My personal suggestion to for revitalizing rural areas:
Encourage businesses to allow remote work where feasible. That alone has driven a huge economic shift.
Encourage small business and shut up about how they’re less efficient. The market can and will figure it out. Dissing small business is about as popular as kicking puppies.
Stop targeting small farms, raising beef, etc. to combat global warming. This is an extremely sensitive cultural issue and it matters to more people than you might expect. Beef consumption is trending down on its own. Small farms are struggling enough already.
Stop elevating polemics on how awful rural people are. Fully 40% of rural residents still vote for Democrats. Why actively try to reduce that number? Paul Krugman might as well work for the RNC for the effect he is having.
Shut up about agglomeration. You do not need to force people to agglomerate when it’s beneficial. Businesses and individuals can figure out where they want to be. If a job is being done remote or outsourced, agglomeration pretty obviously was not key.
Do not treat regional accents or rural roots or rural living as code for bigotry. It isn’t. See Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, or heck, George Clooney who is from Kentucky.
YES. The war on remote work is anti-worker, harms family stability and the pointless commutes have sent emissions skyrocketing while straining infrastructure.
If you want to go further, pass a new office tax. State that any worker who could reasonably work remotely should be allowed to do so and that a mandatory RTO gets a $2,000 per employee monthly tax for each mandatory office day in a week. $10K per month per head tax charged to an employer for 5 day RTO. Give them 5 days a month in an office “for free.”
Remote work will become *mandatory* with such a policy.
Do some people have to be physically present somewhere because of proprietary equipment, or service delivery? Sure. Exempt those.
One of the best things we can do is decentralize prosperity. Why should a tiny handful of insanely overpriced metro areas get all of the economic activity and good jobs while the rest of the country languishes?
Incentivizing remote work and severely penalizing commutes/offices would go a long way towards doing that.
> Encourage businesses to allow remote work where feasible. That alone has driven a huge economic shift.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
> Stop elevating polemics on how awful rural people are. Fully 40% of rural residents still vote for Democrats. Why actively try to reduce that number? Paul Krugman might as well work for the RNC for the effect he is having.
> Do not treat regional accents or rural roots or rural living as code for bigotry. It isn’t. See Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, or heck, George Clooney who is from Kentucky.
Again agreed, and these are such stupid own goals for no benefit. At least with your other points, I can understand how reasonable people can disagree, but insulting and stereotyping people really is all downside for no upside.
> Shut up about agglomeration. You do not need to force people to agglomerate when it’s beneficial. Businesses and individuals can figure out where they want to be. If a job is being done remote or outsourced, agglomeration pretty obviously was not key.
> Encourage small business and shut up about how they’re less efficient. The market can and will figure it out. Dissing small business is about as popular as kicking puppies.
These are pretty niche items from the niche things you and I read. Small, wonky blogs should be free to make wonky arguments to their wonky audiences, and I don't see any evidence that these items have percolated into the general public's image of either the Bluesky activist class or the mainstream Democratic party.
> Stop targeting small farms, raising beef, etc. to combat global warming. This is an extremely sensitive cultural issue and it matters to more people than you might expect. Beef consumption is trending down on its own. Small farms are struggling enough already.
This gets to a bigger issue where activists will talk about a policy with the vision of sticking it to The Man and only The Man, but a significant number of people will either hear the same policy as targeting *them* and/or experience unintended consequences of said policy. So basically, I agree with you here as well, except to say that everyone who needs to hear your point will tell themselves they aren't the ones targeting small farms, and the point here should probably be for activists to pay attention to when their messaging/policies are not landing as intended and adjust accordingly.
Actually not, which is why I mentioned it. Matt Yglesias has repeatedly talked about the inefficiency of small business, to a degree I found rather shocking. Both Yglesias and Waldman promoted Grunwald’s book, We Are Eating the Earth, with, not joking, specific attacks on family farms and praise for industrial agriculture and confinement meat operations.
I understand Grundman’s argument, which is about use of land, and also see about a million holes in how it would actually play out. This includes that existing pasture is not going to be returned to forest in the East, but rather suburbs and hobby farms; existing pasture mostly wasn’t ever forest in the grassland main cattle raising areas; and that if you did rewild the Great Plains, it would surprisingly quickly revert to having about 60 million bison, which fart just as much methane as cattle.
No one deliberately rewilded black bears in the east, but we have them showing up in our back yards all over Virginia, including the DC suburbs. Bison already push out of national parks, but are ringed in by fences.
The post misses one piece of "dumb activist bullshit" about the redesigned logo. The redo also takes off the long tail of the K in cracker. Because a lot of really weird leftist racialists decided it was a dog whistle for the whip that plantation overseers wielded --and connecting it to the K was a wink toward the KKK. Really, not making this up. Just as you think dumb activist bullshitters cannot get any dumber, they do.
Stop being the party of fringe bad ideas birthed by academia and enabled by wealthy unfulfilled feminists. Once the globalist feminazis declared war on rust belt labor we were sunk. Union Labor in America puts blue collar men and women back to work and out of the entitlement till. The Party that used to be for labor is now for career students with worthless degrees in social sciences. They structure the entitlements to help them instead of “working families.” What was the back room of the Biden Administration thinking when they opened the border and looked the other way. Entitlements for immigrants turned a lot of labor democrats into Trump Supporters. The only democrats I ever meet anymore have lots of money, education and arrogant superiority.
"What was the back room of the Biden Administration thinking when they opened the border?" . . . they were thinking, "Oh, look, more government dependents who in their gratitude for the dole will vote D all their lives and unto their great-grandchildrens' lives . . . and also more humble gardeners/nannies who will tug their forelocks and whom we can pay in cash to avoid taxes."
"People like us fly flag X with orange colors. People like *them* fly flag Y with lots of stripes. We fly flag X. Entirely by coincidence, orange is good and stripes are bad. It's scientifically proven."
I think the main driver of allowing immigration was just that it's what people like us do, to show we're not like those other people. Also, we who are in power right now will stay in power forever.
This is the most moronic comment I've seen in a while. Obama had extremely tight immigration (remember the joke in Arrested Development?). So did Clinton, for god's sake.
Slavery didn't used to be what "good little democrats" advocated for.
They're counted in the census. That keeps Electoral college votes in California. I mean, this isn't rocket science.
And "illegal immigrants don't vote" is a fun thing when you don't actually check to see if you recognize who is voting. Or whether they're voting twice, or whether they filled in both the bubbles for Rump and Biden.
Remind me why it was a good idea to ban the election judge from watching the votes be counted? Oh, that's right, NOW we can't even get ANYONE, democrat or republican, to run for election judge. Wonder WHY?!?
