In the popular imagination of many Americans, particularly those on the left side of the political spectrum, the typical MAGA supporter is a rural resident who hates Black and Brown people, loathes liberals, loves gods and guns, believes in myriad conspiracy theories, has little faith in democracy, and is willing to use violence to achieve their goals, as thousands did on Jan. 6.
According to a new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
The authors, Tom Schaller, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a former columnist at The Washington Post, persuasively argue that most of the negative stereotypes liberals hold about rural Americans are actually true.
The electorial college is a threat to democracy.
But neither political party wants to hand that control over to voters.
We need a critical mass of progressive politicians in office before we can fix the system, which is why they’re everyone else’s biggest political enemy
“mass of progressive politicians” so you want every single person in America to think, act, feel, and vote the same? That doesn’t happen anywhere in the world…well, except communist countries of course.
That’s not what they said. Progressive is just basically rational. Progressives think differently about things all the time. It isn’t really a nailed-down ideology of any sort.
Whereas conservatives are notable for not thinking much about anything at any time. Besides their fears. Having no discernible ideology themselves other than they want what they want. And they need someone to hate and scapegoat.
An liberals are? Why do these articles always attack one side? I live in California, I’m seeing first hand what these extreme liberal views are doing. There’s people literally fighting for the right to allow the homeless to use drugs, shoot up heroin, and shit and piss wherever they want… it’s ridiculous. And don’t get me started on the petty crime that’s being ignored…because apparently, according to liberals, we need to completely revamp our criminal and judicial system because people who steal shit shouldn’t be going to prison… it’s fucking ridiculous.
More so than conservatives? Absolutely. Still not great. Also remember that progressives!=liberals. Some liberals are mildly progressive sure. Not enough of them or progressive enough.
The reason articles tend to attack a specific side pretty regularly. Is because they’re abjectly horrible and significantly worse than the next worst group around. Which happens to be liberals. Who are also very shit.
Nah, Saint Ronnie shuttering mental hospitals national wide. Pushing those people out on to the streets untreated. Is literally what caused all of that. But that’s blasphemy to say inn’it? You expect the state or police to have the time or funds to police such things. While closing the only, already inadequate system focused on taking care of those people. While voting at every turn to starve state and federal government of funds and resources to actually handle such situations. Irrationally frothing at the mouth about how your parties actions are all the fault of those evil liburuls!
Prison should only be a solution for those that pose an actual threat to society. Petty theft and drug use ain’t it. It’s pretty inhuman and grotesque the way you treat it as some garbage dump to permanently dispose of people you don’t like. Especially irrational when your realize that they’ll get out eventually. But that not only is recidivism far too high because prison doesn’t actually address any actual problems. It actually trains them to be better criminals.
This is exactly what I was talking about. You’re behaving irrational and vindictive. Blaming everyone but yourself for the problems you create and seek to exacerbate as a “conservative”. You complain about people complaining about the failures of the system, even as you champion the failed system. Putting it’s failures on the group your cult told you to hate. It’s 100% bananas. And you refuse to see it.
I’ll rag on liberals all day long. I barely have even faint praise to give them sparingly. But my god, conservatives somehow make them seem reasonable.
I’m always amazed that a bunch of redneck, Southern, city haters decided that a rich, Manhattan developer was one of them
Don’t be. They’re rubes. Dumber than dogshit. Just pawns in a game.
Pawns, yes. Dumb, stupid as in an inherent trait, no. Just used and discarded by corporate America over the last 70 years or so.
It used to be, in the earlier part of the last century, that you could get as good an education in a small town as in a big city, and a lot of rural folk prided themselves on NOT being dumb hicks. WWI brought them out of the countryside by the scores and raised the expectations for all. These people went off to the wars, went to college on the GI Bill, and even came back to run their farms. This was the norm sixty years ago. This was the life my parents and grandparents lived, on both sides. They were never good at accepting differences in others, but education was HIGHLY valued, and sloth was the greatest failure of character anyone could imagine.
