Yonder peasant who is he?
Celebrity hillbilly calls Chinese factory workers “peasants.”
Speaking to Fox News last Thursday, Vance defended President Donald Trump’s market-hammering tariffs and railed against the “globalist economy.”
“What has the globalist economy gotten the United States of America? And the answer is, fundamentally, it’s based on two principles – incurring a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make for us,” Vance told news show “Fox & Friends.”
“To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
To underline the obvious: if they’re manufacturing they are not peasants.
To underline the equally obvious: don’t forget yer raisin.
A hashtag on Vance’s remarks became the top trending topic on Weibo on Monday night. By Tuesday afternoon, it had racked up 140 million views.
“Look, this is their true face — arrogant and rude as always,” said a comment with 2,900 likes.
“We may be peasants, but we have the world’s best high-speed rail system, the most powerful logistics capabilities, and leading AI, autonomous driving, and drone technologies. Aren’t such peasants quite impressive?” another said.
Trump – another genuine peasant – thinks he’s a brilliant insult comic, and Vance is trying to keep up.
Of course, nobody in the Republican party is going to call out the hypocrisy of their graceless administration insulting Chinese manufacturers while Trump is using those Chinese manufacturers to produce his tasteless red hats and other merchandise…
And even if they were peasants, they wouldn’t have the money to lend to us.
I have not once in my life borrowed money from a Chinese peasant, though I’ve certainly bought a lot of their wonderful and inexpensive manufactured goods. I’ve certainly backed a number of boardgame Kickstarters (Kickstarter has got to have gotten killed over this).
Not forgetting Kurt Godel avec un paysan non identifie – popularized by the French translation of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach.
We have heard a lot about how billionaires and their toyboys like Vance are all marvellously intelligent because look where they’ve got? They have BILLIONS of dollars, after all! They are SUCCESSFUL! They must be stunningly INTELLIGENT! They deserve everything they’ve got and will get!
I have not seen much intelligence on display in interviews with the happy-gabby Howard Lutnick, the pathetically shifty Michael Waltz, drooling and sentimental Steve Witkoff (who brought back the ‘from Russia with love’ portrait of Trump), or from Elon Musk, who when he’s not dancing around on stage with a chainsaw presented to him by the Argentinian tyrant Javier Milei (whose destruction of the Argentinian economy Trump seems bent on emulating), is making pig-ignorant responses when asked about the war in Ukraine by Bret Baier of Fox News, displaying his utter lack of understanding of politics and international relationships — it as though reality, for him, is just a computer game for adolescents, and can be addressed in the same terms.
Not just for him, but for a lot of his fans. I’ve seen people claiming that for the gamers, the only real thing is the virtual world in their games; reality is just another form of game.
Such thinking kills compassion, because anything you destroy will be put back together when the game is reset. It’s unfortunate reality doesn’t work that way. Chain saws really destroy in the flesh-and-blood world where we actually live. Perhaps Tesla stock dropping in value will help him see the difference between virtual and real.
Yes, I wholly agree with you, iknklast. It is something that has struck me both with tech bros & their fans, too: that, for them, living people are really no more than counters in a video game, and the extraordinary complexity of reality may be reduced to the simplicity of the rules that govern such games. As you say, it kills compassion, as well as any desire to address the complexities of the real world — as one could see from Musk’s responses about Ukraine, as well as as from the simplistic thinking that holds sway in every aspect of the Frump regime and the shock bros on right-wing channels. And then, just to help matters along, there are people like little Jesse Squitters (who is always taking great pains to assure us that he is “manly”) on Fox News, or Mucker Carlson, who have no compunction whatsoever about lying about everything everyday since they are getting paid a lot of money for it; after all, they are “successful”, they are wealthy, they are living the American Dream, and that is the only thing that counts; it is also a demonstration that they are moral people since, for them, being “successful” is the only true moral ideal.