This is perfectly said! Getting rid of the dumb culture stuff would be good… however do they understand why most people cannot stand this stuff? I think not … and I feel
that if the Dems regained power … here we go again - open up the border to everyone, etc
They may think they are so intelligent and they probably are in some sense. However intelligence without pragmatism and common sense … it’s not useful
I think the only way to stop "step[ping] on your balls" is with a particularly forceful candidate or candidates who call BS when faced with this crap. It won't be easy -- I can't think of anything I've read in the past few decades that used "white male" as anything but a shorthand for "evil".
Dividing people into groups with inherent group-based qualities seems to be second nature to liberals and progressives. I'm struggling to imagine a world where Democrats don't:
-- put up signs saying "...we believe in science ...." and then pretend boys can become girls
-- assume that everyone who votes R is a sexist or racist.
-- make people write performative DEI statements as part of job applications or self-reviews
This isn't made any easier by the fact that the current White House is actually inhabited by a senile old racist and sexist fool whose every whim is being indulged by the weak cowards in the Senate and House terrified of being primaried.
I don't think that'll be enough. We really need a worker-first approach. Anyone who works for a living should be able to afford a place to live, be able to care for ailing relatives and be able to weather a serious illness without worrying about going bankrupt. These are all things that we can do and that Republicans are fighting against.
Will that person even make it to a primary, much less win one though? There is no more saying one thing for the primary and shifting to the general, the receipts are out there for the public to see now.
Hard to tell. My guess is that the reason Biden won the primary in 2020 was that realists in the primary electorate figured a moderate would do best against DJT.
But what I suggested is more in aggressively moderate socially than Biden, so your question is a good one.
But I do think there is a large chunk of the electorate that simply doesn't like the Democrats view of everything through an identity lens. They vote on vibes, because serious policy analysis is harder.
Right, but that's not why Biden won the primary, and we were talking about what the D primary electorate would support.
But I am curious about what was the primary (sorry) reason you bailed from the Democrats. Because as annoying/stupid as some of the Democratic politicians' policies are, to me they pale in comparison with trying to destroy our research universities, scaring off foreign students or the bizarre tariff scheme where the tariff costs for GM to build a car in the US exceed the costs for Toyota to build a car in Japan and ship it to the US.
Primary reason: the ongoing crime against humanity of pediatric "gender affirming care", which is pure medical quackery that results in the surgical mutilation of over a thousand kids each and every year in the great country of ours, and the chemical sterilization of thousands more. This crime is fully supported, aided and abetted by the Democratic Party, which no way no how is the "party of science".
As for our research universities, I am a recently retired STEM professor at an R1 research university. My degrees are from an Ivy and Stanford. I was a Principal Investigator on NSF grants for 40 years. And I fully support what the Trump administration is doing to reign in the blatant racism and sexism that had taken over the federally funded research effort. It had become impossible to get research support from the NSF without claiming that the work would have "broader impacts" on DEI and making up complete nonsense about how this would happen. My university also required me to write loyalty oaths to DEI to be considered for a routine salary increase. And the pressure from our administration to make "diverse" faculty hires was intense. I used to think "affirmative action" was reasonable and appropriate, but I have changed my mind. The government has no business engaging in racial preferences.
Thanks! Interestingly, perhaps, I recently joined (and then retired 2 years later) one of the Magnificent 7 companies and noticed that for the first time I really had to fill in a "what I've done for DEI" section in my semi-annual reviews, which would have been especially important for promotions.
Fortunately, I was hired in at a level from which I had no reasonable prospect of getting a promotion so it didn't really matter to me, but I remember thinking that it was a good thing I wasn't going to be making my career there. I mean, the only things people really seemed to write for that section was either "I joined affinity group X," or extremely vague stuff about supporting DEI in "all my interactions." The former was probably unavailable to me and the latter was beyond my ability to spin BS.
Don't disagree with your point about gender affirming care for minors. Everything I've read says that for the vast, vast majority of treated children, it's a disaster medically and doesn't even help mental health outcomes. As most European countries' health departments have figured out.
But I still hate what Trump's doing to research universities, wind and solar deployments, and his corruption of the DoJ more. Pretty much everything he's doing is making the country weaker.
You're taking it as given that most Democrats just don't care about the cultural weirdness to stand in the way of the weirdos. But what if being a Democrat now means that you do care about the weirdness, in much the same way as being a Republican means that you're a MAGA Trump guy? Sure, the RINOs and the DINOs can bitch and complain all they want, but the truth is that mainstream political parties are either a cult of personality or a cult of weirdness.
Yet when I read comments on NYT articles about gender affirming care for minors, for example, the top 20 comments (in likes) will all be opposed to puberty blockers or x-sex hormones for minors.
My suspicion is that most Democratic pols are scared of the party's activists, just like most Republican pols are scared of Trumpists. My guess is that policy wonks will go for the Democratic position, since the Republicans these days are doing their best to destroy the country economically and militarily.
But a lot of people vote on gut feelings. They're probably not experts on whether Germany is likely to come to Ukraine's aid with soldiers, or whether Israel has any chance of living in peace with the Palestinians under military occupation. But when you tell them that white men are usually the problem with society, or that 100% of the gender pay gap is due to sexism and 0% due to statistical preferences, or that their tomboy girl might actually be a boy in a girl's body, well, now you've made their voting choice easy.
Most blue states have actually passed laws (with unanimous votes of Democrats in the state legislatures) that allow the State to remove a child from parents who do not "affirm" their kid's new "gender identity" (that they learned at public school from their teachers and the school-supported "gay straight alliance" club) and agree to medicalize it (that is, give the kid chemical castration drugs and mutilating surgeries).
As a parent, am I voting for those people ever again? Fuck no.
One set of laws that does this are the "trans state sanctuary laws" (google it) pioneered by California Senate Bill SB 107, enacted into law in 2022. You cannot trust any MSM descriptions of what these laws do, you have to read the actual text of the actual law.
From the SB 107 Bill Summary: "The bill would authorize a court to take temporary jurisdiction because a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care."
[Note that there is no exception if the reason is that the child's parents oppose it.]
(a) A court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is present in this state and the child has been abandoned or it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child, is subjected to, or threatened with, mistreatment or abuse, or because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care, as defined by Section 16010.2 of the Welfare and Institutions Code [definition quoted below].
[Note the use of "or" here; any one of these things is enough to trigger the law. Also note that inability of the child to obtain any form of health care OTHER THAN "gender affirming care" does NOT trigger the law.]
(b) If there is no previous child custody determination that is entitled to be enforced under this part and a child custody proceeding has not been commenced in a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive, a child custody determination made under this section remains in effect until an order is obtained from a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive. If a child custody proceeding has not been or is not commenced in a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive, a child custody determination made under this section becomes a final determination, if it so provides and this state becomes the home state of the child.
