When Democratic firebrand Jasmine Crockett agreed to be profiled by The Atlantic, she probably expected just another boot-licking puff piece that would add to her leftist street cred and fundraising numbers. What she got was a surprisingly balanced account of her background and meteoric rise in a collapsing political party, which is why she reportedly tried to spike the article.
Perhaps Crockett was incensed by the embarrassing anecdote that staff writer Elaine Godfrey related at the very beginning of the piece. During her quixotic effort to be named the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee last month, Crockett whined that she was “[feeling] a little used” by her colleagues. When Godfrey asked her about her failure to get the post, she said, “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” as if that explained why she should be handed power and responsibility on a plate.
Godfrey’s journalistic honesty has accidentally revealed an inconvenient truth about the new blood on the American left. Crockett and her ilk aren’t true public servants, but social media influencers who see representing the American people as a mere side hustle. This narcissistic approach to their duties makes them dangerous to the body politic.
A Lack of Substance
One of the more disturbing aspects of social media is how it grants unscrupulous users the ability to craft a false identity for themselves. For Crockett, this persona is the “tough black girl from the Dallas streets.” She regularly hurls viral insults at people such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, or Hispanics who voted for Donald Trump.
Though she wrongly characterizes these antics as “forthrightness,” Godfrey refuses to buy fully into Crockett’s charade. She reminds her readers that Crockett hails from St. Louis, where she attended a private high school before going to Rhodes College, a small liberal arts school in Tennessee. The closest Crockett ever got to life on city streets was a role in the musical “Little Shop of Horrors” in her college days.
Crockett credits her entry into law and then politics to an incident at Rhodes in which she and a few other black students received threatening and racist letters from an anonymous source. According to this tale, the black female attorney hired by the college to look into the matter became Crockett’s “shero” and inspiration. Oddly, Godfrey could not fully confirm any of these details; Crockett could not even remember the name of this “sheroic” attorney. All in all, this origin story sounds like a social justice warrior’s Instagram fantasy.
When it comes to Crockett’s policy goals, Godfrey is at a loss; apart from mentioning her law firm’s defense of Black Lives Matter demonstrators and a vague reference to her support for “criminal justice reform” while in the Texas state legislature, the reader gains no insight into what issues concern her or those she represents. Instead, we are treated to a description of her “unofficial leadership” of more than 50 Texas Democrats who fled their state to D.C. in 2021 in order to stymie legislation meant to tighten and clarify voting rules, a stunt that guaranteed Crockett a career on the national level while frustrating more moderate Democrats.
But Crockett clearly knows how to get clicks and likes. Godfrey explains, “On TikTok and Instagram … she monitors social-media engagement like a day trader checks her portfolio,” which is strange behavior for a legislator. The lack of substance behind Crockett’s style reveals that for her, government is not a sacred trust between her and her constituents, but a stage on which she can strut and receive applause.
Hellbound and Down 