But now, look at corporate America, and especially BigAg, for stripping small towns of everything that made for good living and a pleasant life in rural communities. Walmart came and drove all the small stores out of business. Ace Hardware and others came and drove all the small hardware shops out. McDonalds and Waffle House came and drove all the little diners out of business. Fifty years ago, ALL the individual trades were well represented and thriving in rural areas, because everyone, rich or poor, still needed plumbers and blacksmiths and print shops and seamstresses, and it was difficult to find a town without its own proud newspaper.
All these small enterprises and career options and jobs at every skill level were replaced with what?
Sweet fuck all beyond fear, anger, drugs and debt.
Rural America is a wasteland filled with scared, angry, bitter people because WE, as a country, made it that way.
But they’re no different than the rest of us: give them a shot, decent jobs, decent education, futures to work for and they’re just like everyone else. That, and shut off the goddamn propaganda channels that have taken their righteous and well-earned anger and appropriated even THAT, turning it into emotional nooses for yet another set of rich men to control.
Hard to give them a decent education when they defund the school systems because ‘muh taxes’ and denigrate their teachers and everything else public Ed ('ceptin the “pride of the town”, the HS football team, because that one QB is gonna git scouted ‘cuz he’ s got a helluva arm)
They are the cause of their own downfall and reject any ideas that might help them. They deserve no pity. They’ve earned their place in the intellectual hierarchy. The smart ones all leave for cities with no plans to return.
They are the cause of their own downfall and reject any ideas that might help them. They deserve no pity. They’ve earned their place in the intellectual hierarchy. The smart ones all leave for cities with no plans to return.
Guess that puts you in rural Bumfuck County, Nowhereland for life then, Clent, because even the most stupid among us know that crops don’t grow in cities, herds don’t graze in urban areas, but city folk still really like to eat.
I’m not sure what your point is. Being a farmer doesn’t make one worthy of worship. It also has no bearing on what I said. Most rural people are not farmers.
At least you know you’re among the most stupid, so you’ve got that going for you.
I’m not sure what your point is. Being a farmer doesn’t make one worthy of worship. It also has no bearing on what I said. Most rural people are not farmers.
My point, Clent, is that you have no idea how the world works, or where your food comes from, or even any idea that many rural people (including farmers) are college educated. You have no idea what business sustains rural areas, or what it takes for rural people to get their basic human needs met. You wouldn’t last half a day on a real farm, or anywhere other than your mom’s basement.
Your concern trolling fails to account for the humanity of others, and your all-or-nothing language demonstrates the maturity level of an angry preteen. This is all about you needing an outgroup to look down on and feel better than in comparison to yourself, and has nothing to do with the very real lives of the people you condemn as “stupid.” How old are you, twelve?
Look at this, lol:
They are the cause of their own downfall and reject any ideas that might help them. They deserve no pity. They’ve earned their place in the intellectual hierarchy. The smart ones all leave for cities with no plans to return.
When you call others stupid, Clent, you’re looking in the mirror, because I’ve known many of lesser IQ that had more humanity in their little toes than you’ve ever had in your life. Go back to your video games, angry boy, and let the grownups talk.
You have no idea what I do and do not know.
By your own reasoning as you’ve outlined it, you are the one looking in the mirror here.
You are presuming a whole lot about me here based on very little, which is hilarious and yet sad.
I stand by what I said. Your attempt to disparage me is about you. If you had any interest in proving me wrong, you would be able to do so with facts instead of lashing out at me like a wounded animal.
The farmers I know, the ones that were able to actually keep their farms, generally aren’t voting for the dumbass who caused crops to rot in their fields.
You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.
Are you referencing when Trump said he liked dumb voters? He knew he could get them to vote against their interests, their family interests and anything that would improve their lives. But yeah. “Screw that group of people I think I am better than”
Accurately pointing out what they are. In no way implies they have a monopoly. Despite democrats being measurably better by nearly every metric. They are still largely problematic and often do little to actually serve their constituents.
It’s like they’ve never seen a Pace Picante Sauce commercial before.
Man that unlocked a memory from my youth…
…get a rope
To be fair he went out among them and convinced them of that.
Maggie Haberman the journalist says that one of the things about Trump that is undeniably genius is his way of charming the people he wants to support him. That’s how he won, by connecting with these people. It is his one singular talent.
