As part of the wall to wall Donald Trump hatefest that C4 News is running this week, liberal media establishment posterboy milli9onaire Jon Snow last night found himself interviewing Jonathan Capeheart, a black and senior reporter on the Washington Post. Capeheart will earn a good wedge on the flagship liberal beltway cat litter of choice so its safe to assume he is a dollar millionaire. On the day after Trump won he cried on C4 news so upset was he.
Capeheart insists that as a black queer he is set to be persecuted in Trump's America. He feels threatened. For C4 it is a given that Trump is a racist old bigot who probably hates the homos too, although his record on gay rights is actually pretty NY liberal perfect. But Jon Snow did, to his credit, ask his fellow millionaire liberal why he felt fearful.
Capeheart started blathering on about Trump deporting 11 million illegal immigrants which may or may not happen but of course that does not threaten either the blacks or the queers in the slightest. The Beltway millionaire failed to cite one single Trump measure that would threaten him directly yet as a black gay man he had every right to demand personal ownership of the fear and to extract such sympathy that his views could go utterly unchallenged.
How I wish that Guardian hack Owen Jones had been there so the two men could have had an on-air a crying match on who had greater ownership of fear: Jonathan post Trump or Owen post Brexit. When Jonathan won by playing the black card one assumes Owen would have torn off his mike and stormed off camera.
Of course while millionaire journalists who own prime real estate in DC have done incredibly well under Obama's asset bubble whether they be white, black, gay or straight, the gap between average black and average white earnings has actually increased under President hopey change. Disproportionately blacks have suffered from the export of manufacturing jobs and also from low wage jobs being lost to those who will, work for even less, that is to say illegal immigrants.
Donald Trump is not seeking to address this by singing Kumbaya at black churches and saying this is a black issue. It is an issue that - as Dr King realised in his later years - is about restoring jobs and hope to the poorer folks in America who were then, and still are, disproportionately black. And so far his work on bring back manufacturing jobs seems to be going well. But will Jonathan accept that or will he be too busy heading back to his luxury residence, counting his money and demanding ever more rights to talk utter rubbish unchallenged because of the way he has claimed ownership of fear.