(b)(3)(A) “Gender affirming health care” means medically necessary health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient, and may include, but is not limited to, the following:
(i) Interventions to suppress the development of endogenous secondary sex characteristics.
(ii) Interventions to align the patient's appearance or physical body with the patient's gender identity.
(iii) Interventions to alleviate symptoms of clinically significant distress resulting from gender dysphoria, as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition.
(B) “Gender affirming mental health care” means mental health care or behavioral health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient, and may include, but is not limited to, developmentally appropriate exploration and integration of identity, reduction of distress, adaptive coping, and strategies to increase family acceptance.
I googled it. You're a fucking moron. What the above states is that the state can take temporary emergency jurisdiction if a trans kid is being abused (and no, that does not mean "denied gender affirming care")
I just quoted the actual text of the actual law. It plainly DOES allow a court to assume jurisdiction if a child has been denied "gender affirming care". No other condition is required; all those clauses in the text are separated by "or", not "and". So any one of them is a sufficient condition to trigger the law, and one of them is "child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care".
Any googled source that says otherwise is lying.
So who is the fucking moron here? Me, who can actually read the law? Or you, who apparently cannot?
Yes, a lot of Democrats do think that way. In comments in a liberal forum I made the mild suggestion that even if someone seriously thought it was an important “civil rights” issue to let boys cheat at girls’ sports (I put it more diplomatically there), it might be a good idea to drop the issue FOR NOW because obviously the public isn’t there “yet” since even 2/3 of D voters are against it. The agonized wailing could be heard from one end of the Acela corridor to the other. “Democrats are supposed to be for the underdog, that’s what we do!” Elected Democrats “have to stand up for that, because it’s the right thing to do and it’s better for the country.” It’s better for the country to virtue signal and lose elections and not be able to enact the virtuous policy anyway? Maybe they feel more virtuous by losing elections? Idk.
Winning or losing elections is largely irrelevant to members of a cult. Signaling membership in the cult is what is all important. The transqueer cult is maintained by billions of dollars from autogynephile billionaires like James Pritzker, cousin of the Democrat governor of Illinois, and who now claims to be a woman named Jennifer.
In essence, the Democratic Party has reduced itself to nothing more than the US political arm of the worldwide transqueer cult.
I said “a lot of Democrats do think that way” which is true. As for representation, why do literally ALL our D representatives in Congress support this shit when 2/3 of Democrats are against it? Every single one! Seth Moulton said something negative about it (and got called a Nazi collaborator for it!) (and is getting primaried by some “non-binary” loon because of it) but he still went ahead and voted for it anyway. Same with Gavin Newsom, he said how it’s “deeply unfair” or something but he does nothing about it (and keeps putting men into women’s prisons, etc.). So where is our “representation” on trans extremism when they ALL listen only to the extremists?
And in the Year of Our Wokeness 2025, EVERY Democrat in the US Senate is a proud co-sponsor of a bill to make gender self-ID unquestionable under federal law, allowing any male full access to any and all female-only spaces, nationwide.
The deliberate destruction of black role models like Nancy Green is fundamentally unforgivable from the Democratic Party, the "so-called" party of diversity.
So, she wore a do-rag? (at least in the after-the-fact pictures) She was sharp, and a hell of a promoter. Blacks could do worse than look up to her. A black woman baker (and small businesswoman) near me tried to tell the local liberal paper (yep, we've got two, still) that her role model was Aunt Jemima. "You sure you want us to print that?" the paper asked (and put it in the article, so we'd know they were "good liberals"). She stood by her words, and I'ma stand by someone with the personal courage to say what ain't popular, but is right.
Ain't anybody in rural America going for an "abundance" anything. Just stop using that term, it is stupid, tone-deaf and bougie. Find some leaders who can speak credibly about what is needed to bring jobs to rural communities. Stop being lured into unwinnable conversations about issues that aren't relevant to rural people.
I'll defer to you on whether it's the right word, but the actual substance of "abundance" is about cutting red tape and building more things, which—as far as I know—is critical if we want to create jobs in rural communities.
I sympathize with what your saying, but I don’t really think it would put a dent in rural voters voting for Republicans, and at some point the juice ain’t worth the squeeze
The culture (and the left which owns it) has gone all-in on appealing to women, specifically the AWFL variety. The whole re-brand was made to appeal to women like CEO Julie Felss Masino and her lawyer friend from Pilates class. The problem is they don't eat at Cracker Barrel in the first place, and have probably never met anyone who does. It looks like it didn't even dawn on the company that customers might like the grandma-chic store and the kitschy interior.
The same breed of cat is responsible for the disastrous Bud Light campaign, the destruction of Star Wars and Marvel, and a whole host of other Diversity, Equity and Intrusion missteps.
> It looks like it didn't even dawn on the company that customers might like the grandma-chic store and the kitschy interior
They are down 53% over the past 5 years so lots of people aren't liking it.
It's not the whole market. Yes, DINE, which owns Applebees and IHOP, is down 60%. But Texas Roadhouse is up 183%. Babcock (Buffalo Wild Wings) is down 30%. Darden (Olive Garden) is up 147%. Brinker owns Chili's and Maggiano's and is up 286%.
(In less direct competitors Chipotle is up 72% and McDonalds up 47%. YUM (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell) up 52%.)
I asked in another substack and people who really hate the rebrand hadn't been there in six months, maybe years. The rebrand looks dumb to me, but I'd only been there once or twice in the past 5 years.
> That's because the same fools behind the current redesign have been running Cracker Barrel for a while now.
Julie Felss Masino became the CEO (hired from Taco Bell) on November 1 2023. Starting 5 years ago to November 2023, CBRL was already down about 52%. So she's maintained a flat stock price, while DIN and DENN continued to fall.
It's an old store appealing to old people and their customers are dying off, the same way Howard Johnson's customers died off. I remember Howard Johnson's attempt at a rejuvenation. It didn't work. I thought they should have hired Howard Johnson, who was a famous baseball player at the time, to be their spokesman but no one listens to me.
I hate the rebrand for many reasons but the idea that CB would be an easily profitable and growing company if only there weren't woke retards on the board (maybe put there by ESG) is itself a retarded idea. It's a slowly sinking ship.
... I don't think the people in charge are this clever, but this could be a purposeful New Coke thing, which is largely remembered as a disaster by CEO Roberto Goizueta. But it ended up reminding people how much they liked Classic Coca-Cola, whose market share had been consistently slipping for a long time. From 1984 to 1996 (when Goizueta died) PEP increased in value by about 16X while KO increased about 25x. Twinkies did a similar thing about 10 years ago when they were going to be discontinued -- people who liked the idea of Twinkies but hadn't bought them realized they might lose them and started buying them again.
