Oikophobia Pushes Me to Board the Trump Train (Reservedly)

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, my family is building a house on ten acres of pastureland in Rappahannock County, one of Virginia's most sparsely populated areas. As this planned rural retreat becomes a reality, I grow more and more excited. I look forward to embracing what my brother Matt and I refer to as "the good life": a life dominated by nature, by quiet, and by neighborliness. I look forward to getting to know the farmers, fruit growers, and small business owners in Amissville and nearby Little Washington -- folks who, by 17.8%, gave their county to Trump.

There will be downsides to this move. I will have to travel more to find work. Our cell phone service won't be as reliable, and the same goes for our television and internet. But one thing I'm certain I won't encounter, despite my family members' various disabilities, is disrespect or cruelty. I am confident of this because I have met many of my future of neighbors and have found them to be kind and friendly. I am confident of this because I've visited similar communities elsewhere in Trump's America and have found the people in those places to be equally decent and unassuming.

The folks in Trump's America are not perfect, of course; nobody is. They may have beliefs and opinions that you find irrational or downright repugnant. But does that mean they will round up all the foreigners, gays, and ethnic minorities and expel them as soon as they get the chance? Nope. Not even close.

In the wake of the election, it has amazed me how many unbelievably privileged leftists have attacked and denigrated Trump's America based on nothing but ignorance and stereotypes -- not to mention how many unbelievably privileged leftists have complained about being victimized.

Take, for example, Meryl Streep's extended whine at the Golden Globes, during which she had the gall to complain that "all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press." For someone so downtrodden, Streep seems to be doing quite well. But beyond that, has she ever considered the possibility that two out of those three groups have done things that deserve our opprobrium?  Or that the third group - foreigners - are only resented if they arrive here illegally or demand that we abandon our classically liberal traditions?

The wealthy denizens of Hollywood cycle through relationships faster than shit flows through a goose. Apparently, fidelity and self-sacrifice are concepts foreign to many of these professional pretenders. Meanwhile, my own father, who's itching to move to Trump country as soon as possible, has stayed married to one woman for thirty-eight years despite trials that likely would end Hollywood's more ephemeral unions, including Mom's chronic illness and Dad's extended military-imposed absences from home. Who, do you think, do I admire more?

"So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick 'em all out, you'll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts," Streep then claimed. But this too is total BS. If all of leftist Hollywood dropped off the face of the planet tomorrow, a lot of space would be freed up for Americans who've entertained the idea of pursuing film but have hesitated because of Hollywood's demonstrable hostility to non-leftist beliefs. And while it would take a while for the members of the new entertainment class to learn the craft, the industry would eventually be rebuilt -- and maybe this time, we would be treated to more truly original stories instead of endless reboots and tired left-wing agitprop.

I was also not impressed by Streep's pleas for empathy. I was not impressed because her entire speech was an exercise in abandoning empathy. She clearly has no idea what it feels like to be a working-class American who has to listen to rich people like her mock his tastes in entertainment and his overall lifestyle on a regular basis. And yes, working-class Americans have been endlessly insulted and harassed by their supposed "betters" for quite some time. As Mike Rowe once observed, if there's a plumber in a Hollywood production, he's showing butt-crack. If a reporter goes out to engage the working class, it is often to set a snare for some innocent Christian family with typical Christian beliefs about human sexuality -- a family who will then be subject to a media storm driven by coastals who don't actually know them as human beings and don't care about destroying their livelihood.

So, yes -- it was a dickish move for Trump to mock that reporter's disability (assuming that was in fact what he intended to do) - but I don't think the vast majority of his supporters like him because "he makes fun of the disabled." They like him because he made fun of a reporter - a member of the very aristoi that has persistently bullied them for not embracing "orthodoxy." While I don't normally condone revenge, I understand the impulse. And personally, I wish leftists in Hollywood and elsewhere would actually recognize their own culpability when it comes to how divided and angry our political landscape has become. Trump would not have been a viable candidate if the left had not spent the last eight years pushing its agenda to the point of absolute insanity and accusing the innocent of every social ill under the sun.

Seriously - who's actually going to respond appreciatively to crap like this:

Well, gee, that's the ticket! In order to get respect, I just need to stop being an evil asshole. Awesome. I'll get on that right now.

NOT.

Let's do a mini-fisk of this garbage, shall we?

...those towns have nothing going for them. No infrastructure, just a few bars and a terrible school system.

It's interesting you would mention school systems. I was exploring the results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress earlier today, and do you want to know what I discovered? When you account for important demographic characteristics like minority enrollment and free/reduced lunch rates, the Trump states perform at levels wholly comparable to the performance of the Clinton states. As it turns out, while there are very high performers among this election's blue states (clustered in New England, mainly), there are also very low performers as well. So I'm not buying that leftist-run school systems cannot also be terrible -- especially since I live very close to overwhelmingly leftist Washington DC and consequently hear a lot of news about the DC school system's disastrous academic results and overall incompetence.

And as for the lack of infrastructure -- well, I'll address that below.

So if you want jobs, clean up your act and make your town a place people like us want to live in. Add fiber internet.

Has it occurred to you that fiber internet costs money? That a municipality has to convince the purveyors of fiber internet that building such infrastructure there will be worth the risk? That people can't just install fiber internet themselves and need the cooperation of a corporation that sells the tech? What you are doing here is blaming less advantaged people possessing limited resources for not living the way you live. It's tantamount to looking down on the people who lived in mid-20th century Appalachia for not having indoor toilets. "Clean up your act, hillbillies. Stop crapping in outhouses."

Make it a point to elect a progressive city council and commit to not being bigots.

"Stop thinking the way you think and start thinking the way I think, you racist-y racists!" Well, there's only one legitimate response to that:

We especially don't want to live in states where the majority of residents are still voting for things that are against their own interests just because they don't want brown people to thrive.

Because you, madam, are better qualified to decide what is in the best interest of the working class than the members of the working class themselves? Honestly, this particular sentence pisses me off more than anything else she's said so far; it perfectly encapsulates the left's repeatedly-debunked-by-history belief that distant technocrats know better than the locals what must be done to improve their lives. I'm sorry, but fuck you. You are not there. You clearly don't know their true motivations or what they're actually going through. You, therefore, don't have the requisite on-the-ground knowledge to make decisions on their behalf.

As I suggested in the title of this post, I'm now on the Trump train, and leftists like Streep and Byerley are the reason I'm here. I still don't like the guy - and I plan to watch him like a hawk over the next four to eight years - but I'd rather throw in my lot with Trump's supporters than with the snobbish jerks who think they're superior to the rest of us.