In the past week or so, you’ve probably noticed a lot of fuss over the phrase “learn to code” . Numerous media outlets have had mass layoffs in the couple of months, and when these unemployed journalists take to Twitter to vent about their job problems, they have apparently been bombarded with trolling tweets of “Learn to code” or something to that effect. Apparently, this has happened so much that they’ve had to bitch about it.

The reason that the trolls are throwing this particular phrase in the face of unemployed journalists is due to the allegations that journalists and other public figures have essentially told unemployed factory workers and coal miners to “learn to code” as a solution for their job woes, and thus it is now being thrown in the face of journalists—“what goes around comes around” and all that.

But is this true? Have journalists callously told laid off blue-collar workers to magically become computer programmers overnight? And do they deserve to be mocked in this manner?

In my research, I tried to find any example of journalists literally using the phrase “learn to code” (or anything similar), and I was unable to do so. The closest that I could find was an article titled “Can a coal miner learn to code?”, which seemed to suggest that blue collar laborers could be retrained in other industries and skills. Several other articles are about this exact phenomenon of ex-coal miners learning programming.

Does that settle it? Are journalists and other members of “The Cathedral” completely innocent in this regard, and the whole “learn to code” campaign the work of the regular hate-filled haters on Twitter?

In a word, no.

While it is true that they have never used the exact phrase “learn to code”…I think that the SENTIMENT, the “let them eat cake”-esque lack of concern for the plight of blue collar workers is something real and palpable, and has subtly been conveyed in various articles in the last 20 years.

If you want proof, you can start with the testimony of Michael Bloomberg, who has gone on record saying that Mark Zuckerberg is of the opinion that these guys can just “learn to code” l

Or you can look at the countless articles where people say that working class American people are shiftless, worthless scum who deserve to be outmoded and outcompeted. l

Or you can read this article by Matt Forney detailing his own futile efforts in trying to teach out of work factory workers computer skills.

And while he’s not at all an “elite” by any metric, I have argued that Bob Chipman embodies everything that our elites believe in, and more importantly that us plebeians are supposed to believe—and wouldn’t you believe it, he despises anybody who works with their hands too! l

So while it has never been explicit, it has for years been implicit. And so, to unemployed journalists…

Learn2Codelolololol