Why Vox (and Everyone Else) Pretends to Hate Elites

No one in the political elite actually hates the concept of elites not even Vox in one of their videos called Why Tucker Carlson Pretends to Hate Elites. The central thesis is that popular Fox News commentator, Tucker Carlson, is a false prophet leading the poor working class away from the real party of the people, the Democrats, away to the corporate capitalist Republican oligarchs. While yes Tucker Carlson is rich, so is Noam Chomsky for that matter, and so is Vice too. In fact Vice just got $200 million dollars from Comcast:

To wit: Vox Media announced Wednesday a $200 million round of funding from NBC Universal. Vox had previously raised $100 million in funding, including from the venture arm of NBC Universal’s parent company, Comcast (CMCSA, -1.25%). Other Vox investors include Accel Partners, Allen & Company, General Atlantic, Khosla Ventures and Ted Leonsis, the former AOL executive. Its most recent round was a $46.5 million raise last fall at a reported valuation of $380 million.

The latest round values Washington, D.C.-based Vox Media at $850 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Including the venture funding, Vox Media now is officially a startup “unicorn” worth more than $1 billion.

In other news popular left wing media outlet Vice also just got:

The company’s new debt financing was led by 23 Capital, a financing firm focused exclusively on sports, music and entertainment sectors, with participation by Soros Fund Management, Fortress Investment Group and Monroe Capital, as first reported by the Wall Street JournalFriday.

With this capital investment, Vice’s growth plans can be accelerated, allowing us to execute our new leadership’s strategic vision for the company,” a Vice rep said in a statement… he Brooklyn-based youth-culture company, launched 25 years ago as a punk-culture magazine in Montreal, was valued at $5.7 billion less than two years ago. Since then, its valuation has dropped: Disney disclosed a $157 million write-down on its Vice equity stake last year. Vice previously raised about $1.4 billion from investors including TPG Capital, which plowed $450 million into the company in the summer of 2017.

This is odd; why are Vox and Vice, the real speaker of the people, raising billions of dollars from elite capitalist investors? Also what about this George Soros guy? With $250 million dollars to blow he must be rich, but I mean a rich guy like that surely can’t be a supporter of the party of the people. Lets take a look at his website:

George Soros has been a prominent international supporter of democratic ideals and causes for more than 30 years. His philanthropic organization, the Open Society Foundations, supports democracy and human rights in more than 100 countries.

If you scroll down a little further you see this interesting article called A Worldwide Movement for Domestic Workers:

Despite the profession’s growing ranks, millions of domestic workers — 80 percent of whom are women — remain impoverished and exploited. In many countries, in fact, legal norms don’t provide domestic workers with the same rights and protections that other workers already enjoy.

Thankfully, more domestic workers than ever — including people like Phobsuk “Dang” Gasing, a Thai domestic worker and union leader in Hong Kong, who is featured in this video — are coming together and forming unions.

It’s a global movement, too: Gasing’s union is part of the International Domestic Workers Federation, a collective which boasts more than 500,000 members in 54 countries. The federation has helped ratify international labor standards for domestic workers in more than 28 countries.

Interesting, here we have an elite rich man claiming to be the voice of the people, and a media outlet of the people that is worth $1 billion dollars. Why is it then, that when Tucker Carlson claims to be speaking for the common man he is implanting “false consciousness”, but when George Soros and Vox do it they are legitimate? Is it because they claim to support the common man? Well Tucker Carlson also claims to support the common man, so that doesn’t help much. Maybe it has something to do with the parties they support? So what if George Soros and Vice are “elites” they support the Democrats, the party of the people, why would real elites support the party of the people? Lets look at some of the Democratic candidates then.

Here is an Obama campaign video, a video on the Hillary Clinton campaign, and an official Bernie Sanders campaign video contrast it with this video on Bernie Sanders.

What are these candidates of the people doing be supported by major celebrity elites? Well maybe these are good elites, and there are lots of bad elites supporting the Republican party. Lets look at Republican candidates then.

Here’s a list of celebrities who support Trump, but here’s celebrities bashing Trump at one of the biggest award shows of the year. Here’s a list of celebrities who support Ted Cruz, but here a bunch of celebrities cheering for his opponent, Beto. Here’s a list of celebrities that supported Ron Paul in his run, but that support didn’t travel to his son, Rand Paul.

