Christy Ratliff is sitting in a folding chair in a public school gym in Grundy, Virginia, waiting for her number to be called. She arrived at 4 a.m. on this October Saturday to secure her position in line to have eight teeth pulled. Genetic gum disease, she explains, has left most of them rotten or broken. She hooks a finger to pull down her lip and show me gruesome damage—the kind most dentists see only in textbooks.
Ratliff is 29 years old.
Grundy, the seat of Buchanan County, sits deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia. This weekend, it’s hosting a free clinic courtesy of Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders, but for places in the United States where the health outcomes are as grim as those in many developing countries. RAM founder Stan Brock once suggested that because Grundy is so inaccessible, his volunteers should literally parachute into town, as he once did while working in rural Africa.
Despite all the faith these locals have put in Trump, his second term is threatening their precarious existence. Few places in America are as reliant on the federal government. According to a recent study, 45 percent of the personal income of Buchanan County residents comes from Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and government disability programs. Federal dollars also account for about 15 percent of the county budget, subsidizing nearly every aspect of local life—education, economic development, disaster recovery, housing, sewer infrastructure. And Trump has succeeded in jeopardizing or eliminating nearly all of it.
“We live in a remote part of the world,” the driver says, declining to give his name. He’s here for denture work because Bradshaw has no dentist. He grew up in a holler, and like generations of his people, worked in the coal industry, including once for a company owned by Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.)—until his paychecks bounced, a chronic problem at Justice’s mines. Now he works in logging. He has no health insurance, he says. Like 80 percent of McDowell County’s voters, he cast his ballot for Trump: “He’s kicking ass and taking names. He’s cleaning up the gangs. He’s doing awesome with the immigrants, too.”
I hear ya, and I so get it. But look, these people aren’t trying to be evil or whatever. They’re getting crushed out of existence and grasping for anything familiar. Stupidly, poorly, but some of it’s understandable.
It’s a shame all the way around. Places like these are home to racist bullies, jesus freaks, gravy seals and crooked good ol’ boys, but they’re also home to people just literally trying to feed their family and be a good person as best as they know how.
If you want to condemn everyone, you have to wrong some innocents. I think we all know that Fox News and the republican party have created this self-defeating dystopia, but it’s not all bad and it can definitely be good.
The article is long but there’s lots of examples.
I grew up in Appalachia.
These people do not have bad hearts insofar as they’re not sociopaths. They’re very capable of kindness and love, even towards total strangers.
But they bear a set of bizarre values that absolutely ends up with them trying to be, by our standards, evil.
If someone is trying to kill me, I am going to defend myself and I am not going to feel bad if in that defense they meet their demise.
These people, for whatever the reason may be, are trying to kill me and people I care about. And it may be different where you are, but the ones around where I live hate, genuinely hate anyone that disagrees with their way of life and they chant for their death.
So, fuck these people, fuck all of them even the ones that are being duped or are being taken advantage of - because as long as they exist they will continue to contribute to the problem.
I feel bad if some chickens have to be culled due to disease. I love animals. But I recognize they still need to be culled.
So do these people.
Oh you’re too good to compare them to rats, eh. How very.
I disagree whole heartedly and I’d point to both this article and the countless examples of these human chodes seal clapping and cheering along the murder of innocent civilians by the ICE gestapo as just one example.
These people have reached a point to where they are either outright denying Trump’s child rape and going all g with the Epstein cover up, or outright doing everything they can to justify child rape and act like its no big deal since Trump does it.
This pattern repeats with literally all evils their god-emporer does. What the left needs to realize is we have long surpassed the point where MAGA malice and MAGA ignorance has become the same exact thing.
There is zero excuse whatsoever. There is nothing to understand from their perspectives. The dog whistles have become bull horns. They are, quite simply, a hostile enemy of democracy and human rights. And their legacy will only ever remain the colossal ocean of blood they left behind.
And what you should understand is the “people just literally trying to feed their family and be a good person as best as they know how.” are objectively not the Trumpers. They simply are not.
These people don’t continue to worship Trump because they’re desperate. They do it because they believe in his power. They believe in his genocide of brown people. They believe in his crusade against lgbtq+ people. And they believe in his war on everyone who isn’t a white Christian man.
We need to stop pretending these people have good intentions. Good intentions don’t compromise basic morality and fundamental critical thinking skills. Hate does. Greed does. Hostility does. Malice does.
