Forget the deplorables. What we have here is the REAL threat to our Democracy. Which is, drumroll please, the rage of the white rural voters.

No, I’m not kidding. That’s according to two very VERY liberal writers (one of whom used to write for the Washington Post. Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman wrote a book titled: “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” Isn’t that such a darling title? Well, Paul wrote an op-ed for MSNBC in which he informs us that the real danger to this country is because of the rage embedded into the psyche of the WHITE rural voters. 

At the same time, polls show that rural whites not only are more likely to express racism, xenophobia and conspiracism than Americans who live elsewhere, their commitment to the American model of democracy is increasingly tenuous. Of course, that doesn’t apply to all rural whites, and plenty of Americans in suburbs and cities share those views. But rural whites are particularly important because of the unusual political power they wield.

No one understands that better than Trump. The election denialism at the center of his candidacy — both the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and the claim that if he loses again it will only be because of fraud — finds a particularly receptive audience among rural voters. A 2021 Public Religion Research Institute poll, for instance, found that 22% of those who lived in cities said the 2020 election was stolen, compared to 30% of suburbanites — and 47% of rural respondents.

 What Schaller and Waldman are saying is echoed by many liberals. For example:

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.

Because they used data in their book to make their case, this must mean it’s true that those of us who live in, or grew up in rural areas as I did, and have the audacity to be WHITE, are the very real threat to our Democracy. The two authors appeared on MSNBC last week and you REALLY need to watch, but also keep throwable things out of reach. 

Did you catch all that? To recap, here’s how a white rural voter is described as by these two in that interview and their book:

He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.

Well, these two have certainly ripped their masks off and thrown them gleefully into the bonfire. As Matt Taibi explains, how DARE rural voters have a voice in this country! How dare we question our betters??!!

The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.

The media and Democrats have spent the last 9 years since Trump announced his first run as President telling Americans that anyone who questions them is wrong. We are the deplorables for pointing out Hillary’s hypocrisy and breaking the laws. We are the ones full of rage when we point out that the lockdowns were harming our kids, that masks don’t and never did work, and that January 6 didn’t cause billions in damage. That was reserved for the cretins who rampaged around the country during the George Floyd riots in 2020.

Liberals like Waldman and Schaller are gleefully blaming the white rural voters for everything that is wrong in this country. Our values make US the deplorables and baddies, not them. It’s backwards that we have actually read the Constitution and want our government to adhere to it instead of bypassing it like the Democrats want to do. We are full of rage because our values tell us that pronouns are asinine and the trans agenda is actually harmful to kids (especially girls) and families.

The correct terminology is female, girl, woman.

— Nina Bookout (@NDBook96) March 1, 2024

Desiring border security and refusing to house criminal illegal immigrants makes us contemptible in their eyes.

“I’m sorry about your daughter but statistically speaking she was more likely to meet this end at the hands of an American citizen”

They really don’t realize what it sounds like, do they? https://t.co/ols2tNOErB

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) March 2, 2024

We want our military to be able to FIGHT for this country, not spend time recruiting illegal immigrants, worrying about pronouns, promoting transgenders, or leaving Americans behind. To point out that DEI is harmful, discriminatory, tramples on free speech, and racist is very presumptuous of us. 

2/ These emails come from a mandatory class called "Structural Racism and Health Equity." UCLA med students are told to read about wars of “Indigenous resistance” – in which Native Americans killed thousands of white people – to “imagine what liberation could look like." pic.twitter.com/0E9RWS7C5w

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 1, 2024

According to liberals and these two authors, all of that makes us rural white voters so filled with rage, that it is WE who are the threat to Democracy. Never mind their cherry-picked data, the evidence says otherwise.