Larry Kudlow might be everything wrong with white America—privilege, Karenism and this administration all rolled up into one stiff suit.
Kudlow, who is currently the director of the United States National Economic Council, was once chief economist and senior managing director for Bear Stearns the investment bank for really rich white people and was also the economics editor for the National Review online. He parlayed that into a television career, having made regular appearances on all of the talk shows to talk about economics, and hosted a series of shows about finance, including America Now, Kudlow & Company, and most recently, The Kudlow Report.
And Kudlow has done all of this with no formal economics qualifications. He doesn’t hold one degree in anything that has anything to do with money, the economy, addition, subtraction, eBay, nothing. In fact, his only degree is from the University of Rochester, where he studied...history, and yet here he is as the head of the National Economic Council in Trump’s administration. So why not ask him about race, another subject where he is grossly underqualified to share anything?
Oh, and about his time at Bear Stearns, well, he was fired for a cocaine addiction, but that didn’t stop his upward trajectory at all. I don’t want to make light of Kudlow’s substance-abuse problem, but I just want to point out that even being in recovery for many people of color is a death sentence in the job market, but not for Kudlow. And now he’s being asked about racism in America.
Kudlow, the economic guy with no degree in economics but who reportedly did stay at a Holiday Inn Express, said: “I don’t believe there’s systemic racism in the U.S. I’m not going to go into a long riff on it.”
Thank you, Mr. Kudlow for understanding that no one wants you to go into a long riff on anything because you are a fucking idiot whose best advantage appears to be that you are a white man in a society that values white men over everything.
Kudlow also added that he believes “law and order is good for growth” and then added, “I mean what the fuck do I know about anything, really?”
OK, fine. He didn’t say the last part but he could’ve and no one would’ve batted an eye. Kudlow’s comments came after a reporter asked Kudlow about the happenings in the world, you know the protest against systemic racism that Kudlow doesn’t believe exists and doesn’t have to because he’s a white man.
“I think the harm comes when you have very bad apples on the law-enforcement side. What was done to Mr. Floyd was abysmal,” he said, Business Insider reports. “I believe everyone in this country agrees with that.”
Kudlow was talking about the Memorial Day video capturing a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of Georg Floyd for close to nine minutes until life was drained from Floyd’s body. Floyd was pronounced dead at a local hospital and protests have ensued across the globe ever since.
Here’s the exchange between Kudlow and the reporter:
Kudlow added: “I think part of this coming back together — the president is a law-and-order man. Law and order is good for growth. Law and order is good for families. Law and order is good for people of all colors — it’s a unifying message,” Business Insider reporters.
Kudlow is merely toeing the Trump administration line as Attorney General William Barr, aka Evil Fred Flintsone, and national security adviser Robert O’Brien–both white men who wouldn’t know racism it was in a taxi and passed their outstretched arms several times over–said they did not believe systemic racism was a problem.
From Business Insider:
But experts say that Black Americans face vast economic inequalities in wages, household wealth, and employment rates, which has greatly reduced their financial security and denied them a fair shot at prosperity.
“Racism generates exclusion, discrimination, oppression, exploitation in a number of ways,” Valerie Wilson, the director of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity, and the economy. “It’s not just physical violence.”
About half of all Black adults are employed in the US, according to the Labor Department. In the latest jobs report, the unemployment rate for white Americans dropped nearly 2 percentage points, while it ticked upward for Black Americans.
About 75% of Americans who were polled by Monmouth University said they believed racial discrimination was a big problem in the US.
But why should anyone listen to the voice of the oppressed when we can ask the fake economist what he believes about racism as a white man in a country that allows him to reach the highest levels of a field he doesn’t know shit about.