Professional Left Podcast Episode 987: The Vice of the People

"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice."  --  Gore Vidal

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The Triumphant Return of Magic Ruralism ™

There's only one thing wrong with the title of this post.  It's the word "return", because Magic Ruralism never left.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term:

Magic Ruralism:  Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.

As I have mentioned once or twice before, after Trump slithered down the escalator and into the hearts of Americas bigots and imbeciles, Magic Ruralism became the Beltway media's favorite new genre of fiction:

...just as Thrilling Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly were in the business of cranking out hard-boiled crime genre fiction for the titillation of their readers, so have The New York Times and the Washington Post gone into the business of cranking out True Tales Of Rust-Belt Trump Murricans! for the titillation of their readers.

And at this point, we as a country have already run enough versions of the "Just reach out humbly and respectfully to Republican base voters with policies that will materially benefit them and they'll see reason and stop voting for lunatics, grifters and fascists" experiment to understand that it never fucking works and never will.   

This strategy was the sum and substance of the entire Obama administration, which had to immediately set to work cleaning up after the various catastrophes Bush and the Republicans had left behind.  The Right reacted with an eight-year-long racist primal scream followed by the nomination and election of the King of the Birthers.  

The coastal media remained positively obsessed with that goddamn Ohio diner, because rich city folks live a million social and economic miles from the actual Middle America and their lives were substantially untouched in any material way by the Republican madness abroad in the land, they were free to savor hair-raising tales (from The Washington Post July 30, 2018) --

White, and in the minority

She speaks English. Her co-workers don’t. Inside a rural chicken plant, whites struggle to fit in.

-- of rural Murrican pity and terror (the New York Times also from July 30, 2018)  --

How to Talk to a Racist

White liberals, you’re doing it all wrong.

-- from a safe distance.

After the disaster of Trump 1.0, the Biden administration's policy of reaching out to people whose lives have gotten worse under Republican administrations and yet still fucking hate Democrats and always vote for the party that screws them was directionally the same as the Obama administration: focus on manufacturing in red states, infrastructure, raising the standard of living for the working class, and lifting poor children out of poverty.  

Once again the Right reacted by ignoring reality, obsessing over the lies and slanders being cranked out all day, every day by Conservative media, nominating the King of the Birthers for the third time, and electing him again.  

 As has been proven time and time again, the whole notion that ignorant ofay "Ohio diner" voters are driven by "economic anxiety" is bullshit.  They are driven by fear, paranoia, rage and racism and no matter how genteel your language or calm you approach, it doesn't work and it's never gonna work. 

 And so, of course, from the Department of Infinite Credulous Mulligans...

The author's case for wasting time and energy pursuing the the same outreach to the unreachable strategy that has already failed more often than Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Steaks, and Trump Vodka combined is based entirely on her conversation with one woman and her brother-in-law, six years ago.

Roxanne lived in a double-wide trailer with her husband, plus her parents-in-law and brother-in-law. It was during the Covid-19 pandemic, so we sat distanced on her porch to talk.

Because of the garbage she'd read online, Roxanne was very confused about Joe Biden.

Some of them said Biden was the worst thing that could happen to America, while others said they were relieved at the outcome of the election because Trump was evil and had to go. She was open to talking with me because she was trying to sort through all of it for herself, to figure out what she believed. “Regardless, I don’t plan on voting in the runoff election,” she told me. “I don’t think it makes much of a difference.”

At least one of the presumably many reasons Roxanne was worried about Joe Biden was based on some absolute bullshit which she had picked up from somewhere and had apparently never bothered to find out the truth of it. 

Roxanne had voted for Trump in the general because she had been told Biden would take away their disability. Now that Biden had won, fear of losing their benefits kept her up at night. “I don’t know how we’d live without it,” she said.

And here comes her brother-in-law Jeremy who is also full of stupid opinions.

