Right as Jason Aldean’s recent song raised controversy, I happened to go on a cross-country road trip from my current Jersey home to my small-town hometown in Nebraska. I spent a lot of my trip thinking about the realities of small-town life versus the popular culture renditions. American popular culture either portrays them as uncomplicated fonts of virtue, or as bigoted hellholes. Contra Aldean’s notion that small towns are harbors of peaceful living and virtue, the last time I visited somebody got murdered. This time around, I witnessed the same kind of anti-social behavior at the movies (including letting a kid play a game on their device with the volume up!) that I see in New Jersey. On the other side, I also hung out with an old friend who has moved back from Los Angeles with his husband, and is very happy with this decision. Small towns are more far more complex than most people think.
That is a cheap shot about the AMC theatres and the alleged suppression of movie showings about The Sound of Freedom. It has not been established (and it would be very difficult to show barring internal email leaks which would be unlikely for something so inconsequential as this) that the movie was suppressed at all. Your business gotcha that it was the result of a business ploy is just as dumb as the "Fox-MAGA" paranoid theory that a film about child trafficking is being suppressed. MAGA is a meaningless term of abuse and your constant raising of this bogeyman diminishes your otherwise refreshingly detailed travelogue to the undiversified zoo.
Instead, why not ask why someone might speculate they are being lied to? Is it possible that on so many important topics they know they are being lied to? These people know that FOX news is lying to them all the time. They see that their favorite anchor, Tucker Carlson, was exposing some of those lies—around COVID, the war in Ukraine, the phony prosecutions of Trump and the Russian hoax, the suppression of possible explanations of all these and many more— and then lost his job. You ignore these possible answers. To say nothing about the devastation following COVID, the loneliness, the small businesses decimated, following the 40 years of deindustrialization. Is there no method to their madness. All you can do is blame FOX and the Gregor Samsa maggot man? This is Frumkeit in your bubble?
Sigh. If you read what I wrote, my point was that not every small town is the same. My small town does not fit the stereotype of a deindustrialized hellhole. In fact, factories in town are advertising high wages because there is a labor shortage! The people I talked to who are repeating conservative conspiracy theories are very comfortable middle class people. The system works for them! They are not the dispossessed, but the opposite! They aren't lonely, they are very much connected to community, and that community likes to share the fever swamp stuff they hear on Fox.
You are illustrating how discourse based in vague generalities is so tiresome. I am looking at specific people in a specific place that I know very well. Also, trying to call "MAGA" a term of abuse is pretty funny. (I thought your initial reply was a parody.)
Trust me, the people I talk to back at home believe the lies they get from Tucker completely. They literally believe they are in a world being fought over by angels and demons, it does not take much for them to think that The Sound of Freedom was being intentionally supressed.The past few years have illustrated to me that propaganda works, and that people primed to believe certain lies will believe them when they are put to them attractively.
That is a cheap shot about the AMC theatres and the alleged suppression of movie showings about The Sound of Freedom. It has not been established (and it would be very difficult to show barring internal email leaks which would be unlikely for something so inconsequential as this) that the movie was suppressed at all. Your business gotcha that it was the result of a business ploy is just as dumb as the "Fox-MAGA" paranoid theory that a film about child trafficking is being suppressed. MAGA is a meaningless term of abuse and your constant raising of this bogeyman diminishes your otherwise refreshingly detailed travelogue to the undiversified zoo.
Instead, why not ask why someone might speculate they are being lied to? Is it possible that on so many important topics they know they are being lied to? These people know that FOX news is lying to them all the time. They see that their favorite anchor, Tucker Carlson, was exposing some of those lies—around COVID, the war in Ukraine, the phony prosecutions of Trump and the Russian hoax, the suppression of possible explanations of all these and many more— and then lost his job. You ignore these possible answers. To say nothing about the devastation following COVID, the loneliness, the small businesses decimated, following the 40 years of deindustrialization. Is there no method to their madness. All you can do is blame FOX and the Gregor Samsa maggot man? This is Frumkeit in your bubble?
Sigh. If you read what I wrote, my point was that not every small town is the same. My small town does not fit the stereotype of a deindustrialized hellhole. In fact, factories in town are advertising high wages because there is a labor shortage! The people I talked to who are repeating conservative conspiracy theories are very comfortable middle class people. The system works for them! They are not the dispossessed, but the opposite! They aren't lonely, they are very much connected to community, and that community likes to share the fever swamp stuff they hear on Fox.
You are illustrating how discourse based in vague generalities is so tiresome. I am looking at specific people in a specific place that I know very well. Also, trying to call "MAGA" a term of abuse is pretty funny. (I thought your initial reply was a parody.)
Trust me, the people I talk to back at home believe the lies they get from Tucker completely. They literally believe they are in a world being fought over by angels and demons, it does not take much for them to think that The Sound of Freedom was being intentionally supressed.The past few years have illustrated to me that propaganda works, and that people primed to believe certain lies will believe them when they are put to them attractively.