Carlson: It’s a Big Deal When the Country’s Elites Reject Their Own People But an Even Bigger Deal When People Reject Them

Thursday during his Fox News Channel program, Tucker Carlson pointed to polling data that suggests most Americans have lost confidence in the country’s elite institutions — academia, the media, labor unions and banks.

Transcript as follows:

Our country’s most powerful institutions that hated the rest of the country for a long time. When the people who run tech companies, Hollywood studios, look out the window there, G5 as they commute from Santa Monica to Teterboro. They see a population that is fat and bigoted and dumb. They feel pure contempt for the people below them.

Well now, at long last the Middle America is returning those feelings. A new poll by Pew finds that Republican leaning voters have come to distrust the higher education establishment a lot. Fifty-eight percent of them believe colleges and universities have a negative overall effect on the country. Just 36 percent think they have a positive effect, that is a swing of about 20 points from just two years ago.

Okay, you say. That just because stupid, uneducated conservatives naturally hate schools. They could never get into them. Right? Wrong. Actually, Republicans with college degrees are even more hostile to college than those without them because they know how bad it is. But if colleges have lost the confidence of non-liberals, consider the media. Eighty-five percent of Republican voters say the national news media are hurting the country. Once again a substantial swing from just a few years ago.

Republicans aren’t that impressed by labor unions, either, or banks remarkably. The only institutions that are still viewed positively by both sides of the spectrum are churches and religious groups, and yet those institutions are the ones that are losing power in America. Now, these sentiments are not pointless. These are not numbers that mean nothing. A country can’t actually thrive without strong, respected institutions. It’s a big deal when the country’s elites whether in media or business or education reject their own people, but it’s an even bigger deal when the people reject them.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor