I’m a bit focused on real life in red states, versus whatever was peddled by the East Coast media dipping in and out of some rural areas. The story of the struggles of a Wyoming abortion clinic that I posted about yesterday is one example. Here’s a report from Jason Provencio, who lives in Idaho:
Idaho is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. We have the beauty of the outdoors all around us. We have four seasons of mostly wonderful weather. And we have a BIG problem with racism, bigotry, sexism, and homophobia.
You see, Idaho is controlled by religion. We have a large population of Mormon citizens. Many of the members of this religious organization are politicians, business owners, and wealthy or well-off people. Think of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale, but not quite that fucked up. Yet.
We also have a large percentage of our population that are conservative Christians. Most of which are in name only. Many of them are the biggest racist, bigoted, hateful hypocrites you could imagine. Some would love to see a Gilead-type world here in Idaho. We’re headed that way, as a second Trump term is about to begin in January.
He details things like swastikas on an Anne Frank memorial in Boise, a pride flag ripped down so violently that the flagpole’s screws were bent, and so forth. Jason is a prolific and interesting writer, so subscribe to his Substack if you’re so inclined.
Anyway, in general the sanewashing of rural hatred is one of the biggest disservices done by East Coast media. There is a deep and abiding streak of bigotry and hate in rural America that isn’t well-covered, probably for a few reasons. First, it exposes the reporters to threats of violence. Second, it disrupts the narrative that we just need to listen to these people more closely in order to understand what they really want. Finally, it’s just uncouth, as Dave Karpf pointed out the other day. Yet, it exists.
CliosFanBoy
When my wife and I have to drive through really red, really rural areas, we make the same joke from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. “we are pilgrims in an unholy land.”
CliosFanBoy
Thanks, I subscribed to his Substack.
Ksmiami
It would only take one outbreak….
Elizabelle
That is one Red State American Offense Vehicle, right there.
different-church-lady
Now now, we’ll never win an election ever again if we even so much as think of them as deplorable.
John S.
It’s so nice that these snowflakes can retreat to their safe spaces in red state America. Because a truck like that is likely to end up with 4 flat tires elsewhere.
Ten Bears
Eiron, Goddess of Irony, really had the runs when she flew by screaming: there shouldn’t even be an Idaho, private or otherwise. It makes no sense geographically nor bio-regionally, it was a carveout to the slave states, kissing the confederates’ asses …
gene108
Painting an honest picture of rural America will also paint a large part of white Americans in an unflattering light.
Starfish (she/her)
Now look critically into medical access in Idaho. After they banned abortion, a lot of their OB/GYNs fled so what we have for a large Mormon community with many children is a bunch of poorly trained home birth midwives with no medical qualifications. And this shift is killing moms, but don’t worry, Idaho is going to hide its mortality stats like other states with blood on their hands.
Doug R
Back in the before times when we used to visit Silverwood, we noticed how religilous everything was. The passport thing was a real PITA and after Trump was “selected” the FIRST time, we have not crossed the border.
I remember one of our visits being around Katrina time-Fox “News” was on in the lobby/breakfast room of our hotel, but when no one else was there I slipped it over to CNN, no one noticed by the time I checked in an hour or so.
Tim C
As someone who lived in Eastern Oregon for a number of years, 100% this. Portland has it’s problems, but really, out in the sticks it’s prime face-eating leopards territory. An example of this is the “Greater Idaho” movement. I’m actually pro giving Eastern Oregon to Idaho as long as there can be an equal swap, say give St. Louis to Illinois or some other trade where an urban area doesn’t have to live under red-state domination. Yes I know this isn’t happening, and feel free to call me a “Great Big Dummy” for saying it.
hells littlest angel
You mean the heartland of real America?
Sadly, the joke’s on me. It may really be the heartland of real America. We’ll know for sure in a few years.
Bulgakov
Rural America was lost when media consolidation was allowed and conservatives started buying up all of the small town local radio stations. If you travel outside of major media markets in Kansas or Missouri you are fed a radio diet of religious nuts, right wing nuts or retro rock on the AM dial (and lots of FM stations as well) controlled by “Con”servative media corporations. There is no moderate or liberal messaging in these information deserts. Republicanism is the predominant media message across rural America 24/7/365.
Bill Arnold
@John S.:
No need to slash tires; a “Valve Core Removal Tool”, and one can tape the cores to the windshield if one is feeling nice. (Faster if one spins it with a cordless screwdriver or small electric drill, though.)
O. Felix Culpa
@Bulgakov: All true. And, people didn’t have to listen to that bilge. They could have punched the off button and let the Almighty Invisible Hand figure out that there was no market for hate radio and come up with something else. Trouble is, people gobbled that stuff up, and so more and more was produced. It fed and nurtured the hatreds that were already there.
Soprano2
@gene108: This, 1,000%. Somehow it’s OK to detail the problems of the city, but verboten to talk about the problems of rural America. This is why, “rural” means “white”, and those are “hard-working real Americans”, dammit, how dare you criticize them. 🙄🙄🙄 I live among them.
Soonergrunt
Just to give you all some perspective on Idaho– yes, the Mormons run most of the show up there.
I know more than one Mormon on both sides of the political aisle here in Utah, and they tend to think the ones up in Idaho are crazy and extreme.
Starfish (she/her)
Some enterprising Etsy seller needs to create a “Defacing my truck to own the libs” bumper sticker for when people see ugly trucks like this in public.
bluefoot
A few years ago I went to visit a friend in Indiana and she insisted on making the hour plus drive to pick me up at Indy. She later told me she did NOT want me, a brown woman, making that drive alone, or even on a bus. She also said the safest roads for PoC were not the roads google or Waze would take you on…
I also have to say the hate isn’t confined to rural America. I’ve been the subject of racist physical violence in Boston and its immediate surrounds. That doesn’t even include the outer ring suburbs. I’ve seen cops with visible white supremacist tattoos. I’ve seen bystanders watch with glee as a minority (POC, LGBTQ+, woman) was threatened with violence.
There is a problem with sanewashing hatred in general. But I dont know what to do about it – so many people want to revel in their hatred and inflict fear and suffering on others.
Steve LaBonne
How much better the world could be if we saw the divine (a concept I am able to work with as a metaphor) in each of us, in all living things, in the earth itself, whereas the kind of religion that conceives of God as the emperor above the clouds licenses every kind of cruelty and oppression. (This happens to have been the topic of the service at my church this morning.)
Chief Oshkosh
@Ten Bears: If only we had let Sherman entirely off the leash, so much would’ve been avoided…
Steve LaBonne
@bluefoot: Boston has always been a VERY racist city.
Starfish (she/her)
@Starfish (she/her): I have no life. I created the bumper sticker.
trollhattan
Just want to note blacking out the license # such as above is counterproductive.
Chief Oshkosh
@Steve LaBonne: it’s all the feckin’ Irish…
John S.
@Bill Arnold:
That’s brilliant. And no property damage!
trollhattan
Thing we knew would happen, happened.
Bit of egg on Vlad’s mug, but he’ll get over it.
bluefoot
@Steve LaBonne: Yep. It’s gotten better in the time I’ve lived here, but it’s still pretty damn racist. I try to take hope that it had improved but I’m already seeing differences for the worse since the election.
btw: I wanted to thank you for supporting me in a thread a couple weeks back. I noped out when it became clear people were (intentionally or not) misconstruing what I said. I meant to come back late in the thread to thank you for engaging w what I actually said but I realized I needed a break from here.
Steve LaBonne
@Chief Oshkosh: Thank the FSM none of my many Irish relatives are like that. Fuck assholes like Steve Bannon. Our ancestors were colonized people (and then unwelcome immigrants), you numbskull.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Let’s be fair. There’s nothing wrong with that truck that couldn’t be fixed by three or four passes through a car crusher.
John S.
@bluefoot:
I got jumped by a group of good ol’ boys back in the 90s because they saw the Star of David I used to wear. And this was in liberal South Florida.
It’s truly amazing how deep the rot extends in this country.
Steve LaBonne
@bluefoot: I don’t remember what that was about (memory these days is kind of a theoretical concept), but you’re welcome.
Steve LaBonne
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: It has value as a rolling example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
We have a family friend’s daughter who did her healthcare administrator training at a Boise hospital. She said the racism was so bad she quit and refuses to go back to Idaho. One thing she said was since she’s brown people at the hospital would often assume she was in housekeeping.
WTFGhost
Time was, people would describe the war of southern rebellion, to preserve chattel slavery, as “The War Between The States,” rather than the “Civil War” (which suggests “internal”, i.e., no secession had occurred).
Maybe it’s time to call it “the war to preserve the rights of Southerners to rape Black babies, if’n they happened to be child molesters.”
I mean, they are roughly the same thing, but, the second helps highlight why slavery was so completely, unthinkably, wrong.
John S.
@Mai Naem mobile ¹:
My sleep doctor told me the same thing a few weeks ago. Did his residency in Idaho, and couldn’t wait to leave for Washington for the sake of his family.
He’s a Pakistani Muslim.
WTFGhost
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: Old joke, is, someone asks a woman (lawyer) to fix coffee; she comes back, with coffee, and hands over a bill for $750, her consulting rate.
It’s a shame it doesn’t work where it’s really needed, especially if it’s a Black or Hispanic receptionist told to make coffee, but given freedom to bill at lawyer/doctor rates for “consulting” when given such orders. Or, obviously, a doctor asked to go fetch “the doctor,” or otherwise treated as less than human.
Soprano2
@Soonergrunt: Read the book “Educated” to see how crazy they can be.
ChrisSherbak
As a side topic, there is a TT creator (ya, well, so much interesting stuff, to me, is happening on TT) that is asking the (somewhat) reasonable question: if the GOP is so great on economics, why are all the bottom GDP/income states run by Republicans. (Also: why are they all net federal money TAKERS?) MUCH sturm und drang is erupting over it. White rage (who’s the snowflake again?) over this is following on the heels of various FAFO ‘cutting off’ of friends and family over the election AND the resulting “oh you’re not a -sshole (mostly) but supporting one in office rubs off. Just don’t have the energy to deal with your BS anymore.” Wedge it “don’t ask me to feel sorry about a guy who routinely cuts off medical care getting gunned down.” Finally, as to the last wrt the $10k ‘bounty’ “That won’t even cover my deductible…” Ouch. Are we seeing a rise of Consciousness 4? (obscure Boomer reference to “Greening of America.”)
BellyCat
@Starfish (she/her): IIRC, This American Life interviewed one of the few remaining obgyn docs (a woman) and it was bleak. She wanted to stay and defend women’s right to health care. I seem to recall an update that she eventually fled as well?
Episode from at least a year or two ago?
bluefoot
@WTFGhost: I started using the term that was used on Coates’ blog: The War of Treason in Defense of Slavery.
@John S.: I believe it. The very first time I heard the phrase, “Jew them down” in negotitation was here in Boston. By a head of finance at a company, in a professional setting. Wtaf?!? If it’s like that in a professional setting, at work, I can only imagine what this guy was like in his off time.
Kayla Rudbek
@Chief Oshkosh: as I said over on Bluesky,we needed to do de-Confederation after the war like we did denazification after WW2. Hanging every man above the rank of corporal in the Confederate army would have been a damned good start. As my dad used to quote before I lost him to Fox, “treason never prospers, and the reason is that if it prospers, none dare call it treason” (although the one bright spot is that he still wants to dig out his class A uniform and go to Ukraine to try the Russians for war crimes)
Ramalama
@bluefoot: I knew a black woman who got harassed constantly while living in Brookline, Mass, an incredibly tony neighborhood near Boston. It’s not really a suburb. But it’s not an actual hood like JP or the other hooligans. She opted out of there not long after moving in.
So, yeah.
Ramalama
@bluefoot: Seems like…
… there should be an app for that
Steve LaBonne
@bluefoot: Long ago when I was a biology postdoc, a Jewish fellow postdoc had just finished negotiating a price on a piece of lab equipment. He said “I Presbyterianed them down”.
bluefoot
@Ramalama: I’ve been thinking about that. Data collection in order to create a reliable app sp people would be safer would be challenging. But I think we’re going to be back into Green Book territory.
bluefoot
@Steve LaBonne: I don’t know how to put a laugh emoji here…
Starfish
@Ramalama: Boston is incredibly racist.