This is fundamentally untrue when it comes to the MAGA cult. They are irrefutably supporting the billionaire cabal of child rape Trump and Epstein both ran. They are objectively supporting the genocide of racial minorities, the lgbtq+ crowd, Palestinians, and so many more.
They’re praising the ICE Gestapo conducting a domestic genocide and killing any and all dissidents. They’re running to their keyboards, families, neighbors and coworkers to scream the exact bullshit propaganda Trump feeds them to justify such atrocities.
I need you to take a moment to realize you’re genuinely, and unreasonably trying to scrape up some nuance… of Nazism.
Here’s some advice to save you time: there is ZERO nuance to Nazism. All Nazis are bastards. All Nazis are enemies. Because all Nazis ultimately want to see you, everyone you love and everyone you care for killed.
Its simply just reality.
There’s nothing good about Nazism or Nazis. Full stop, plain and simple.
Bravo homie. I hope you’re not using* AI because this comment is the shit.
Not AI. You can tell because I keep making typos on my phone keyboard.
Hate all you want, we have to find a way to show them what’s actually happening.
Because I disagree they know shit about Gaza or USAID or DOGE and we want H4A so how are we gonna get there when they keep voting in whoever’s on tv?
They don’t know shit about those things because they discard any information that makes them uncomfortably while privileging any information that affirms their pre-existing position or prejudices. I pride myself that I’m pretty good at arguing with people, and IRL, I tend to take a much softer tone because I have to deal with these fucks day-in and day-out. There’s no block function in meatworld if I find them too tedious. And let me tell you - you can lay it out in terms they absolutely understand, and in a week, a day, an hour, they will revert to their prior position. They don’t ‘forget’ what was said, they disregard it. “Well, it’s just my opinion. Who knows what’s true anyway? There’s a lot of lies on both sides.”
Their positions are not predicated on their knowledge, nor are they interested in retaining knowledge that contradicts their positions.
Fucked if I know. Really wish that ‘demographic destiny’ bullshit peddled in the late 2000s worked out better.
Honestly, I think that’s partly why the conservatives are all having a collective freakout and back someone like Pedonald.
Wish I had that kind of optimism anymore.
Heh, I’m not sure I’d call it optimism. I’m pretty sure a lot of the reactionary voters have at least some dim awareness that adherence to xtianity has been falling off a cliff for many years, and that America is increasingly less white, more accepting of LGBTQ, etc…
In fact, I seem to recall one of their thought leaders explicitly saying that Europe is increasingly more fascist-friendly in certain countries because more refugees were admitted.
I’ve definitely have seen online trolls on various platforms actively hoping to see Republicans win here for the same reasons, and then put policies into place that would actively reverse such things - close the borders to all but whites, revoke gay marriage, crush trans, crush non-xtians, and deport anyone non-white (or worse). I’ve seen some of them champion things like repealing Virginia v. Loving and sending out government goons to round up “race traitors” for murder.
Republicans really do feel entitled to say some of the very worst things online, that’s for sure. Especially after Pedonald “won” the first time. As an example, I saw some of the very worst of this kind of thing on Diaspora. I cannot imagine dipping into something like 4chan at that time, Jesus.
It’s all out there in the open. Its not that they don’t see this information because its not reaching them. It’s because they don’t want to see it.
Don’t get me wrong, we should still spam-fuck it to them, but don’t expect much in the way of rescuing any of them from.the cult.
It doesn’t matter, does it?
They didn’t know shit about Iran did they? Yet they all scrambled to justify the failed and illegal bombing of Iran after it happened.
They didn’t know shit about Venezuela, did they? Yet suddenly they’re scrambling to support regime change war in Venezuela and raping the country of its oil.
They didn’t support the idea of the feds publicly executing someone for exercising their 2nd Amendment rights, did they. Yet they’re all foaming at the mouth to justify Alex Pretti’s murder and are blaming him having a gun.
You need to understand that it doesn’t matter, not even in the slightest, what you expose to these Nazi fucks. They will change every position they have to defend Trump and his atrocities.
Latest example: everything to do with Epstein and Trump raping children coming to light. Suddenly they’re all pro-child rape now.
It’s both. “Fox News desert” is totally a thing.
It so does.
My point is even when you do broadcast the truth and all evidence to these Nazi pieces of shit, they immediately reject it and double down. It doesn’t matter how isolated they may be in theory. The moment that isolation ends, they double down. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.
And no, it actually doesn’t matter whatsoever, for that reason.
MAGA ignorance and MAGA malice are the same.