Yeah, more than a few brands lately have tried to appeal to a wider audience at the expense of their existing customers, but I can't imagine bland is ever a selling point, if you're gonna rebrand I would think go bold at least.
I can make as much fun of the Crackers and Rednecks spewing online invective about Cracker Barrel's rebrand and logo change being another full-on frontal cultural / political attack against them as any feckless, condescending urban wokester can. And I have.
But I've done so with the experience and muscle memory that comes from having been raised in a small southern rural town... a "city boy" to the county residents, who spent his youth from the age of 11 until the end of high school and beyond working in the tobacco fields, corn fields and hayfields of farms scattered around and between the Knobs of central Kentucky, rubbing elbows and sweating with the sons of men and the men themselves who largely wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone and unimpeded by burdensome taxes and undue regulation to make a decent living for themselves and their families, and to live their settled lives relatively quietly, as they saw fit and with the dignity that they felt inherent in the hard work at which they toiled year-round.
And the burning political question in rural America today is not really any different than it was those 6 decades ago in my youth, and isn't "What can you do *for* me?"
More often than not it's "What the fuck are you trying to do *to* me, and to my way of life?"
As ridiculous as this whole Cracker Barrel brouhaha is - and it is indeed ridiculous; all you online Bubbas out there need to pick much, much better battles, or maybe start by just getting a better life, because if this shit is any part of your raison d'etre, your lives really do suck - it is, in fact, one more example of the divide between urban and rural America and the fact that woke - merely perceived or otherwise - just don't much cut it with the crowd past the city limits. And never has.
And until Democrats come around to that realization and stop ignoring rural America's significance in the electorate and their preference for common sense in government as opposed to hi-falutin' rhetoric and policy that seems alien to their way of life, they're going to not just continue to struggle but continue to lose elections they might otherwise win.
You want to do better in rural America, Democrats? You don't have to give up your ideals of equality and better lives for *all* Americans.
But you might have to give up on Meatless Saturday and a couple of other things while just meeting these voters where and how they are...
Nota bene: I've lived in a rural township in a northern state for 5 decades now. Trump country if ever such existed. In local township elections, virtually every candidate for every office runs as a Democrat with no corresponding Republican name for the spot on the ballot. None of their "campaigns" have ever brought one of them to my door. Been this way ever since I moved here.
But the less-than-handful of politicians seeking an elected office outside the township who have showed up at my door over the years have all been Republicans. Go figure.
Having worked for a company that went bankrupt 20 years ago this fall, putting my pension earned over the course of more than 3 decades into the PBGC with a permanent reduction in the monthly payout (along with reduced benefits, which have since recovered and, actually, improved thanks to the excellent stewardship of the union entity responsible for managing those), I'm aware of the importance of government help / protections for the members of pension plans that end up circling the drain (the PBGC is a government chartered corporation but not a government run entity and doesn't use taxpayer money to rescue or fund pensions).
I'm not sure why stories like this one don't gain any more traction than they do with working people. I heard litlle of it at the time besides the story you link to. Maybe too much other higher-decibel noise (read: culture war noise) drowned it / drowns them out?
I think the problem is at least partly the anti-union sentiment among the swath of the blue-collar / working class that succumbs to the "unionists are communists" political line perpetrated by the right, and there are a whole lot of 'em out there. So, I'm not sure what would overcome that, or that the story would have gotten any more traction or had any real influence no matter what Biden did or didn't do.
I hear plenty of anti-union sentiment on construction sites, but it is rarely 'unionists are communists'. It's usually 'unionists have poor quality performance at their job, can't be fired, and generally eff things up enough for the real workers that they limit everyone's opportunities'. That holds across several states.
Well, I used that phrase pretty much as a catchall for all the negative stereotyping that is aimed at unions and their members by anti-unionists in the working-class / blue-collar ranks... but yes, all of the above, plus overworked & underpaid, lazy featherbedders, you name it. And of course, the ultimate, un-American slander of communists or socialists... pejoratives mostly parroted by folks who picked them up listening to politicians or political commentators and who mostly couldn't accurately differentiate between communism, socialism and capitalism if their jobs depended on it.
Twitter isn't real life. So a million "people", "bots" complain about something? Well, there's still over 300 million real people in the U.S. who care so little they can't be bothered to look at a different screen on their phone.
Sure, there's votes there, and some advertising value, but it's far from the whole world. Remember when Facebook was "the new town square?"
That sounds like using an absence of evidence to suggest evidence of absence. It CAN be true and something to watch out for, but not everyone who disliked something posted about it either
Many (not all) rural areas have been revitalizing spontaneously with the expansion of remote work and the near-universal availability of Starlink. See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america from UVAs Cooper Center. Lots of people actually like living in nice rural areas, and “nice rural areas” isn’t an oxymoron.
My personal suggestion to for revitalizing rural areas:
Encourage businesses to allow remote work where feasible. That alone has driven a huge economic shift.
Encourage small business and shut up about how they’re less efficient. The market can and will figure it out. Dissing small business is about as popular as kicking puppies.
Stop targeting small farms, raising beef, etc. to combat global warming. This is an extremely sensitive cultural issue and it matters to more people than you might expect. Beef consumption is trending down on its own. Small farms are struggling enough already.
Stop elevating polemics on how awful rural people are. Fully 40% of rural residents still vote for Democrats. Why actively try to reduce that number? Paul Krugman might as well work for the RNC for the effect he is having.
Shut up about agglomeration. You do not need to force people to agglomerate when it’s beneficial. Businesses and individuals can figure out where they want to be. If a job is being done remote or outsourced, agglomeration pretty obviously was not key.
Do not treat regional accents or rural roots or rural living as code for bigotry. It isn’t. See Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, or heck, George Clooney who is from Kentucky.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
YES. The war on remote work is anti-worker, harms family stability and the pointless commutes have sent emissions skyrocketing while straining infrastructure.
If you want to go further, pass a new office tax. State that any worker who could reasonably work remotely should be allowed to do so and that a mandatory RTO gets a $2,000 per employee monthly tax for each mandatory office day in a week. $10K per month per head tax charged to an employer for 5 day RTO. Give them 5 days a month in an office “for free.”
Remote work will become *mandatory* with such a policy.
Do some people have to be physically present somewhere because of proprietary equipment, or service delivery? Sure. Exempt those.
One of the best things we can do is decentralize prosperity. Why should a tiny handful of insanely overpriced metro areas get all of the economic activity and good jobs while the rest of the country languishes?
Incentivizing remote work and severely penalizing commutes/offices would go a long way towards doing that.