Captain C
@Ramalama: It could be called the Green Book.
Kayla Rudbek
@WTFGhost: I have been playing around with plot bunnies about human cloning ever since I started reading the Vorkosigan saga (the series was ongoing while I was attending a Jesuit law school, unfortunately I didn’t take any bioethics classes during that) and Bujold didn’t go nearly far enough with all the horrors that could result from it, as she made the worst villains businessmen (Jackson’s Hole) instead of religious and racial fanatics. The Cetagandans I would guess are supposed to be genetic/eugenics villains but they have a veneer of cool and inclusivity and she treats them like the White Northerners did the White Southerners after the Civil War in my opinion, instead of treating them like post-WW2 Europeans would have regarded the Nazis.
I could very easily see modern Christian/Catholic fundamentalism deciding that you have to be a body birth natural conception product in order to have human rights, and excluding human clones, IVF babies, or children born from a uterine replicator and making them perpetual slaves and claiming that they were soulless and had no human rights. I keep on playing around with the idea of the Union of Civilized Societies versus the neo-Confederacy only on an interplanetary scale instead of a continent-wide scale.
Eric Flint did a better job with slavery, genetic engineering, and religious fanaticism than Bujold did when he started writing the Honor Harrington books with David Weber.
Betty
@gene108: This is so true. Too many people are unwilling to face the uncomfortable truth about white America, especially rural white America. My sister lives in a deep red area of PA and told me as soon as Harris was nominated that she would get no votes in that area. She told off a few acquaintances for nasty Facebook posts and then just quit Facebook.
Betty
@WTFGhost: I recently saw it referred to as the rebellion. That is an accurate description.
Geminid
@WTFGhost: My understanding is that Southerners called the Civil War “The War Between the States” and everyone else called it “the Civil War” or “the Rebellion.”
Starfish (she/her)
@Geminid: It really depends on when and where. Some folks I know had incredibly progressive history teachers in the South.
Starfish (she/her)
With the fall of Syria’s government, discussions about the whereabouts of Austin Tice have begun again.
Booger
@Ramalama: Yeah, digital “green books.” SMDH.
Bill Arnold
@WTFGhost:
It was officially “The War of the Rebellion”. Congress published a many-volume history of the war with that name, in the 1890s/very early 1900s.
(I grew up with a set filling a large bookcase, from my great grandfather. Project Gutenberg has a set; seems to be 128 volumes.)
I have also heard it called “The Treasonous Slaveholder’s Rebellion”. Which is accurate and to the point.
trollhattan
@Starfish (she/her):
Friend raised in Tennessee was taught “The Wo-wah of Nawthen Aggression” in school.
CliosFanBoy
@trollhattan:
Or, for genteel Southern ladies of a certain age, “The Late Unpleasantness.”
Starfish (she/her)
@trollhattan: How old is this friend?
Like if they are of the age of people who yell “bring back cursive” on Facebook, is that relevant to modern education? I am sure there are some people calling it the “war of northern aggression,” but are we discussing this to sneer at southerners or improve education there?
Chris
Part of the infuriating thing about those NYT diner interviews is that you know those interviewers are getting an absolute earful of racism, misogyny, transphobia and homophobia. And yet every fucking time they choose to clean it up into “these strongly traditional people, whose economies have been decimated, are very upset at what they see as a distant and high handed Washington politicians…” They know goddamn well what they’re dealing with, and they intentionally sweep it all under the carpet.
Chris
@CliosFanBoy:
I used to live just up the street from the hotel where CPAC had its annual rallies. One time I went in and walked through out of sheer curiosity, but I did it with my earphones visibly in, because I didn’t particularly want to be engaged in conversation. The song I had on the entire time was the Nazi rally song from that scene in the movie; seemed appropriate.
(This was 2010. A lot of people gravitated to the idea that the GOP was a fascist party with Trump. Not me; for me it was the teabaggers. Though other people suggest even earlier dates).
trollhattan
@Starfish (she/her):
“Improving education” seems prosaic compared to defending public education in the face of eliminating it and shifting public funds to charter schools, especially religious ones, but maybe that’s just my take.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Tim C: I would love for St. Louis to be part of Illinois.
