A professor at one of the most prestigious fancypants liberal arts colleges in the United States has criticized America’s media elites for blindly and universally supporting aggressive affirmative action and relaxed immigration policies.
Frederick Lynch, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times this weekend to argue that journalists — and throngs of academics — have responded to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election with “thinly veiled scorn.” This attitude “has inhibited deeper study” of the possibility that “working- and middle-class whites” are “responding to legitimate economic threats” posed by policies promoting affirmative action, lax immigration restrictions and ethnic diversity for the sake of ethnic diversity.
Lynch spoke to The Poynter Institute on Monday about how most journalists and television commentators tend to discuss affirmative action and immigration.
“What we’ve got here is class bias: Harvard grads v. high school grads.” Lynch told Poynter.
He noted that reporters tend to be shaped by the same basic mold. They have the same “Ivy League or state flagship school credentials.” They have the same liberal political preferences. They have the same cultural attitudes.
“I think much of the press has been very (politically correct) on affirmative action/diversity, immigration and the White middle and working-class,” Lynch also told Poynter. “They think there are no downsides to these policies. There’s an elite, class bias.”
Elite “contempt for Trump-oriented middle- and working-class Whites remains strong,” Lynch said.
He recalled the “shock on many cable news hosts’ and pundits’ faces” in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.
“It was proof of being way out of touch,” the professor said.
The Poynter Institute notes that New York Times readers perusing the op-ed pages this weekend largely skipped Lynch’s piece and preferred instead to read an opinion piece entitled “The Policies of White Resentment” by Carol Anderson, an African American studies professor at Emory University.
Anderson has suggested that Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” meant either re-enslaving black people or taking the right to vote away from women.
Lynch wrote an eerily prescient book way back in 1996 entitled “The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the ‘White Male Workplace.'”
A 2016 Gallup poll shows Americans across all demographic groups are sick of affirmative action when it comes to college admission and want admission to be based on merit alone, Lynch notes in his weekend New York Times op-ed.
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