In the years since Dirty Jobs went off the air, host Mike Rowe has gotten into political activism, positioning himself a real champion of the blue collar working man. In 2008, Rowe launched the mikeroweWORKS foundation, an organization that supports people wanting to learn skilled trades to fill what would otherwise be considered undesirable jobs. He also ran for Arkansas county judge in 2014. Rowe has also been praised and criticized for the S.W.E.A.T. mission statement his foundation is based on (which is an anagram for “Skill & Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo”), with some calling him out as a right-wing propagandist.
Bearing all that in mind, it should come as no surprise that Rowe took umbrage with the following tweet from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders earlier this week:
At the end of the day, providing a path to go to college is a helluva lot cheaper than putting people on a path to jail.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 13, 2015
In response, Rowe posted the lengthy tirade to Facebook on Monday:
While I don’t necessarily agree with all of that, I can understand both sides of the argument. The point Sanders is trying to make is that maybe if the United States spent some of the money we use to keep prisoners incarcerated in overcrowded prisons towards nurturing the education of our young people, we’d have less people in jail and more people in jobs.
However, given his beliefs, it’s also easy to see how a blanket statement would come off as elitist to Mike Rowe–as if the choice is college or jail and nothing in between. I mean, somebody’s got to farm the maggots, am I right?