RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to another female employee, he would say of attractive women, “I’d like to do that piece of meat.”

“It’s a f—ing baby,” Bloomberg reportedly yelled at another female employee when she was scrambling to find a nanny for her child. “All it does is eat and shit! It doesn’t know the difference between you and anyone else! All you need is some black who doesn’t even have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building!”

It’s easy to assume that Bloomberg, like the man he wants to replace in the White House, is simply selfish, crude, and misogynistic. It’s tempting to see Bloomberg’s cutthroat capitalism as unrelated to, or even at odds with, his social liberalism. But there’s a bigger story here, a pattern that becomes clear when you consider Mike Bloomberg in full.

Bloomberg’s odd apology for China’s authoritarian communist regime is not some weird blind spot. His embrace of stop-and-frisk policing was not just some New York City thing. And his nanny-statism on sodas, cigarettes, and trans fats is not merely an over-enthusiasm for clean living.

Nor is Bloomberg an inconsistent thinker or some nonideological independent. He has a very clear view of the world that underlies his economic policies, his social policies, his personal life, and his behavior. Bloomberg’s ideology is neither left nor right. Instead, his worldview is supremely materialistic, and ultimately inhuman.

In Bloomberg’s eyes, any talk of the dignity of the human person is mawkish sentimentality. Mike Bloomberg doesn’t see people as ends in themselves, but instead as means to ends.

Begin with Bloomberg’s disturbing warmth toward China’s regime. Bloomberg News has, according to insiders, spiked stories that were critical of the regime. Bloomberg also kicked off his current presidential run by praising China’s environmental record and lauding the way the government holds power, in addition to rejecting the idea that Xi Jinping is a dictator, suggesting that a majority of the population approves of his rule.

At best, Bloomberg is saying that individual liberty and free expression can be suppressed, so long as the guy suppressing them could, in theory, find public support for it — and by “support,” he’s not necessarily referring to a free election. That’s unnerving, coming from a guy running to become president.

In this context, consider his Big Gulp bans, his smoking bans, his trans-fat bans, and his tireless campaign to outlaw guns. Bloomberg clearly rejects the notion that ordinary people should be allowed to make their own mistakes. Treating adults as adults and respecting their self-determination is not something Bloomberg believes in.

So, how then to understand his massive support for Planned Parenthood, his 100% pro-choice record on abortion, and his call to deregulate abortion clinics? Just go back to his workplace conduct.

Telling an expectant mother to kill her baby, mocking a new mother’s desire for quality child care, cursing whenever a female employee gets pregnant, and publicly denigrating marriage among professional women all reflect a clear and consistent mindset: The women who worked for him were worker bees. Their humanity, their fertility, their love, and their human attachments were all impediments to productivity. He saw these women as means to his ends of profit.

Hence the misogyny, the keeping of a girlfriend in every city (and bragging about it), the jokes that some employees’ value was in providing sexual favors— that all fits in, too.

Once you see Bloomberg as someone who rejects the dignity of the individual, his attitude toward policing makes sense. The virtue of his “stop-and-frisk” practice, Bloomberg once explained to a crowd of elites, was that officers would stop black and Hispanic children without probable cause and “throw them up against the wall and frisk them,” so as to scare them straight.

That may seem to you to be inhumane and demeaning. Bloomberg sees that as being realistic. The former mayor tellingly described criminals and crime victims in New York as all being the same: “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops.”

Human beings, to Bloomberg, are not unique creatures, all deserving freedom, respect, and dignity. They are not ends in themselves, in Bloomberg’s eyes. People are either inconveniences to be ignored or terminated (babies), threats to be neutralized and intimidated (minority males), corporate machine parts to be exploited for profit (employees), or tools for sexual gratification (women).

It may look like Bloomberg’s views and policies are all over the place, until you see people the way Bloomberg does. And once you’ve seen him for what he is, you can’t unsee it.