While we were talking, her brother-in-law, Jeremy, came outside. He had splurged and gotten his nails done, and they looked fantastic, which I was sure to compliment him on. They were long purple stiletto-shaped acrylic nails. Roxanne told him I was there to talk about the runoff elections, and he quickly told me of his distrust of the Democratic candidates, especially Jon Ossoff. “For someone that young to be that successful, they had to do something crooked.”

Then Astral Projection David Brooks entered the chat...

“Hold on now,” Roxanne told him. “She’s here to talk about voting for them. Let’s be polite.”

“Well, I don’t hate them,” he said, “but I don’t like any of them — neither side. I won’t vote for any of them anyway.” 

Because Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

You can practically hear a generation of legacy media Both Siderism and Republican excuse-making pinging around Jeremy's head like a BB in a rain barrel.  

As they talked, I listened for what was underneath their distrust of the political process. They were afraid of losing their health care, their disability benefits and their home. They were worried about losing their family members who were sick. Roxanne grieved the loss of her health. They worried about their neighbors who didn’t have heat in the winter. These problems had only gotten worse over the years, never better, no matter who was in office. “It hasn’t mattered if there was an R or a D after their name,” Roxanne said.

Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

And rather than perhaps, y'know, gently pointing out the many Democratic policies that already have materially improved Roxanne's life and would have improved it even more had it not been for Republican obstruction, sabotage, slander, and gutting, the author opts instead to... 

I affirmed their experiences, validated their feelings and pointed out the very real injustices in their lives, the very real failure of either political party to help...

Again, Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

In the words of BlueSky user Always Jae...

Ohhh...that's what kept them voting for all this?  They weren't "welcomed" enough?  Seriously?  The interference that the media continuously runs for white people in the sticks is almost pathological at this point.

To which I would only add that, when it comes to the way legacy media runs cover for these people, we no longer need to modify the word "pathological" with the word "almost".  

Which is why we need to...

Burn The Lifeboats

Bubba Gharib

From NPR, April 17, 2026:

Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump

The number of immigrants who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has reached an all-time high this fiscal year.

Twenty-nine people have died in ICE custody since October, the start of the federal government's fiscal year, already surpassing 2004's toll of 28, the previous record, according to government data.

However bad you think it is, you know that, under this fascist regime, the truth is so much worse

No Half Measures

And Then One Day You Find, Ten Years Have Got Behind You.

No one told you when to run. 

You missed the starting gun.

Burn The Lifeboats

I Used to Be Your Favorite Drunk

\

Good for one more laugh

Then we both ran out of luck

Luck was all we ever had...

Burn The Lifeboats

The Atlantic Lied To You

The 7,000 words of meandering TL;DR Both Siderism that The Atlantic paid David Brooks to write is actually just three David Brooks New York Times, "The Extremes on Both Sides" columns in a trench coat.

Once again Brooks has divided the human universe into "traditionalists" and "progressives", who are both a little bit right and both equally wrong.  Example:

...to contend successfully with the traditionalists’ effects on our politics and culture, we also need to recognize that elements of their worldview are correct. But which parts are correct, and which are completely off the rails?

And, as always, Brooks offers up a Third Way out of the artificial and reductive binary human universe he has invented: a sorta forward-leaning revival of tradition within modernity.

It's really nothing more than that, bloated up to 7,000 words.

Some scientists have theorized that the reason David Brooks has been unwilling to write anything other than variations on "Both Sides Do It" for the last quarter of a century is that he was traumatized by this terrible season three episode of Star Trek TOS at a tender age -- 

-- and that, in order to temporarily exorcise that trauma, he enacts and externalizes it every time he sits down to write.  

Others, who are less charitable, think that Mr. Brooks figured out early on that the American political, academic and corporate elite will never tire of having their favorite cliche Beltway fairy tale endlessly repackaged and repeated back to them.  And that dedicating his professional life to doing that one thing was the key to winning the devotion of those elites, and a a license to print money.

 

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 986: AmeriKKKan Gothic

"Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they was just asking for trouble."  --  Peter Clemenza, The Godfather

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Trump The Uniter

I Am The Liberal Media