Chris
@Kayla Rudbek:
Eric Flint of 1632?
I never could get into Honor Harrington. Mostly just the style, but I did read one book, and I’d be lying if I said one of the reasons I didn’t have much interest was seeing the premise “the enemy is Revolutionary France, and the reason they’re so aggressively expansionist is that they keep having to find other people’s resources to feed their out of control welfare state!” and thinking “I read way too much Tom Clancy as a teen, I feel no need to read Shittier Tom Clancy In Space.”
Flint had better politics, which might go some way towards persuading me to read his take on the same universe, though.
Kayla Rudbek
@Chris: yes, Eric Flint of 1632. Start with Crown of Slaves as the first of the subseries, I think. Flint provided much needed balance and better enemies for the series as a whole (Masada as the religious fanaticism, Mesa as the business enslavers, we still need a SF series combining both although maybe that’s Charlie Stross’ Laundry Files) and the slave trade was going on during the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon was actually in favor of slavery and punishing Haiti if I recall correctly, so Flint having a master’s in African history was much needed knowledge and background.
Geminid
@Starfish (she/her): A friend who went to high school in Macon, Georgia on the 1960s told me about his high school history teacher’s lament:
Which is pretty funny if you know much about the siege of Vicksburg.
My friend said the teacher kept an ashtray in a bottom desk drawer. Every now and then he’d lean down and take a puff off a cigarette and then sit back up and resume teaching.
Tony G
@O. Felix Culpa: That’s very true. Nobody is being forced at gunpoint to listen to that propaganda. Also: Right-wing talk radio is popular throughout the country, not only in rural areas. The New York City radio station WABC-AM (which had been a top-forty station back when I was a kid) has had a lineup of 100% right-wing propaganda since the mid-eighties. There are plenty of people in the New York City Metropolitan area who love listening to that stuff 24×7. The main difference is that in the NYC area there are plenty of alternatives to that.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Bulgakov: The only non-right wing media on the radio in most of rural America is NPR. Things would be worse without it.
coin operated
Born in Eastern Washington and spent many a weekend in the Idaho panhandle. Didn’t meet a single PoC until high school. Grew up telling n****r jokes with little to no pushback from most adults in my parent’s social circle. This was 50+ years ago…nothing has changed in that area.
Oregon is no better. the I-5 corridor from Portland to Eugene is liberal…the rest of the state is as redneck as Arkansas.
Joined the Army in my early 20s. Every supervisor I had was a PoC…I got ‘woke’ real quick.
Chris
@Kayla Rudbek:
Yeah, Napoleon actually reinstated slavery after the First Republic abolished it.
Thanks, I may check out his Honorverse books.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chief Oshkosh:
Sherman never marched thru a lot of the Confederacy and I think history shows that was a regrettable oversight…or multi-decade, strategic miscalculation.
RaflW
@mistermix: “it disrupts the narrative that we just need to listen to these people more closely in order to understand what they really want” also, too, if we want to hear these people (or their proxies) they’re all yelling nonstop on Xitter. There is no shortage of information about what these people want.
But somehow Bsky is the echo chamber. It’s transparent bullshit and a bunch of sour grapes from all the people who’ve recently discovered that owning the libs isn’t much fun when libs eyeballs have all departed the venue.
Glidwrith
Forty years ago, my parents moved to Boise and were having a house built. Not one contractor would listen to what my mother would say for decisions about the house, always needing my father on the phone for confirmation. To his credit, he started yelling at them and said what she said goes.
Yes, they were all Mormons and it sounds like it hasn’t changed.
Martin
@Bill Arnold: Similarly a pebble under the valve cap creates a lot of inconvenience with no damage.
Rand Careaga
A friend of mine worked for the US Forest Service as a senior manager in the eighties. He recounted an exchange he had with a colleague who was a Mormon bishop in Rexburg, and who mistook my chum for a co-religionist: “Yeah, we had a Gentile family move in, but we run ’em out of town.”
Life is very different there “behind the Zion Curtain.”
Paul in KY
@Kayla Rudbek: I would have gone with Colonel or above, at the least.
Paul in KY
@Geminid: Up in KY in the 60s, a teacher could openly smoke in class. The students had to go out to the ‘smoking barrel’.