“Journalism” failed to win this year’s Kentucky Derby, and the corporate media are taking it personally. MSNBC, however, was lashing out at the beloved cultural institution even before the race began.
“The Kentucky Derby perfectly encapsulates Trump’s vision for America,” wrote MSNBC producer Hannah Holland, and she did not mean it as a compliment. Her complaints against the Derby include its glorification of “the Good Ole Boys of the American South, a bastion of American conservatism,” its relationship to gambling and drinking, and above all, what she deems its Trumpiness.
Most of the piece’s substance comes in the form of a regurgitation of Hunter Thompson’s 1970 essay titled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” a memoir of Thompson’s own drunken experience at Churchill Downs. In it, Thompson returns to his childhood home of Louisville to criticize his childhood friends and caricature what he derided as “the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.”
Holland, who interprets Thompson’s essay as a “salient metaphor for Nixon’s America,” extends the critique to the Trump era.
“In Trump’s second term, culture is already being reworked by those who long for an America that is long past, or maybe never really was. The Kentucky Derby already mythologized this,” she writes.
Holland doesn’t despise the Derby because of the drinking or the gambling, but because of what Thompson calls its “atavistic” quality: its reverence for tradition and nostalgia for the way things have always been done. People tend to only long for past greatness if they believe there was anything great about the past, which — as far as MSNBC is concerned — is the cardinal sin of MAGA and Derby revelers alike.
Of course, reverence for the past is one of the surest defenses against cultural suicide. Respect for our ancestors cultivates a sense of responsibility to steward what they passed down to us so that we can pass it down to our children, as anyone who’s ever read a page of Burke can tell you. There’s a reason that people who want to destroy America and remake it in their Marxist image started with her statues and holidays.
Traditions large and small exist to remind communities of their heritage and bring them together in celebration of their cultural inheritance. You can’t have a healthy society without events like the Derby and the sense of shared heritage that they produce. And you don’t need to splurge on box seats at Churchill Downs to participate; the spectacle is shared by families of varied socioeconomic backgrounds gathered around their televisions in living rooms all over the South. This year, the race brought in 17.7 million TV viewers, the most since the 1980s.
I was one of them, watching a friend’s young children wave homemade signs and cheer for their chosen horses. When I was their age, my family would go over to my grandparents’ house to watch. I have fond memories of “mint juleps” made with Sprite for the kids and poring over the newspaper with my grandmother to pick which horse I wanted to cheer for. In lieu of a bespoke headdress, I donned a wide-brimmed straw hat I’d gotten as a souvenir from Colonial Williamsburg. When “My Old Kentucky Home” commenced, the room was silent. You have to go several generations back to find Kentucky roots in my family, but on Derby day, we remembered them.
Southerners are better than the rest of the country at holding on to our cultural relics, among which the Derby reigns as one of the grandest. MSNBC producers who want to take them from us deserve the same suspicious rejection Thompson received in 1970.
As a Houstonian identified only as “Jimbo” said to Thompson, after berating him for the sacrilege of ordering a margarita on Derby weekend — “Don’t they respect anything?”
Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
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