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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t this a tad much? Not all rural people are racist and inbred.
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.
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.