There was a book released not long ago that argued that rural white people were uniquely evil and a threat to America. One of the blurbs was that rural white people were especially prone to political violence -- this, only a couple years after the Mostly Peaceful Protests, in which rural white people played no part whatsoever. https://www.amazon.com/White-Rural-Rage-American-Democracy-ebook/dp/B0CKVJ66JR/ref=sr_1_1?crid=24XSKUI8TNQWU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.u86riaa_P4TMoMWFjL1Ozz_0rECQo1QO30CtvE7uHg5FLp9b0dmAhW_i-Toh747rYAJmtEMTcbbwo2gICJ-w_Q.t5a_rCC56oN2sBvdl_mKSWfsaW6iWqx5AD0VaXXPH2A&dib_tag=se&keywords=white+rural+rage+book&qid=1756249195&s=books&sprefix=rural%2Cstripbooks%2C141&sr=1-1
There weren’t any rural white people at january 6th?
Most of the people at January 6th were not rural.
Okay
> Encourage businesses to allow remote work where feasible. That alone has driven a huge economic shift.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
> Stop elevating polemics on how awful rural people are. Fully 40% of rural residents still vote for Democrats. Why actively try to reduce that number? Paul Krugman might as well work for the RNC for the effect he is having.
> Do not treat regional accents or rural roots or rural living as code for bigotry. It isn’t. See Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, or heck, George Clooney who is from Kentucky.
Again agreed, and these are such stupid own goals for no benefit. At least with your other points, I can understand how reasonable people can disagree, but insulting and stereotyping people really is all downside for no upside.
> Shut up about agglomeration. You do not need to force people to agglomerate when it’s beneficial. Businesses and individuals can figure out where they want to be. If a job is being done remote or outsourced, agglomeration pretty obviously was not key.
> Encourage small business and shut up about how they’re less efficient. The market can and will figure it out. Dissing small business is about as popular as kicking puppies.
These are pretty niche items from the niche things you and I read. Small, wonky blogs should be free to make wonky arguments to their wonky audiences, and I don't see any evidence that these items have percolated into the general public's image of either the Bluesky activist class or the mainstream Democratic party.
> Stop targeting small farms, raising beef, etc. to combat global warming. This is an extremely sensitive cultural issue and it matters to more people than you might expect. Beef consumption is trending down on its own. Small farms are struggling enough already.
This gets to a bigger issue where activists will talk about a policy with the vision of sticking it to The Man and only The Man, but a significant number of people will either hear the same policy as targeting *them* and/or experience unintended consequences of said policy. So basically, I agree with you here as well, except to say that everyone who needs to hear your point will tell themselves they aren't the ones targeting small farms, and the point here should probably be for activists to pay attention to when their messaging/policies are not landing as intended and adjust accordingly.
Actually not, which is why I mentioned it. Matt Yglesias has repeatedly talked about the inefficiency of small business, to a degree I found rather shocking. Both Yglesias and Waldman promoted Grunwald’s book, We Are Eating the Earth, with, not joking, specific attacks on family farms and praise for industrial agriculture and confinement meat operations.
I understand Grundman’s argument, which is about use of land, and also see about a million holes in how it would actually play out. This includes that existing pasture is not going to be returned to forest in the East, but rather suburbs and hobby farms; existing pasture mostly wasn’t ever forest in the grassland main cattle raising areas; and that if you did rewild the Great Plains, it would surprisingly quickly revert to having about 60 million bison, which fart just as much methane as cattle.
No one deliberately rewilded black bears in the east, but we have them showing up in our back yards all over Virginia, including the DC suburbs. Bison already push out of national parks, but are ringed in by fences.
Let's make you the new DNC chair, please.
The post misses one piece of "dumb activist bullshit" about the redesigned logo. The redo also takes off the long tail of the K in cracker. Because a lot of really weird leftist racialists decided it was a dog whistle for the whip that plantation overseers wielded --and connecting it to the K was a wink toward the KKK. Really, not making this up. Just as you think dumb activist bullshitters cannot get any dumber, they do.
Do you have a link to that symbolism being discussed?
I cannot remember where I read it . . . but it was online, so it must be true.
Mike Solana just mentioned seeing it on Threads as a guest on House Of Strauss
Somebody mentioned it 🥴
Stop being the party of fringe bad ideas birthed by academia and enabled by wealthy unfulfilled feminists. Once the globalist feminazis declared war on rust belt labor we were sunk. Union Labor in America puts blue collar men and women back to work and out of the entitlement till. The Party that used to be for labor is now for career students with worthless degrees in social sciences. They structure the entitlements to help them instead of “working families.” What was the back room of the Biden Administration thinking when they opened the border and looked the other way. Entitlements for immigrants turned a lot of labor democrats into Trump Supporters. The only democrats I ever meet anymore have lots of money, education and arrogant superiority.
"What was the back room of the Biden Administration thinking when they opened the border?" . . . they were thinking, "Oh, look, more government dependents who in their gratitude for the dole will vote D all their lives and unto their great-grandchildrens' lives . . . and also more humble gardeners/nannies who will tug their forelocks and whom we can pay in cash to avoid taxes."
I think it was just flag waving.
"People like us fly flag X with orange colors. People like *them* fly flag Y with lots of stripes. We fly flag X. Entirely by coincidence, orange is good and stripes are bad. It's scientifically proven."
I think the main driver of allowing immigration was just that it's what people like us do, to show we're not like those other people. Also, we who are in power right now will stay in power forever.
This is the most moronic comment I've seen in a while. Obama had extremely tight immigration (remember the joke in Arrested Development?). So did Clinton, for god's sake.
Slavery didn't used to be what "good little democrats" advocated for.
I'd say the two preceding it are orders of magnitude more moronic since illegal immigrants don't vote. Period.
They're counted in the census. That keeps Electoral college votes in California. I mean, this isn't rocket science.
And "illegal immigrants don't vote" is a fun thing when you don't actually check to see if you recognize who is voting. Or whether they're voting twice, or whether they filled in both the bubbles for Rump and Biden.
Remind me why it was a good idea to ban the election judge from watching the votes be counted? Oh, that's right, NOW we can't even get ANYONE, democrat or republican, to run for election judge. Wonder WHY?!?
" What was the back room of the Biden Administration thinking when they opened the border and looked the other way"
Two things:
1) If Hispanic voters like what we are doing, we could turn Texas purple.
2) We have to somehow make up for the residents leaving California or else we will lose seats in the House.
This is perfectly said! Getting rid of the dumb culture stuff would be good… however do they understand why most people cannot stand this stuff? I think not … and I feel
that if the Dems regained power … here we go again - open up the border to everyone, etc
They may think they are so intelligent and they probably are in some sense. However intelligence without pragmatism and common sense … it’s not useful
I think the only way to stop "step[ping] on your balls" is with a particularly forceful candidate or candidates who call BS when faced with this crap. It won't be easy -- I can't think of anything I've read in the past few decades that used "white male" as anything but a shorthand for "evil".