They simply deny everything you present to them. Facts do not matter. They are literally living in their own imagination and refuse to accept reality. It is time to reopen the mental institutions and throw them back in, along with the ACLU clowns who let them out to begin with.
It is time to reopen the mental institutions and throw them back in, along with the ACLU clowns who let them out to begin with.
My gods y’all say some legitimately evil shit sometimes.
Defending against violent fascists is evil?
I know what side you’re on now.
Defending against violent fascists is evil?
You sound exactly like the rest of the violent fascists you deride as though they are any different from yourself, you tell us. As a reminder, what you said was:
They simply deny everything you present to them. Facts do not matter. They are literally living in their own imagination and refuse to accept reality. It is time to reopen the mental institutions and throw them back in, along with the ACLU clowns who let them out to begin with.
Tell me how that doesn’t sound like a “violent fascist” to you.
Or better yet, don’t. I looked at your post history. Less than a month old, and the vast majority of your comments completely ignore the crimes of the right – you know, the fascists you claim to hate – while pointing out front and center even the tiniest faults of anyone trying to make things right these days.
So tell it to someone else. Your posts sound exactly like the people trying to rile shit up from the right, and to the exact same end.
I cant help but notice that your path of pacifism and “incremental change” has led to the rapid and accelerating rise of fascism…so until you can come up with a solution that has actually worked historically as well as mine has, you have no business trying to ivory tower your "superiority complex.
By the way, wtf does “less than a month old” mean? How is that relevant? Exactly what gate are you keeping, and by whose authority? How old are you? Were you born in the 90s or after? Do you have any concept of a world before cable news was able to spew nonstop propaganda and the airwaves weren’t saturated with constant radical fascist garbage? I can assure you that there is no possible way that I could be their equal in any way whatsoever. You would probably have nothing to compare to to know that.
Removed by mod
Removed, no threatening death camps.
ooooh, tough guy here.
Reagan shutdown the mental institutions.
Whatever hatred you have for the ACLU is based on your ignorance.
Rural America is mostly a wasteland. It’s either where people of means deliberately choose to live away from society, or it’s people who are too ignorant, poor and/or drug-addled to have much choice. Neither group is going to be left-leaning… and that’s why when you look at electoral maps, you see all that red.
Pick a highway, any will do, travel along it and tell me what you see. I already know. One little failed town after another. They might have a dive bar or ancient gas station, but most commercial buildings will be long abandoned. If you need anything, you’ll have to find a decent city with a generic walmart, dollar general, mcdonalds, etc. Long gone are the mom-and-pop grocers, general stores, etc.
The irony is these are solid red Republican districts. Cities have major problems too, but they are full of action; plans, projects, hopes of a better future. There is no future for the average rural American.
They are frustrated and angry, as well they should be. Too bad they can’t see the forest through the trees.
As a resident of one of these towns, another issue is that many people who are knowledgeable or capable are simply trapped. Several years ago in the area I live we use to have an economic development council that sponsored some proposals on alternatives to the anchor industry here (coal fired power generation), I shit you not, one of the remarks made by the workshops was a reference to a 2017 WSJ article that stated "rural is the new ‘inner city.’”
Rural areas have, and I’m quoting someone who presented at a workshop “lower economic status, lower education levels, higher wage gap, poorer health, higher rates of teen birth, and greater impacts from the opioid epidemic.”
The largest obstacle facing the trapped knowledgeable and educated people in rural areas is the obscene fucking cost of housing and the double-negative we’re facing on having little equity and cheap housing, where we want to move somewhere desirable and progressive having housing that’s beyond our lifetime earnings potential.
For the ignorant, this feeds into the anger cycle of wanting to just burn the whole thing down, and for the reds they look at every way they can fuck things up for the rest of us as a middle finger back at the country for the squalor they’re stuck with. They’d rather burn the forest down than try to fix anything, because they’re also lazy. Lazy in the sense of not wanting or accepting change. They’ll work hard at what they know, but learning new concepts is pushed against.
That doesn’t make it right, and I agree with you on all counts. Unity would get them a hell of a lot farther than the same tired old Reagan rhetoric they peddle. I’m just extremely fortunate in threading the needle through economic transition and getting to stay at my house without worrying about having to move, and I don’t like the city after having grown up in the Bay Area California. What you said still resonates with me as I can tell you understand it. We have no action plan and no hope because these towns are full of people who would just rather be angry than change.
