By Daniel Stein
In July, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens offered a notable mea culpa, acknowledging his failure to read or empathize with the mood of about half of the country. “I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called ‘the protected.’ My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges,” he wrote.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must have missed that column. In what was clearly intended as a broadside aimed at Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, for diverting a few dozen of the more than 2 million illegal aliens the Biden administration has allowed to cross our borders to the tony resort island of Martha’s Vineyard, she uttered one of the most tone-deaf statements since Marie Antoinette advised starving Frenchmen to eat cake.
“We have a shortage of workers in our country. In Florida, some of the farmers and the growers are saying ‘why are you shipping these immigrants up North? We need them to pick the crops down here,’” opined the speaker, as though she actually has her finger on the pulse of the Florida agricultural industry. For good measure, after claiming we need migrants to provide us with cheap labor, she pulled an about-face and proceeded to lecture the majority of the American public who are alarmed by the administration’s border policies about our “moral responsibility to accept refugees.”
Leaving aside that her potshot at a likely 2024 presidential contender coincided with his state being ravaged by an epic hurricane, Mrs. Pelosi’s statement once again highlighted the obliviousness of “the protected” class, whom she and her party have come to represent.
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