I didn’t have to expose Nancy Pelosi — she did it herself

Musician, writer and podcaster Winston Marshall squared off against former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in an Oxford Union debate that‘s drawn viral attention, focusing on whether “populism is a threat to democracy.” Below are Marshall’s thoughts on the event and his opponent’s performance.

I could’ve gotten her on her and her husband’s stock trading. But I thought that would be bad taste.

Or on the casual flaunting of her decadent ice-cream collection mid-pandemic. That would have been rather cheap of me, don’t you think?

It was quite the opportunity I had in front of me — a debate on populism and its supposed threat to democracy with one of the very people the American populist movement has been most inspired by: Speaker Emerita, Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

Best stick to her political hypocrisies, I concluded. Of which there are plenty.

Too many even, for the 10 minutes of speech time.

It was rather curious that Madame Pelosi would even agree to such a debate.

I’ve never seen the 84-year-old do more than five-minute puff pieces with the usual fawning mainstream media outlets.

She was brave, I thought. But given how unprepared she turned out to be, what I mistook for courage was actually naivety.

So just as she peppered her speech with same-old smearing of working people as “ethnonationlists,” I seasoned mine with evidence of her hypocrisies.

Would she condemn the June 2020 federal courthouse insurrection in Portland, Ore., by radical progressives? Remember — the one that lasted the entire month?

No. She was more concerned with Jan. 6, insisting to the room of Oxford students that it had been incited by Donald Trump.

OK, that was a dark day, I agreed. But would she condemn the Oregon incident?

She stared at me blankly.

Trump — who she would not refer to by name through her speech, like Voldemort (“he who must not be named”) — was the real threat to democracy.

So much so that the paradoxically named Democratic Party should do everything in its power to subvert democracy in order to protect democracy.

Trump should’ve accepted the 2020 election, I baited. So, too, should Pelosi have in 2016 instead of claiming it was “hijacked.”

“It was!” she interrupted, adding “that doesn’t mean we don’t accept the result of it.”

There we have it, ladies and gentlemen: In one breath calling into question the legitimacy of the election. And in the next breath saying she accepted an illegitimate election.

These politicians are all the same.

It turns out I did not have to expose her disdain for ordinary Americans in my speech. She did it herself in hers.

I encourage you to watch a video of the event: In a long, self-contradictory, incoherent ramble, she claimed ordinary Americans were “blocked” from making good decisions because of their culture and because of their “God.”

Startling.

It is the “basket of deplorables” all over again.

I lost count of how many times she blurted the word “ethnonationalist” — a new buzzword adopted by the left, having given up on “alt-right,” “racist” and “uneducated.”

All these have lost meaning, given their brazen repeated misuse and abuse.

And before my very eyes, whilst in one swoop decrying demagoguery, she then engages in it.

Seeing as we were at the Oxford Union, I’ll give you the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word: “political activity or practices that seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.”

For Pelosi, the prejudice she plays to is that of the elites.

The prejudice of America’s coastal elites, who sit with upturned noses at the concerns of the flyover underclasses.

The prejudice that ordinary working Americans who vote conservative must be white nationalists.

MAGA Americans are surely white supremacists.

It’s a lie.

And how better to illustrate it than to see the rise in popularity of Trump amongst ethnic minorities.

“Both national and battleground state public polls consistently show Trump, at this point, drawing more support from Black and Hispanic voters than any Republican nominee since at least 1960,” CNN reported recently.

“When The New York Times/Siena College, NBC News, Wall Street Journal and CBS News/YouGov all released national polls a few days apart this month, each of them found Trump winning from 20% to 28% of Black voters and 45% to 48% of Hispanic voters. That’s far more than the 12% of Black and 32% of Hispanic voters he won in 2020.”

Are we to believe that America’s minorities are converting to white “ethnonationalism”?

Perhaps, Madame Pelosi, 36 years atop the dizzying heights of DC have blurred your conception of reality.

She is a demagogue. And I mean that literally.

I went into the prestigious Oxford Union debate with small ambition to call out the ex-speaker’s various hypocrisies. But it turns out I didn’t need to. She exposed herself.

No wonder she fears populism. She is the embodiment of an elitism ordinary American’s are finished with.