Don’t expect Hillary Clinton to tell the laid-off federal workers from DOGE to “learn to code” like she told the coal miners anytime soon. Hillary Clinton’s infamous comment urging coal miners to “learn to code” sparked a firestorm of criticism at the time, revealing a deep disconnect between political elites and working-class Americans, particularly those in industries facing obsolescence due to rapid technological changes and policy shifts.

In 2016, during her presidential campaign, Clinton suggested that coal miners, whose livelihoods depended on the declining coal industry, should simply transition to coding jobs. Hillary’s apathetic proposal ignored the complexities of their lives and the struggles they faced as their industry was squeezed by environmental regulatory whack jobs pushing the Green New Scam.

The comment was a stark example of the clear and present apathy from a politician who, at the time, was advocating for the Green New Deal, an ambitious boondoggle to supposedly combat climate change through sweeping environmental reforms. Clinton’s suggestion to coal miners, that they could easily switch to coding, betrayed an ignorance of the realities of those displaced workers. She failed to consider the systemic challenges of retraining a generation of workers who had spent decades in an industry with very different skill sets, as well as the cultural and emotional ties many had to their work.

Telling coal miners to “learn to code” not only belittled their experience but also dismissed the significant barriers to accessing the training and employment opportunities needed to make such a transition that was never provided by the Democrat Party. In the case of DOGE layoffs today and Trump’s efforts to shrink a bloated government, these workers have private-sector jobs just waiting for them with little or no retraining. Wouldn’t it be something if one of DOGE’s computer geeks was once a coal miner or came from a coal mining family? Now that would be Karma, that would put such a smile on my face. Maybe Hillary Clinton should tell the laid-off government workers to learn to mine coal, I hear the coal industry is booming now.

C. Rich

Crich@AmericaSpeaksInk.com

C. Rich

C. Rich is the voice behind America Speaks Ink, home to the America First Movement. As an author, poet, freelance ghostwriter, and blogger, C. Rich brings a “baked-in” perspective shaped by growing up on the streets and beaches of South Florida in the 1970s-1980s and brings a quintessential Generation-X point of view.

Rich’s writing journey began in 2008 with coverage of the Casey Anthony trial and has since evolved into a wide-ranging exploration of politics, culture, and the issues that define our times. Follow C. Rich’s writing odyssey here at America Speaks Ink and on Amazon with a multi-book series on Donald Trump called “Trump Era: The MAGA Files” and many other books and subjects C. Rich is known to cover.

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