Dividing people into groups with inherent group-based qualities seems to be second nature to liberals and progressives. I'm struggling to imagine a world where Democrats don't:
-- put up signs saying "...we believe in science ...." and then pretend boys can become girls
-- assume that everyone who votes R is a sexist or racist.
-- make people write performative DEI statements as part of job applications or self-reviews
This isn't made any easier by the fact that the current White House is actually inhabited by a senile old racist and sexist fool whose every whim is being indulged by the weak cowards in the Senate and House terrified of being primaried.
I don't think that'll be enough. We really need a worker-first approach. Anyone who works for a living should be able to afford a place to live, be able to care for ailing relatives and be able to weather a serious illness without worrying about going bankrupt. These are all things that we can do and that Republicans are fighting against.
Will that person even make it to a primary, much less win one though? There is no more saying one thing for the primary and shifting to the general, the receipts are out there for the public to see now.
Hard to tell. My guess is that the reason Biden won the primary in 2020 was that realists in the primary electorate figured a moderate would do best against DJT.
But what I suggested is more in aggressively moderate socially than Biden, so your question is a good one.
But I do think there is a large chunk of the electorate that simply doesn't like the Democrats view of everything through an identity lens. They vote on vibes, because serious policy analysis is harder.
And then literally on Day One the "moderate" Biden went all-in on gender ideology.
I've been a registered Democrat since 1974. I cast my last vote for a Democrat in November 2020.
I doubt there will ever again be a Democrat candidate that I can vote for.
Right, but that's not why Biden won the primary, and we were talking about what the D primary electorate would support.
But I am curious about what was the primary (sorry) reason you bailed from the Democrats. Because as annoying/stupid as some of the Democratic politicians' policies are, to me they pale in comparison with trying to destroy our research universities, scaring off foreign students or the bizarre tariff scheme where the tariff costs for GM to build a car in the US exceed the costs for Toyota to build a car in Japan and ship it to the US.
Primary reason: the ongoing crime against humanity of pediatric "gender affirming care", which is pure medical quackery that results in the surgical mutilation of over a thousand kids each and every year in the great country of ours, and the chemical sterilization of thousands more. This crime is fully supported, aided and abetted by the Democratic Party, which no way no how is the "party of science".
As for our research universities, I am a recently retired STEM professor at an R1 research university. My degrees are from an Ivy and Stanford. I was a Principal Investigator on NSF grants for 40 years. And I fully support what the Trump administration is doing to reign in the blatant racism and sexism that had taken over the federally funded research effort. It had become impossible to get research support from the NSF without claiming that the work would have "broader impacts" on DEI and making up complete nonsense about how this would happen. My university also required me to write loyalty oaths to DEI to be considered for a routine salary increase. And the pressure from our administration to make "diverse" faculty hires was intense. I used to think "affirmative action" was reasonable and appropriate, but I have changed my mind. The government has no business engaging in racial preferences.
Thanks! Interestingly, perhaps, I recently joined (and then retired 2 years later) one of the Magnificent 7 companies and noticed that for the first time I really had to fill in a "what I've done for DEI" section in my semi-annual reviews, which would have been especially important for promotions.
Fortunately, I was hired in at a level from which I had no reasonable prospect of getting a promotion so it didn't really matter to me, but I remember thinking that it was a good thing I wasn't going to be making my career there. I mean, the only things people really seemed to write for that section was either "I joined affinity group X," or extremely vague stuff about supporting DEI in "all my interactions." The former was probably unavailable to me and the latter was beyond my ability to spin BS.
Don't disagree with your point about gender affirming care for minors. Everything I've read says that for the vast, vast majority of treated children, it's a disaster medically and doesn't even help mental health outcomes. As most European countries' health departments have figured out.
But I still hate what Trump's doing to research universities, wind and solar deployments, and his corruption of the DoJ more. Pretty much everything he's doing is making the country weaker.
Gallego. But really Nick Saban should run in 2028 as a Dem.
You're taking it as given that most Democrats just don't care about the cultural weirdness to stand in the way of the weirdos. But what if being a Democrat now means that you do care about the weirdness, in much the same way as being a Republican means that you're a MAGA Trump guy? Sure, the RINOs and the DINOs can bitch and complain all they want, but the truth is that mainstream political parties are either a cult of personality or a cult of weirdness.
Yet when I read comments on NYT articles about gender affirming care for minors, for example, the top 20 comments (in likes) will all be opposed to puberty blockers or x-sex hormones for minors.
My suspicion is that most Democratic pols are scared of the party's activists, just like most Republican pols are scared of Trumpists. My guess is that policy wonks will go for the Democratic position, since the Republicans these days are doing their best to destroy the country economically and militarily.
But a lot of people vote on gut feelings. They're probably not experts on whether Germany is likely to come to Ukraine's aid with soldiers, or whether Israel has any chance of living in peace with the Palestinians under military occupation. But when you tell them that white men are usually the problem with society, or that 100% of the gender pay gap is due to sexism and 0% due to statistical preferences, or that their tomboy girl might actually be a boy in a girl's body, well, now you've made their voting choice easy.
Most blue states have actually passed laws (with unanimous votes of Democrats in the state legislatures) that allow the State to remove a child from parents who do not "affirm" their kid's new "gender identity" (that they learned at public school from their teachers and the school-supported "gay straight alliance" club) and agree to medicalize it (that is, give the kid chemical castration drugs and mutilating surgeries).
As a parent, am I voting for those people ever again? Fuck no.
This is complete and utter bullshit. You're either a drooling donkey or just lying your ass off.
One set of laws that does this are the "trans state sanctuary laws" (google it) pioneered by California Senate Bill SB 107, enacted into law in 2022. You cannot trust any MSM descriptions of what these laws do, you have to read the actual text of the actual law.
From the SB 107 Bill Summary: "The bill would authorize a court to take temporary jurisdiction because a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care."
[Note that there is no exception if the reason is that the child's parents oppose it.]
https://pluralpolicy.com/app/legislative-tracking/bill/details/state-ca-20212022-sb107/1035849
Family Code, Section 3424, as amended by SB 107:
(a) A court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is present in this state and the child has been abandoned or it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child, is subjected to, or threatened with, mistreatment or abuse, or because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care, as defined by Section 16010.2 of the Welfare and Institutions Code [definition quoted below].
[Note the use of "or" here; any one of these things is enough to trigger the law. Also note that inability of the child to obtain any form of health care OTHER THAN "gender affirming care" does NOT trigger the law.]
