Spiked: The hypocrisy of virtue-signaling elites

As gasoline prices in the US continue to surge to an unprecedented $7 a gallon in some places, President Joe Biden seems more interested in finding someone to blame than mitigating the problem. ‘Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’, the president said on Friday at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference. The president then cited a ‘fact checker’ in the New York Times and a Washington Post op-ed to counter anyone daring to lay the blame for skyrocketing prices at the feet of the president of the United States.

I guess if you’re going to gaslight working-class Americans who have been struggling with historic levels of inflation for over a year now, it’s good to have legacy media outlets backing you up.

Of course, Biden is right that his decision to ban Russian oil and gas from the US market – a popular move, which 80 per cent of Americans approved of – has exacerbated these trends. But in trying to lay the blame of a year-long trend entirely at Putin’s feet because of a war that started three weeks ago, Biden is erasing the ongoing struggle American families have been facing, enlisting a foreign foe to cover for his domestic failures.

And it’s the very people the Democratic Party claims to care about who are suffering the most as a result of those failures. A new Wall Street Journal poll found that 35 per cent of black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters were feeling the sting of inflation, compared to just 28 per cent of white voters. Among black women and Hispanic men, the proportion was even higher, at 44 per cent. And of course, for those making less than $60,000, it was the worst, with half feeling the pain of inflation – compared to just 13 per cent of those making over $150,000.

It’s perhaps no surprise that it’s those whose incomes protect them from the sting of inflation who are most vocal about how willing they are to pay more for petrol – lecturing those who can least afford it about the importance of doing so on moral grounds.

‘I said defending freedom is going to cost’, the president said last week, as part of his attempt to rebrand inflation as ‘Putin’s Gas Price Hike’. In fact, the president was one of many in the liberal elite – people who couldn’t tell you how much a gallon of milk or a pound of ground meat cost if their lives depended on it – to suggest that doing the ‘right thing’ is going to cost Americans.

‘I’ll happily pay more for gas for her’, Bette Midler, who is worth $250million, tweeted with a photo of a Ukrainian child. ‘Americans: We can endure higher prices for food and gas if it means putting the screws to Putin’, tweeted Star Trek actor George Takei. ‘A clear conscience is worth a buck or two’, late-night host Stephen Colbert, who makes $15million a year, lectured Americans last week: ‘I’m willing to pay. I’m willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I’ll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla.’

* * * * *

If you want to see how environmental policy furthers inequality, look no further than California, which is the state most committed to decarbonising its energy supply. It is now the most energy efficient state – as well as the state with the highest poverty rate in America. Twenty per cent of Californians live in poverty, and a growing number of academics have been tying that poverty to the cost of living – including to the cost of energy. Since 2011 the cost of electricity in California has increased five times as fast as the rest of the US.

Rising electricity prices in California have disproportionately impacted low-income families. In practice, this means that black and Latino households are spending 20 to 40 per cent more of their household incomes on energy than white households, the esteemed environmental lawyer Jennifer Hernandez found in a 2021 paper titled ‘Green Jim Crow’. In 2020, nearly four million California households – or 30 per cent of Californians – faced energy poverty. Meanwhile, more than two million households were forced to spend between 10 and 27 per cent of their total income on home energy.

The cost of ‘energy efficiency’ is being paid by those who can least afford it – thanks largely to the policy preferences of Californians with household incomes 80 per cent higher than the national average. Perhaps this green class divide is no surprise. After all, who could forget John Kerry, Biden’s climate tsar, travelling to accept an environmental award in a private jet? ‘It’s the only choice for somebody like me, who is travelling the world to win this battle’, was how a visibly annoyed Kerry defended himself to a reporter last year. A climate hero like me… travel coach?

And yet, despite the obvious tension between working-class interests and environmental maximalism, when pressed on what he is going to do to combat surging gas prices, President Biden has only doubled down on green-energy policies like solar, wind, electric cars and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels – in other words, the very policies that are contributing to the immiseration of California’s working class where they have been implemented.

‘Loosening environmental regulations won’t lower prices. But transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles, powered by clean energy, will mean that no one will have to worry about gas prices’, President Biden tweeted last week. Electric cars have become the ‘Let them eat cake’ of 2022.

None of this is to deny the importance of the environment, policing, Covid or the war in Ukraine. But somehow, the people in charge keep choosing to address these issues in ways that make their poor and working-class neighbours pay – literally – for their moral posturing. It’s time to find solutions that do more than flatter the rich, and that actually help the poor.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is is deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.