It seems both the Republicans and Democrats have elite support, but there is a certain disparity in that support. It seems less notable celebrities support the Republicans (in fact some nerds like Paul Ryan can’t even make one single friend), while the elite of the elite support the Democrats, but again this proves nothing. Celebrities are elites, but they got to where they are through skill and hard work. They aren’t like those evil capitalist businessmen who exploit the common man to become elites, so if we are following Vox’s thesis this must mean capitalist businessmen support the republicans. Here is the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, saying the minimum wage should be raised to $15 dollars an hour:

Still, in a country with a federal minimum hourly pay of $7.25, Amazon’s actions can be considered progressive.

“Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage,” Bezos writes. “Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.”

Why would the richest man in the world be supportive of progressive policy? This other line in the article illuminates a little:

Amazon moved to a $15 minimum wage in the United States at the end of last year — though it did so with cuts to benefits and stock grants that meant some employees would end up being paid less, which then led Amazon to announce a further boost in pay to rectify the situation.

You can put two and two together. Yet again, this proves nothing though. Jeff Bezos is probably just pretending to be progressive to hide his companies horrible working conditions. Let’s look at some other companies then.

Here’s an article titled It’s True: Tech Workers Overwhelmingly Support Democrats in 2018:

WIRED analyzed more than 125,000 contributions made to federal candidates in 2018 by employees of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, using data from the US Federal Election Commission. Our not-shocking finding: Tech workers overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. As you can see below, just over 1 percent of the $15 million sent to candidates went to Republicans, while 23 percent of the funds went to Democrats…The largest recipient, ActBlue, a fundraising platform for progressive candidates, has collected nearly $1 billion for the 2018 election season, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; that money has gone to campaigns for individual candidates, Democratic party fundraising committees, and progressive groups like Emily’s List.

This is not to let Republicans off the hook though; I mean $15 million is nothing to scoff out, but an interesting pattern is emerging. According to Open Secrets in 2016:

We the Democrats universally raised more money then the Republicans, but these numbers seem surprisingly close if one side was the side of the common and the other of the elites.

Compare this to 2018:

The Republicans raised more then the Democrats, but again these numbers are surprisingly close. Who is party of the people of the people then? Both of these seem like parties of the elite with slightly newer elites leaning blue. The thing is though none of this matters.

Vox talked a lot about a cute little Marxist term known as false consciousness. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica it means:

False consciousness, in philosophy, particularly within critical theory and other Marxist schools and movements, the notion that members of the proletariat unwittingly misperceive their real position in society and systematically misunderstand their genuine interests within the social relations of production under capitalism. False consciousness denotes people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist society because of the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes.

In simpler terms it is simply that the evil capitalist trick the proletariat into thinking capitalism is good for them; usually by blaming capitalism’s failures on other issues. The irony of Vox using this term should be obvious. Despite my dislike of communism I think false consciousness is exactly what Vox is doing. Throughout the video they repeatedly suggest the Republicans are the party of the elite while the Democrats are the party of the people, which I’ve shown is entirely false.

The whole purpose of “elite baiting” is to stop you from thinking critically. Instead of actually considering things like for instance Republican supply side economics vs. Democrat demand side economics, or any other policy for that matter. Instead you are told that the Republicans are evil elites so nothing they say is of value and if they say anything reasonable it is just elite lies. The exact same thing can be said of Tucker Carlson and his rants about the elite. Why is this? Elites are probably smart and who knows maybe they say something correct every once and a while, or maybe they don’t. You can’t know until your educate yourself.

This “elite baiting” is prefaced on the illusion that one side of America is for the people while the other is for the elites, but for every George Soros there is the Koch brothers and for every Tucker Carlson there is a Noam Chomsky. If elites are telling you to fight other elites; your probably going to end up a dog to them. Your either being told by the elite elite to destroy the lesser elites to secure the elite elite homogeneous power (High-low vs the middle) or your being told by lesser elite to destroy the elite elite so the lesser elite can gain power (Low-middle vs the high).

Next time someone starts telling you not to listen to X side because it is full elites just listen to them anyway. Develop your own opinion by listening to all sides and remember most political movements are lead by some faction of elites; “grassroots” activism is just a rhetorical strategy to divert the discussion away from actual ideas.