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Mehmet Oz ad mocks working college students as entitled 'liberal snowflakes' with 'blue hair' [1]

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Date: 2022-10-11

The ad has been recorded for posterity on YouTube:

Narrated by a bad Sam Elliott voice impersonator (The real Sam Elliott cut an ad for Joe Biden in the 2020 election and has described Trump supporters as “not very smart”), the ad depicts four TikTok users made up with flourescent hair dye and a bartender singled out for her “blue hair” as evidencing, I suppose, typical Pennsylvania college students. The narration helpfully imagines that “union workers” would be forced to pay for the bartender’s “gender studies” degree, as well as the college costs for the other young people depicted in the ad. Class, age, and gender stereotypes are all invoked while the ersatz Sam Elliott voice gruffly declares that “taxpayers” (Presumably the bartender does not make enough money to pay federal or state taxes) will be voting for “Dr. Oz.”

There are several inherent problems with this ad beyond the obvious disdain for young people it conveys. Those problems are sadly indicative not only of Mehmet Oz’s mindset, but of the Republican party as a whole. But first, let’s start with the bartender.

Being a bartender is not easy work. It involves standing on your feet 8-10 hours a shift, cleaning up floors and mats and prepping drink mixes afterwards for the bartender who works next, and often dealing with drunks, creeps, and entitled jerks trying to impress their friends or girlfriends. You have to be nice to these people because you depend on their tips. Some people get so drunk they forget to leave tips at all. If you’re a young attractive woman you will be ogled and flirted with by these types of people for hours at a time. You will only receive health benefits if you’re working full time, in a business that boasts notorious rates of failure and closure. And while bartending can be enjoyable

Bartender with “blue hair” mocked in Oz political ad.

and rewarding, depending on your job and the clientele, in the end you will make enough money to pay your rent, but probably not enough to save for a down payment on a house, particularly if you have student loans to pay off while you search for a decent paying career in whatever you happened to pursue in college.

So it’s likely that if she actually was a bartender, the woman in mocked in Oz’s ad is working to pay off her bills. It’s even possible that her parents are those same “union workers” who were “busting their hum for 25 years” so she could have better prospects than they had. Oz’s campaign backers may disparage her desire to preserve a sense of identity by dyeing her hair, but something tells me few blue-collar workers would.

And as for “union workers,” most are probably very grateful to be in a union. Republican anti-worker policies and their allies on the Supreme Court have whittled down union membership in this country to a fraction of what it once was, leaving workers without any leverage to negotiate better working conditions, pay or benefits. None of the highly paid, billionaire-backed wizards who crafted this ad have ever worked in a union, so they have no idea what they’re talking about when they claim to represent what unionized workers might “think.” Nor does Mehmet Oz, who married into fabulous wealth before his Hollywood career took off.

The essential point of this ad is to inflame blue-collar workers that their tax dollars may go towards paying off allegedly undeserving students’ loans. Two points: first, no parent wants their kids to have to incur massive debt in order to get ahead in life. Most parents would gladly pay for all or part their children’s educations if they had the resources to do it, and many parents sacrifice a large part of their own accumulated nest egg in order to do just that. So forgiveness of student loans doesn’t just inure to the students but to their parents as well, some of whom may be tasked at the same time caring for their own elderly parents. The same cabal of Republican senators that Mehmet Oz is itching to rub elbows with effectively killed care for the elderly included in President Biden’s budget last year. Maybe the folks at Our American Century don’t have to care for their parents, but plenty of blue-collar workers do, often stuck in an impossible position between wanting to assist their children’s futures and preserving the lives of their parents.

But to put this ad in its proper context, the second point is even more relevant: In 2017 Republicans passed a $2.4 trillion dollar tax cut to reward their uber-wealthy donor base. Almost none of that money “trickled down” to the middle class. It went, for the most part, to corporate CEO’s and officers who didn’t create jobs with it or invest it in R&D, but instead bought back stock in their own companies. Those “liberal snowflakes” on TikTok and working service jobs? They didn’t see a dime of that, and for the most part, neither did their working parents.

There’s something a little more than obscene about a guy worth an estimated $100 million from promoting phony quack cures and supplements telling “union workers” they should be angry about a program designed to give their kids a decent shot at a better life (It’s even more bothersome when he allies himself with a party that recently had its nose to the trough when those billions in PPP loans during the pandemic were being dished out).

But I guess it’s just easier to go after the kids, rather than facing up to the person you really are.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/11/2128166/-Mehmet-Oz-ad-mocks-working-college-students-as-entitled-liberal-snowflakes-with-blue-hair

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