My conservative friends enjoy picking political fights with me. Naturally, I am a good sport and humor them, safe in my knowledge that facts have a well-known liberal bias.
But a funny thing is happening amid the GOP’s post-Trump meltdown: My Republican friends are resorting to increasingly far-fetched attacks. Perhaps they are desperately trying to distract from the civil war engulfing American conservatism.
This calls for a healthy dose of “libsplaining.”
Case in point: Many of my Republican friends are tripping over themselves to blame President Biden for a recent increase in gas prices. No, I patiently libsplain, that’s not how oil prices work. Biden has nothing to do with the spike in prices at the pump. Nice try, though.
My conservative friends also complained that nixing the Keystone XL oil pipeline was a job-killing catastrophe. But their criticisms abruptly end when I libsplain that the pipeline would have created only 35 permanent jobs.
In much the same vein, Pennsylvania’s oil and gas jobs emerged as a hot-button issue during the 2020 election. Yet for all of the oil industry-fueled falsehoods parroted by my Republican friends, oil and gas jobs account for a minuscule fraction – less than half of 1 percent – of all Pennsylvania jobs.
Nationally, the green economy employs 10 times more Americans than fossil fuels — a remarkable fact that my conservative friends struggle to acknowledge.
And in New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, my Republican friends have found the motherlode of political distractions. Their attacks center on the claim that Cuomo’s March 2020 order requiring New York nursing homes to admit COVID-19 hospital patients led to a surge in nursing home fatalities.
But the facts point to a different reality. Indeed, nursing home deaths began declining before admissions from New York hospitals reached their peak. According to a report by the New York State Department of Health, “If admissions [from hospitals] were driving [nursing home] fatalities, the order of the peak fatalities and peak admissions would have been reversed.”
Contrary to what some conservatives are arguing, the facts indicate that asymptomatic nursing home staff and visitors unknowingly spread the virus in New York nursing homes.
And just like that, some light libsplaining undercuts the most feverish anti-Cuomo hysteria.
To be sure, Cuomo is taking significant flak for the way New York counted nursing home deaths. But if the topline numbers were accurate all along, how is this suddenly such an egregious scandal when the state’s methodology was publicly known last May?
And if Republicans want to attack Cuomo for delaying the release of data to the New York State Legislature, where is the outrage over the Trump administration and Florida potentially fudging COVID-19 data – including death numbers – immediately before the 2020 election?
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, squabbles over gas prices, oil jobs or Cuomo’s management of the pandemic distract from other topics that call for some serious libsplaining.
Take, for example, the fact that many Democratic presidents have a remarkable record on economic growth and jobs. Many Republican presidents, on the other hand, have a fairly dismal economic track record over the last century.
Ditto for the fact that blue counties now account for 70 percent of the U.S. economy — a trend that has only accelerated as the failures of the GOP’s post-Reagan economic experiment pile up. Indeed, vast sums of tax revenues from Democratic-run states help to keep many deep-red states afloat.
At the same time, one of the Republicans’ top priorities – slashing taxes for the ultra-wealthy – has deepened inequality while failing to spur meaningful economic growth. Nowhere is this dangerous dynamic more apparent than in the collapse of Donald Trump’s white, blue-collar base.
Forty-five years of stagnant wages, a soaring cost of living, the decimation of unions and the outsourcing of jobs crushed the American middle class. White, working class Americans were hit the hardest by these developments and are now killing themselves with drugs, alcohol and suicide at a truly shocking rate.
Over the last four decades, “free trade” and “trickle down” Republicans, aided by a generation of business executives fixated on maximizing profits for wealthy shareholders, transferred $50 trillion from millions of hard-working Americans to the top 1 percent. The despair and economic desperation caused by this staggering loss of wealth made millions of white, blue-collar Americans susceptible to political conspiracy theories – such as baseless claims of a “stolen” election – and extremist ideologies.
These are dire circumstances that demand immediate action. But too many of us are distracted, libsplaining the latest spike in gas prices to our Republican friends.
Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense. Follow him on Twitter @MvonRen.