(b) If there is no previous child custody determination that is entitled to be enforced under this part and a child custody proceeding has not been commenced in a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive, a child custody determination made under this section remains in effect until an order is obtained from a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive. If a child custody proceeding has not been or is not commenced in a court of a state having jurisdiction under Sections 3421 to 3423, inclusive, a child custody determination made under this section becomes a final determination, if it so provides and this state becomes the home state of the child.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=FAM§ionNum=3424.
Welfare and Institutions Code, Section 16010.2:
(b)(3)(A) “Gender affirming health care” means medically necessary health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient, and may include, but is not limited to, the following:
(i) Interventions to suppress the development of endogenous secondary sex characteristics.
(ii) Interventions to align the patient's appearance or physical body with the patient's gender identity.
(iii) Interventions to alleviate symptoms of clinically significant distress resulting from gender dysphoria, as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition.
(B) “Gender affirming mental health care” means mental health care or behavioral health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient, and may include, but is not limited to, developmentally appropriate exploration and integration of identity, reduction of distress, adaptive coping, and strategies to increase family acceptance.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=16010.2&lawCode=WIC
[Other provisions of California law allow "temporary" jurisdiction to become permanent if no other court objects.]
I googled it. You're a fucking moron. What the above states is that the state can take temporary emergency jurisdiction if a trans kid is being abused (and no, that does not mean "denied gender affirming care")
I just quoted the actual text of the actual law. It plainly DOES allow a court to assume jurisdiction if a child has been denied "gender affirming care". No other condition is required; all those clauses in the text are separated by "or", not "and". So any one of them is a sufficient condition to trigger the law, and one of them is "child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care".
Any googled source that says otherwise is lying.
So who is the fucking moron here? Me, who can actually read the law? Or you, who apparently cannot?
Yes, a lot of Democrats do think that way. In comments in a liberal forum I made the mild suggestion that even if someone seriously thought it was an important “civil rights” issue to let boys cheat at girls’ sports (I put it more diplomatically there), it might be a good idea to drop the issue FOR NOW because obviously the public isn’t there “yet” since even 2/3 of D voters are against it. The agonized wailing could be heard from one end of the Acela corridor to the other. “Democrats are supposed to be for the underdog, that’s what we do!” Elected Democrats “have to stand up for that, because it’s the right thing to do and it’s better for the country.” It’s better for the country to virtue signal and lose elections and not be able to enact the virtuous policy anyway? Maybe they feel more virtuous by losing elections? Idk.
Winning or losing elections is largely irrelevant to members of a cult. Signaling membership in the cult is what is all important. The transqueer cult is maintained by billions of dollars from autogynephile billionaires like James Pritzker, cousin of the Democrat governor of Illinois, and who now claims to be a woman named Jennifer.
In essence, the Democratic Party has reduced itself to nothing more than the US political arm of the worldwide transqueer cult.
It's force vs persuasion. A win does not feel like a win if the winning is done through persuasion.
Oh, comments in a liberal forum on the internet prove your point. NOT. Just because they're loud, does not mean they are representative.
I said “a lot of Democrats do think that way” which is true. As for representation, why do literally ALL our D representatives in Congress support this shit when 2/3 of Democrats are against it? Every single one! Seth Moulton said something negative about it (and got called a Nazi collaborator for it!) (and is getting primaried by some “non-binary” loon because of it) but he still went ahead and voted for it anyway. Same with Gavin Newsom, he said how it’s “deeply unfair” or something but he does nothing about it (and keeps putting men into women’s prisons, etc.). So where is our “representation” on trans extremism when they ALL listen only to the extremists?
And in the Year of Our Wokeness 2025, EVERY Democrat in the US Senate is a proud co-sponsor of a bill to make gender self-ID unquestionable under federal law, allowing any male full access to any and all female-only spaces, nationwide.
Oh, he had a name all right...
https://www.crackerbarrel.com/about/Uncle-Herschel
The deliberate destruction of black role models like Nancy Green is fundamentally unforgivable from the Democratic Party, the "so-called" party of diversity.
So, she wore a do-rag? (at least in the after-the-fact pictures) She was sharp, and a hell of a promoter. Blacks could do worse than look up to her. A black woman baker (and small businesswoman) near me tried to tell the local liberal paper (yep, we've got two, still) that her role model was Aunt Jemima. "You sure you want us to print that?" the paper asked (and put it in the article, so we'd know they were "good liberals"). She stood by her words, and I'ma stand by someone with the personal courage to say what ain't popular, but is right.
"Information kiosk on the moon" 🎯
Ain't anybody in rural America going for an "abundance" anything. Just stop using that term, it is stupid, tone-deaf and bougie. Find some leaders who can speak credibly about what is needed to bring jobs to rural communities. Stop being lured into unwinnable conversations about issues that aren't relevant to rural people.
I'll defer to you on whether it's the right word, but the actual substance of "abundance" is about cutting red tape and building more things, which—as far as I know—is critical if we want to create jobs in rural communities.
I sympathize with what your saying, but I don’t really think it would put a dent in rural voters voting for Republicans, and at some point the juice ain’t worth the squeeze
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/opinion/liberalism-texarkana-economy-democracy.html
I call it AWFL decision-making.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-171762401
The culture (and the left which owns it) has gone all-in on appealing to women, specifically the AWFL variety. The whole re-brand was made to appeal to women like CEO Julie Felss Masino and her lawyer friend from Pilates class. The problem is they don't eat at Cracker Barrel in the first place, and have probably never met anyone who does. It looks like it didn't even dawn on the company that customers might like the grandma-chic store and the kitschy interior.
The same breed of cat is responsible for the disastrous Bud Light campaign, the destruction of Star Wars and Marvel, and a whole host of other Diversity, Equity and Intrusion missteps.
> It looks like it didn't even dawn on the company that customers might like the grandma-chic store and the kitschy interior
They are down 53% over the past 5 years so lots of people aren't liking it.
It's not the whole market. Yes, DINE, which owns Applebees and IHOP, is down 60%. But Texas Roadhouse is up 183%. Babcock (Buffalo Wild Wings) is down 30%. Darden (Olive Garden) is up 147%. Brinker owns Chili's and Maggiano's and is up 286%.
(In less direct competitors Chipotle is up 72% and McDonalds up 47%. YUM (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell) up 52%.)
I asked in another substack and people who really hate the rebrand hadn't been there in six months, maybe years. The rebrand looks dumb to me, but I'd only been there once or twice in the past 5 years.
> They are down 53% over the past 5 years so lots of people aren't liking it.
That's because the same fools behind the current redesign have been running Cracker Barrel for a while now.
> That's because the same fools behind the current redesign have been running Cracker Barrel for a while now.
Julie Felss Masino became the CEO (hired from Taco Bell) on November 1 2023. Starting 5 years ago to November 2023, CBRL was already down about 52%. So she's maintained a flat stock price, while DIN and DENN continued to fall.
