‘We have to make sure we explain it to those people who are displaced that their skills are going to be needed for the new opportunities…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Democratic front-runner Joe Biden suggested on Monday that displaced mining workers should “learn to program,” echoing an earlier conservative suggestion that failing liberal journalists should learn to code.
“Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well,” Biden said at a New Hampshire event Monday, as Gizmodo reported.
The former vice president then added: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
Biden has already made it clear that he wouldn’t have a problem sacrificing thousands of mining and manufacturing jobs for the sake of environmentally-friendly policies, promising blue-collar workers that if they do end up losing their jobs, they can learn new skills to help them adapt to the new field.
“We have to make sure we explain it to those people who are displaced that their skills are going to be needed for the new opportunities,” Biden said during December’s presidential primary debate.
Biden’s suggestion that workers should “learn to program” will hardly receive as much negative backlash as the “learn to code” meme that went viral after BuzzFeed, Yahoo News, and several other publications began to lay off writers.
Twitter even suspended accounts that circulated the phrase, describing it as a “targeted harassment campaign.”
Just like Biden, then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton vowed to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” to make way for clean energy, and it’s one of the reasons she lost so badly in the Rust Belt, according to Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel.
Biden riffing on how Obama put him in charge of judging the “jobs of the future” suggests re-training miners as coders.
“Anybody who can go down 3000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well.”
This sort of “just transition” stuff was murder on Clinton in 2016…
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 30, 2019