Bloomberg Insults Farmers: ‘Could Teach Anybody’ to Farm, Requires Less ‘Gray Matter’

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg once said that farming and factory jobs required less intelligence compared to working in the information economy.

Bloomberg is being criticized for newly found old sexist and racially-charged remarks he made during a 2016 Oxford University forum in England. At the event, the former New York City mayor claimed that a major obstacle to uniting middle class America with the coasts was the inability of the working class to become part of the information economy.

‘I could teach anybody… to be a farmer’

“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg said. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”

“Then we had 300 years of the industrial society,” he continued. “You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job.”

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Bloomberg argued that through the information economy, those used to working blue-collar jobs like farming and manufacturing are now at a disadvantage because they don’t have the proper education or intellect to compete.

Bloomberg Says Working Class Can’t Keep Up

“Now comes the information economy and [it] is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree level different,” Bloomberg said. “You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

Bloomberg said he didn’t know if the skills or “gray matter” required for more highly-skilled jobs could be taught in schools, so the “challenge of society” was figuring out how to provide for middle class workers Bloomberg believes are left out of the information economy.

Right and Left Blast Bloomberg

The billionaire was blasted for his remarks by both the right and the left.

“Bloomberg wouldn’t last 3 seconds as a farmer… but like his comments on minorities, you can tell he really hates regular hardworking Americans,” Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted. “He will never fight for them because he couldn’t care less about them.”

Supporters of Bloomberg rival Bernie Sanders took direct aim at the former mayor’s comments.

“Time and time again we see Bloomberg insulting the middle class and the working class, union members and not yet union members,” the tweet from People for Bernie read. “Maybe it’s time for pundits to stop pretending he’s just another candidate.”

“Bloomberg is an oligarch spending his play money to buy the White House,” the tweet added.

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Other Old Controversial Comments

These comments about working class Americans emerge in the wake of audio resurfaced last week from a speech he gave at the Aspen Institute in 2015, in which Bloomberg defended “stop-and-frisk” at a mostly white gathering using racially charged words.

“It’s controversial, but … 95 percent of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one [description],” Bloomberg is heard to say on the audio. “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America.”