Locals use the term “parachuters” to describe coastal journalists like me who, every few years, spend a few weeks following White House hopefuls around early primary states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Understandably, many resent outsiders who think they can move into a Marriott and get a true feeling for a place before hopping back home and writing long screeds about “real America.”
What happened in Des Moines on Tuesday, Jan. 21, was something worse — an example of imperial parachuters trying to spread their values among confused people.
Brooklyn-based Vice News inexplicably decided to rent out two auditoriums of the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, officially to host a “Brown & Black Presidential Forum” in which the minority voices of Iowa’s overwhelmingly white electorate could hear Democrats answer questions relevant to them. It became readily apparent during the four-hour symposium, however, that the whole thing was really about Vice. (That message was reinforced when I asked a staff member if I could speak to voters at some point. Instead, I was told I could interview Vice’s journalists after the event. I declined the offer.)
Appropriately, for a forum hosted by “creatives,” the organizers got creative with the start time — it was delayed twice in the days leading up to the event. Once we finally got underway, the predominantly old and white audience was treated to a roughly 10-second turntable show by a man introduced as DJ Matt FX. That was all we heard from DJ Matt FX, who just sheepishly stood next to the audience for the remainder of the event. One of the hosts attempted to explain DJ Matt FX’s presence: “Why do we have a DJ? Because we’re Vice.”
The hosts began the proceedings without any references to Iowa but with plenty about immigration and the perils of political compromise. The first candidate to speak, the relatively moderate Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, had a lot to answer for.
The conversation between Bennet and the hosts was reminiscent of a 20-something bargaining with her father for a larger allowance. When Bennet said “no” to some newly proposed social program or federal rule, the hosts would reply with something along the lines of, “But we need it.”
The most fruitful discussion came on the topic of the minimum wage. Bennet supports raising it to $15 an hour in America’s wealthier communities but not in the whole country. Businesses in small towns, he argued, simply can’t afford to pay such a wage — nor do many workers in those towns need to make that much money to avoid poverty. Eventually, someone asked him, “Should businesses exist that can’t pay people a living wage?” Bennet squirmed and offered a string of liberal platitudes about how all people in the United States are entitled to a healthy standard of living. To Bennet’s initial point, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, the living wage in Iowa is just $10.89 for an adult with no children. The current minimum wage in the state, which was not referenced in the questioning, sits at $7.25.
What came next was not much more enlightening. Perhaps sensing the opportunity to score points back in Brooklyn by tearing down a merely left-wing (as opposed to far-left) Democrat, the hosts pounced on former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Again, they asked him nothing about what he’d do for states such as Iowa. Instead, they grilled him over the diversity of his hometown’s police force, which lost 50% of its black officers during his tenure.
In between the candidate interviews, the audience was treated to brief video clips in which young Vice reporters would venture on safari into the corners of Iowa’s counterculture.
Of note was a trip to the state’s oldest gay bar, the Blazing Saddle, where a young reporter asked attendees their thoughts on the Democratic field. The segment’s editors were clearly shocked by the bartender, a middle-aged gay man who supports President Trump but has been impressed by Buttigieg. No one in the audience, mostly Iowans who know actual Trump voters, seemed surprised or gave any sort of audible reaction when the background music paused for laughter.
Disappointingly for Vice, many of those in the Blazing Saddle seemed partial to Buttigieg, not because of his sexual orientation but because of his military service and air of moderation. Everyone interviewed in the Blazing Saddle, save a transgender dancer in drag, was white. They had little to say about the far-left candidates in the race.
Eight Democrats ended up speaking during the Vice event, which brought in an impressive 3.5 million views online. Presumably, most of those viewers were on the coasts. Issues that Iowans care about, including farm subsidies, federal infrastructure aid for towns ravaged by historic flooding, and rural high-speed internet access, didn’t come up at all. Instead, they were sidelined with questions about doubling or tripling funding for historically black colleges and universities or about how well John Delaney knows Jay-Z lyrics. The whole thing felt less like a journalistic forum than an act of colonization. Bearing a cross of sleek graphic design and hip beats, the journalists of Vice were here to show you, the local pagans, what this election is really about.
Issues facing minorities are important ones, but the issues facing minorities in Iowa are often identical to the ones faced by whites. The black and Hispanic voters I spoke with after the event had little to say about policing or systemic discrimination, but many had the same question: Who were those people?
Joseph Simonson is a political reporter for the Washington Examiner.