So true.
One thing you can be sure of is that they all have a dollar store.
Yeah I know they’re facts. I spend far too much time as a semi-passing trans woman in rural America. I think a lot of people overestimate the proportions of these people, I’ve met so many thoughtful, kind, and progressive hicks, hillbillies, and other rural sorts.
But the fact is I’ve never seen passive aggressive Bible verses on mailboxes in cities. I’ve never heard an educated urban coworker rant and rave about how blm protesters are funded by George soros. I’ve never seen city folk wear a mask that says “government control device” on it or carry a Bible with them onto a factory floor or put newsmax on the company share point.
And the armed city folk I know are far more likely to be responsible gun owners and not have a couch gun. Jesus fucking shit so many people talk about their fucking couch gun and they always act like it’s reasonable and normal and every gun owner has one instead of the reality that that’s not a safe place to have a gun. They also don’t realize that you shouldn’t advertise owning the only thing that gets more valuable when stolen, especially not by putting a bumper sticker saying one is in the fucking car.
I’m sorry… couch gun??? Like they just shove a gun into the couch cushions? What the hell kind of purpose would that serve? Opening a beer can or turning on the tv? Or are they all just living in constant paranoia of someone kicking their door in and trying to kill them?
I couldn’t tell you. It boggles the mind in fact. This is so normal to these people that no explanation is necessary
Or turning around in their driveways apparently
I’m sorry… couch gun??? Like they just shove a gun into the couch cushions?
Usually this means one accessible while sitting on the couch. Not necessarily in the couch cushions.
What the hell kind of purpose would that serve?
Home invasion. Exceedingly unlikely but some folks are paranoid. Same basic logic as having a gun in a bedside table, but for when you aren’t in bed.
The funny part is if one ever did want to attack these rural folks, the logical method would be use literal fire. A drone would prevent having to risk their weapons. Then let their ammo hoards do the work. Use the drone against anyone who flees.
They seem to think people want to break in and rape and pillage but they’re so over invested in fire power there is nothing much to steal and rape is more their thing than the left’s.
They are not ready for a real apocalypse scenario or an invading force because as you’ve noted, we all assume they are heavily armed and their defense begins and ends with their gun fantasies.
Then let their ammo hoards do the work.
Minor correction to your relatively insane post, but rounds that cook off generally don’t have enough velocity to really do any significant damage, especially when they’re not exposed out in the open.
Holy shit, the couch gun is normal? Here I thought I was just seeing some weird and rare manifestation of growing up in a rural area as a kid.
It is only in rural areas that I see this shit. Maybe in some of the type of suburbs where people daily drive a pickup truck
I have these stereotypes, because I’ve met these people. I used to live among them. So many Confederate flags in northern Michigan
Our style of government is the largest threat to democracy.
We need to eliminate the electoral college, primaries, the Senate, President restricted to 1 term, perhaps 6 years, term limits for the House, All elections publicly funded, No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied. No party affiliation on any campaign documents, signs, advertisements, no straight ticket voting.
Voting booths exist for a reason. They are to ensure the privacy of the person voting.
Otherwise all sorts of overbearing people can force others to vote per their direction.
Consider an abusive partner, or a extremist pastor, or a factory manager. In all cases they have power over others, and voting may be one of the few places where individuals can express their choices.
Voting booths are an outdated relic. We live in the most technologically advanced age ever and we should still rely on methods from the 1800s? What would be more convenient than pulling out your phone, wherever you are, being able to pull up details and platform of every candidate, make selections, then cast your ballot? Force people to vote on policies, not parties.
You missed their point.
It’s so convenient, you have no excuse when your boss demands to watch you vote or you’re fired. Your abusive spouse or parent demands your phone to use your vote. Someone manages to identify unregistered voters and register on their behalf and get massive votes because of flaws in the electronic system.
Which is also a potential issue for mail in ballots.