It's an old store appealing to old people and their customers are dying off, the same way Howard Johnson's customers died off. I remember Howard Johnson's attempt at a rejuvenation. It didn't work. I thought they should have hired Howard Johnson, who was a famous baseball player at the time, to be their spokesman but no one listens to me.
I hate the rebrand for many reasons but the idea that CB would be an easily profitable and growing company if only there weren't woke retards on the board (maybe put there by ESG) is itself a retarded idea. It's a slowly sinking ship.
... I don't think the people in charge are this clever, but this could be a purposeful New Coke thing, which is largely remembered as a disaster by CEO Roberto Goizueta. But it ended up reminding people how much they liked Classic Coca-Cola, whose market share had been consistently slipping for a long time. From 1984 to 1996 (when Goizueta died) PEP increased in value by about 16X while KO increased about 25x. Twinkies did a similar thing about 10 years ago when they were going to be discontinued -- people who liked the idea of Twinkies but hadn't bought them realized they might lose them and started buying them again.
Yeah, more than a few brands lately have tried to appeal to a wider audience at the expense of their existing customers, but I can't imagine bland is ever a selling point, if you're gonna rebrand I would think go bold at least.
Your piece referred to the phrase "head up your ass." If you want to be anatomically correct, the phrase is "rectocranial inversion."
This blog post is spot on! And thanks for bringing up the latinx craziness.
The stupidest own goal in history.....
I can make as much fun of the Crackers and Rednecks spewing online invective about Cracker Barrel's rebrand and logo change being another full-on frontal cultural / political attack against them as any feckless, condescending urban wokester can. And I have.
But I've done so with the experience and muscle memory that comes from having been raised in a small southern rural town... a "city boy" to the county residents, who spent his youth from the age of 11 until the end of high school and beyond working in the tobacco fields, corn fields and hayfields of farms scattered around and between the Knobs of central Kentucky, rubbing elbows and sweating with the sons of men and the men themselves who largely wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone and unimpeded by burdensome taxes and undue regulation to make a decent living for themselves and their families, and to live their settled lives relatively quietly, as they saw fit and with the dignity that they felt inherent in the hard work at which they toiled year-round.
And the burning political question in rural America today is not really any different than it was those 6 decades ago in my youth, and isn't "What can you do *for* me?"
More often than not it's "What the fuck are you trying to do *to* me, and to my way of life?"
As ridiculous as this whole Cracker Barrel brouhaha is - and it is indeed ridiculous; all you online Bubbas out there need to pick much, much better battles, or maybe start by just getting a better life, because if this shit is any part of your raison d'etre, your lives really do suck - it is, in fact, one more example of the divide between urban and rural America and the fact that woke - merely perceived or otherwise - just don't much cut it with the crowd past the city limits. And never has.
And until Democrats come around to that realization and stop ignoring rural America's significance in the electorate and their preference for common sense in government as opposed to hi-falutin' rhetoric and policy that seems alien to their way of life, they're going to not just continue to struggle but continue to lose elections they might otherwise win.
You want to do better in rural America, Democrats? You don't have to give up your ideals of equality and better lives for *all* Americans.
But you might have to give up on Meatless Saturday and a couple of other things while just meeting these voters where and how they are...
https://theconversation.com/why-rural-coloradans-feel-ignored-a-resentment-as-old-as-america-itself-260894
Nota bene: I've lived in a rural township in a northern state for 5 decades now. Trump country if ever such existed. In local township elections, virtually every candidate for every office runs as a Democrat with no corresponding Republican name for the spot on the ballot. None of their "campaigns" have ever brought one of them to my door. Been this way ever since I moved here.
But the less-than-handful of politicians seeking an elected office outside the township who have showed up at my door over the years have all been Republicans. Go figure.
What do you think about things like this?
https://apnews.com/article/biden-business-united-states-government-and-politics-retirees-09d93d2af8cc68de47eccda4a9ef0250
$36 billion government bailout to a union pension plan.
Should Biden have not bothered with this? Made a really big deal about it? I didn't hear much about it until well after the election was over.
Having worked for a company that went bankrupt 20 years ago this fall, putting my pension earned over the course of more than 3 decades into the PBGC with a permanent reduction in the monthly payout (along with reduced benefits, which have since recovered and, actually, improved thanks to the excellent stewardship of the union entity responsible for managing those), I'm aware of the importance of government help / protections for the members of pension plans that end up circling the drain (the PBGC is a government chartered corporation but not a government run entity and doesn't use taxpayer money to rescue or fund pensions).
I'm not sure why stories like this one don't gain any more traction than they do with working people. I heard litlle of it at the time besides the story you link to. Maybe too much other higher-decibel noise (read: culture war noise) drowned it / drowns them out?
I think the problem is at least partly the anti-union sentiment among the swath of the blue-collar / working class that succumbs to the "unionists are communists" political line perpetrated by the right, and there are a whole lot of 'em out there. So, I'm not sure what would overcome that, or that the story would have gotten any more traction or had any real influence no matter what Biden did or didn't do.
I hear plenty of anti-union sentiment on construction sites, but it is rarely 'unionists are communists'. It's usually 'unionists have poor quality performance at their job, can't be fired, and generally eff things up enough for the real workers that they limit everyone's opportunities'. That holds across several states.
Well, I used that phrase pretty much as a catchall for all the negative stereotyping that is aimed at unions and their members by anti-unionists in the working-class / blue-collar ranks... but yes, all of the above, plus overworked & underpaid, lazy featherbedders, you name it. And of course, the ultimate, un-American slander of communists or socialists... pejoratives mostly parroted by folks who picked them up listening to politicians or political commentators and who mostly couldn't accurately differentiate between communism, socialism and capitalism if their jobs depended on it.
sorry, first time actually seeing one: that tweet with the post-remodel picture, that’s not real, is it? that can’t be real.
You would think it could not possibly be real . . . but it is.
Which tweet? There are several linked in the article and all the ones I looked at are clear jokes.
The "information kiosk on the moon" link
edit: actually I think that one is a joke too
Check their replies. https://nitter.net/bankertobuilder/status/1958636920147517702
okay i was right to be suspicious
Another quality take, Maurer.
It’s almost like 80% of America doesn’t disagree on most of the stupid issues that seem to dominate online “discussion”.
Twitter isn't real life. So a million "people", "bots" complain about something? Well, there's still over 300 million real people in the U.S. who care so little they can't be bothered to look at a different screen on their phone.
Sure, there's votes there, and some advertising value, but it's far from the whole world. Remember when Facebook was "the new town square?"
This madness needs to stop.....
That sounds like using an absence of evidence to suggest evidence of absence. It CAN be true and something to watch out for, but not everyone who disliked something posted about it either
Yes, I get that. It has advert
value. I just wonder how much?