My White Rural Rage

According to liberals, people like me are the problem with America

Back in 1976, the New Yorker had a cover that was a visual example of how the upper east coast “elites” see the rest of the country.

Remember when the left lost their collective shit when Jason Aldean dropped “Try That in a Small Town” a couple of years ago?

I do.

Good times.

It made the Stupids mad. You know the ones.

These are the people who tore down statues that “offended” them while putting up murals, statues and holding two televised funerals for a criminal drug addict who once held a pistol to the swollen belly of a pregnant woman and died while resisting arrest. The same ones who claimed that the protests had turned out to be fiery, but mostly peaceful, while entire downtowns went up in flames behind them.

Just last week, a strong progressive voice in DC circles, Heidi Pryzbyla, went on MSNBC and said:

"The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians because Christian nationalists are very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any Earthly authority. They don't come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God. The problem with that is that they are determining, men, are determining what God is telling them."

Oh, my. Christians and their crazy ideas. What are we going to do?

Tell me you have never read the first line of the Declaration of Independence without telling me you haven't read the first line of the Declaration of Independence – because the idea we get our rights from our Creator, Nature and Nature’s God according to Jefferson, is literally in the first line.

I began jotting down notes since I saw what Pryzbyla said when she went off on "Christian Nationalists" and how they (we) believe in GOD, for goodness’s sake! What a bunch of rubes!

Then I saw the clips of Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, my first take was pure anger, second take was that it was just a stupid example of the lowest level of thinking in a long line of low-level thinking – Waldman and Schaller’s book, Robin Di Angelo’s White Fragility, George Rogers’ (aka Ibram X. Kendi) Anti-Racist Baby, etc.

Eventually, I just started laughing even though my mom taught me it was not nice to openly laugh at stupid people. My take after I stopped laughing - White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is a self-affirmation book for the Dunning-Kruger set.

I’ve watched “elites” like these effete, intellectually constipated, self-righteous Acela Corridor urban dwellers over the years, and I have nicknamed their entirely predictable thought processes "ricochet thinking".

That name comes from what happens when a Mossad operative clandestinely eliminates a bad actor. The Mossad assassins use a suppressed .22 caliber pistol when they do close in work. It has several advantages, it is small, relatively quiet, leaves a very small entry wound and most of all, the .22L round is just powerful enough to penetrate the thinner areas of a human skull but not powerful enough to punch through the other side – no massive exit wound. What makes the .22 Long such an effective round is that while it can't blow a big hole in a target's head, it does have enough juice to ricochet around inside the skull for a bit, turning the brain to ground round.

That's the thinking of the "elite' on the left. An idea ricochets around in their head long enough to kill enough brain cells until mental retardation looks like scholarship.

It's also why they can't do science or logic because the scientific method and logical thinking requires rigor and the acceptance of the possibility of being wrong. This kind of "intellectualism" is not designed to push boundaries to get at the truth, its only purpose is to satisfy and mollify the thinker. It is a mental sedative that comforts them, reassuring they are all Stuart Smally and gosh darn it, they're good enough, they're smart enough, and doggone it, people like them!

As AOC said, it is better to be morally right than factually correct - even though you can't be one without the other.

I'm working on my WRR (White Rural Rage).  I’m sure I must have it because I vote Republican, I was raised on a farm, I fish and hunt, I’ve butchered hogs, cared for chickens, hogs, cattle and horses, put up hay, hoed a garden, tended fields, driven and operated a long litany of farm equipment, shoveled out stalls, used a manure spreader, roamed creek bottoms barefoot, eaten watermelon straight off the vine and generally filled myself with white rural rage.

I did set aside my WRR long enough to get a mechanical engineering degree, a degree in finance, one in economics and a Master’s in Business Administration, so I got that going for me, white rural rage or not.

But I guess Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia.

Matt Taibbi’s great piece over at his Substack, Racket News (do subscribe) titled “MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over "White Rural Rage", does a thorough job of identifying the latest slander against rural America and covers the fact this anti-populism is really nothing new when the cow-kissing, manure shoveling, great unwashed deign to push back against the demands of the self-anointed elite. Taibbi noted:

“Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a ‘frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,’ and waged a ‘shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.’”

Who knew there were Trump voters back in the late 1800’s?

At the root, this is all based in irrational fear of Donald J. Trump and his supporters. The “elite” see people like us, people who were raised close to where the rubber meets the road, people who produce things and ideas, people who push back and challenge their assumed status, as existential threats to who they know they are – modern day looters.