In the in person scenario, you aren’t allowed to have anyone with you, to talk to anyone, or take pictures of videos that could be used as proof of who you did and did not vote for. This means you know that no matter what threats have been made against you, you can’t prove which way you vote at you can vote however you like without fear.
i like the idea of voting by encrypted app as an option, but lots of disenfranchised/disempowered folks can’t rely on that. by which i mean there are homeless folks without phones, and people with abusive families who lack privacy/safety to really utilize it the way we night intend.
According to a recent study 94% of the unhoused have a cell phone.
These days houses cost what cell phones used to cost and vice versa
I support this entirely, but good fucking luck
I love the theory, but considering that every week we see some headline about some digital fraud or another, I think there is a great reassurance in keeping democracy as analogue as possible
The US can’t even figure out giving IDs to its citizens, what makes you think they can make a cryptographically secure voting app? Not to mention that all forms of electronic voting opens up new attack vectors, which will definitely be exploited.
Just make election day a public holiday, make mail-in voting easier and assign enough polling stations with sufficient personnel to prevent long queues.
You know, the deriders of this bring up some good points, but I’d also like to bring up the point that digitally secured voting doesn’t really need to be a super great solution. It would be great if it was, sure, but it doesn’t need to be great, it just needs to be better than the alternative, which is pretty easy, I think. Voting analog is not necessarily a very secure way to vote either, as many people who remember the “hanging chads” issue will be quick to point out. It’s also a pretty massive inconvenience for some people, which shouldn’t really be discounted as a thing that prevents people from voting. “Oh but if they can’t spare the time we don’t want their votes anyways”, but then you gotta keep in mind that in some places the wait times are gonna be multiple hours upon hours, and maybe days.
In any case, if you still wanted analog voting for any particular reason, you could still keep it open as a backup, which might not be a bad idea generally.
The 17th should be reverted and Senators should be elected by the state legislatures, not abolished altogether. It should serve it’s intended purpose as the voice of the States. The Electoral College also still serves a purpose, but all states should be proportional delegate instead of winner take all. Ranked Choice or something similar is also needed, because FPTP always results in 2 shitty parties and is a root cause of many of our issues.
The House definitely need to be unlocked and proportional to population. Term limits are needed in both House and Senate, and money definitely needs to be removed from politics. Government provided war chests and that’s all you get, hard agree on that. Hard agree on no ads, no PACs, etc. Get your message out in debates and town halls in an actual real campaign.
We should also get rid of the two party system by introducing a party chartered to only support or oppose things that multiple 3rd party polls find over one standard deviation from the norm support.
It’s insane that given a political distribution that’s normal for most topics we arbitrarily divide it into two halves rather than focusing on the center.
Even as someone who would fall to the left of the first standard deviation, I’d much rather live in a world where there was consistent stability around the norms as I fought to move the social norms in my preferred direction over time than live in a world where there’s a 50% chance of Nazis being a thing again.
A significant majority of the county agrees on a surprisingly broad number of major topics, and yet we’re divided into two camps currently being driven more and more by outspoken fringes that represent less and less of the general population, with everyone else falling in line out of a greater fear of the “other team.”
No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied.
You are seriously underestimating just how many people don’t have smartphones (22.5 million eligible voters in the US). A number of your other suggestions are good, but the idea of all digital voting needs at least some form of backup option for people who either have hardware access issues or digital competency issues.
I think the best solution to this issue is to change the calculus of representation. The article mentions that rural areas have out-sized representation, but it only discusses the senate. The house, as well, has out-sized representation for rural areas. For example, California has approximately one Representative for every 749,000 people, while Montana has one Representative for every 560,000 people.
I think that to truly honor the idea of “one person, one vote”, 3 steps need to be taken:
- Abolish the electoral college
- Dissolve the Senate, leaving the House as the only Legislative body
- Dramatically scale up the number of representatives in the House, and tie representative count directly to population.
I’d love to see, for example, 1 representative for every 250,000 people, or something similar. That would push us from the current 435 to about 1,340 representatives, which would definitely require a new chamber for sessions. But it would also mean that demographic groups would be much better represented, and it would be much more difficult for batshit insane people like Marjorie Taylor Green to get or remain elected. If you’re representing fewer people, those people have more incentive to vote.
And it’s not like growing the House is a far-fetched idea. In fact, it is baked into the constitution. Article I, Section 2 says that the number of representatives should be directly tied to the population, with each representative representing no more than 30,000 people, and that adjustments to the size of the House should occur after every 10 year census:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.
And this is what happened, with the size of the House growing every 10 years up until, in 1929, they decided to keep it constant based on the figures from the 1930 survey. Having a cap on the number of representatives harms democracy. We can see the results in the decaying towns of rural America, and the batshit insane cultists who want to overthrow our government and install a fascistic theocracy.
You misread the passage. It doesn’t say
each representative representing no more than 30,000 people
It says
The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand
That means the opposite of what you said: each representative should represent no less than 30,000 people.
Whoops, my bad. You are absolutely correct, of course.
The house, as well, has out-sized representation for rural areas. For example, California has approximately one Representative for every 749,000 people, while Montana has one Representative for every 560,000 people.
This is a direct consequence of the House being a fixed size. The method used minimizes the average difference in people/representative for any two states. You literally can’t make it any better so long as the House is a set number of people, and increasing the size of the House to be one Rep per X people creates practical and logistical issues as regards meetings and floor debate and the like.
The reality is you have a couple of tiny states that get outsized representation by having the minimum one representative, and you have California that is just so much higher population than any other state that it blows the scale on the other end. For the rest of the states, it actually works pretty well. I’ve joked before that we don’t really **need ** two Dakotas and Montoming would be a perfectly good name for another merged state. Or chop California into several pieces.
Headlines like this are problematic. I think we can all agree that Trump has done a lot of damage to democracy in the US, but are rural Trump supporters really more dangerous than urban Trump supporters? That claim is suspect, and the article provides no evidence to support it (it provides evidence that most Trump supporters are rural, which is a totally different claim.)
And saying that white rural Trump supporters are worse than non-white rural Trump supporters is an even more serious claim. It’s racially discriminatory, and seems totally baseless in this article.
The article has no evidence of these claims, and seems to indicate that the book doesn’t even make the claims of the headline.
(I’m not objecting to the claims that Trump supporters are mostly rural and mostly white. That is common knowledge.)
65% of rural America voted for Trump in 2020 nearly half 47% believe the election was stolen that’s half of all rurals not half of rural Republicans. Support for political violence is high with 1 in 3 Republicans nationwide and higher yet in rural America. It is easier for violence to take root where their is monocultural acceptance of the false premises used to justify it.
My friend’s in-laws in rural Missouri are cutting holes into the walls to store guns in for whatever version of the apocalypse they believe is coming.
They are just more empathetic than you realize. They just put themselves in the shoes of the black/brown people and were like:
If I were them, I would have definitely shot me by now.
For what!?!
What the hell did some stupid farmer in the bumbfuck middle of nowhere do to warrant being shot in their home by people of a different skin color?
Some racist asshole living in a rural inbred community where everyone looks the same because their family tree has the same roots of people who never left their own poverty stricken hellhole didn’t actually do shit to anyone outside of voting the way they were themselves indoctrinated.
There’s definitely a lot of far right idiots being worked up into a frenzy of normalized violence that’s very concerning.
But in one of the rare instances of legit “both sides-ism” I’m starting to see a very concerning trend of the far left giving in more and more to the language of normalized violence too.
I have a feeling both sides of this are useful idiots with the same hand pulling the strings, but c’mon dude - use your critical thinking skills before regurgitating rhetoric like that mindlessly.
Perhaps, you just missed out the sarcastic use of “empathetic” in my post.
What the hell did some stupid farmer in the bumbfuck middle of nowhere do to warrant being shot in their home by people of a different skin color?
The media made them paranoid. No one is actually coming for them. Also, many rural communities put so much effort into making non-white lives miserable (that includes voting to sustain systematic racism); to them retaliation isn’t out of the realms of possibility because that is what THEY would do if THEY were put in the same position.
But in one of the rare instances of legit “both sides-ism” I’m starting to see a very concerning trend of the far left giving in more and more to the language of normalized violence too.
How can you complain about “both sides-ism” when you randomly bring up leftists? What even are the two sides here? There’s paranoid rural people and their news. That’s all.
Some racist asshole living in a rural inbred community where everyone looks the same because their family tree has the same roots of people who never left their own poverty stricken hellhole
Isn’t this a tad much? Not all rural people are racist and inbred.
The media made them paranoid. No one is actually coming for them.
Truth. They also let people on sites like “Truth” and social media grifters tell them shit like “Public schools are turning your kids trans!” and they eat it up.
They also let people on sites like “Truth” and social media grifters tell them shit like “Public schools are turning your kids trans!” and they eat it up.
Yeah, but they get their handful of cases they can use to prop those narratives up, like that girl who decided she was trans, went on T and got a double mastectomy all while still a minor, then desisted and is now generally unhappy since she’s decided she’s a girl again but there are permanent effects from going on T and she had her breasts removed (she’s basically the right wing face of desisting). Or the one school that defended helping students socially transition while keeping it secret from their parents. If you ever ask the “public schools are turning your kids trans” folks for evidence that what they are saying is actually happening you eventually get pointed to one of a few cases like those.
In the case of the school helping students socially transition without telling the parents, being a parent myself, I can understand how upset those parents might be, but the public school was probably told not to tell the parents for fear that the parents might not take it well. That’s a lot of parents. If my son came to me and said he did not feel right as a boy, I would respect his feelings, and support and help and empathize. Not many others would. At the school district in question, there would be so many kids pulled out of school and sent to Christian indoctrination centers to be forced to see themselves how their parents what them to see themselves.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say tribalism probably isn’t going to be what bring us together as a country, but hey, what do I know?
I know someone whose grandmother died some years ago and when they were cleaning out her house and doing some reno to it, they kept finding hatchets stored in places that would be accessible in case something went down, including several concealed inside walls. Apparently if things turned bad, granny was going to go down axe in hand. This feels like the same energy, just with more money to hide more expensive weapons.
Ok but that is a tiny bit funny, the mental image of it.
The US election system that gives these people completely disproportionate political influence is a threat to democracy.
these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.
Listen, I’m as blue as my balls on prom night, but we’d have a huge problem if the right said some shit like this.
I’ve always just imagined they’re more susceptible to manipulation. Primarily getting news by word of mouth, the TV, or radio.
That’s definitely probably part of it, but I think the biggest issue is homogeneity. Racism is hard when you can chat with black and brown people regularly. You aren’t hating some perceived immigrants but an actual human being that you know. Especially in places like the rural north and Midwest there was no mass movement of black people there. Similarly people will hate on Muslims in rural Kentucky but not in Dearborn Michigan.
And it’s not just racism. Queer people have always existed everywhere. But rural queer people are often much less open about it and often move away including before coming out. So people in bumfuck nowhere either dont have any queer people anymore, or their queer people are closeted or invisible.
Educated people also tend to prefer urban or suburban areas. Yeah maybe you’ve got a few lawyers or people who went to a local Christian college, and if you have a factory it has some engineers for sure. And you definitely have people who went to agricultural college. But you don’t have professors or scientists or people with humanities degrees. And notice those degrees I mentioned are overwhelmingly white and male programs. You can get them and not make black or brown or queer or even female acquaintances in school.
By and large more rural areas got affordable or accessible internet access much later so they are more succeptable to scams as well.
It’s weird because the leaked Parler account maps showed the density of membership was in red parts of cities. Less in rural.
loves gods and guns
Ok, I was well aware of the gun fetishism, but I gotta say that the polytheism is very surprising!
I think it’s funny that they call themselves monotheistic and then do these verbal gymnasics to keep that true (like calling other deities ‘saints’ or claiming that Jesus is god’s son but also 100% the same entity as god - oh yeah and that holy spirit thing too).
You mean you’re NOT your own dad, and also a disembodied spirit? I thought everyone was!
The most generous interpretation of Christianity is that it’s monotheish. The Doctrine of the Trinity is like crypto: you can’t understand it unless you believe in it.
Maybe they mean the sometimes not so subtle differences in worship by various sects of Christianity?
It’s fact. I live in KY. Many are stupider than you think.
I visited the bourbon trail area. Everyone was lovely to talk with but that was as long as things stayed superficial…
