In hindsight, this is part of why the left and Con Inc hate JD Vance so much. To them, he should have been a Hicklib - a poor rural kid from a dysfunctional family who graduated from Harvard on a military scholarship, married a lawyer, worked in Silicon Valley, and wrote a bestselling book about his upbringing. But he’s not. He genuinely loves and cares about the people he grew up around, and he recognizes that liberals and David French-type “conservatives” have nothing to offer them.
I’m a true lower midwestern hick come to California 35 years ago. The Navy brought me here. SF then LA. Then back and forth again. I’m now a lawyer. I’ve mixed with all the high and haughty. For the entirety. And I remain completely rooted in my rural culture. I imagine there are few as fake as those who’ve come from my place and who’ve embraced city culture as their own.
As an outsider looking in, I’m English, I always found the phrase flyover states to be the most contemptuous and dismissive of phrases and more reflective of the arseholes who coined and used it than the people who live in those states.
I do not believe they are entirely genuine. If they are they are profoundly stupid. Anyone who examine the aftermath of government subsidization and determines that this is necessary for their own small town is functionally retarded.
You describe how I feel about Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson when I see their fake podcast sets and plaid shirts. They may not qualify as Hicklibs, but they seek an image for a flyover demographic that sometimes seems fake.
Being a woodchuck raised in the region of the Catskills that Williamson describes, it’s apparent to me that much of Mainstream Con Inc we see is pretty much an act. They offer a brand of collectivism aimed at supplanting values to compel people to build and craft things for their own satisfaction and well being. Big Ag is fine as long as it is American based multinationals, as small farmers and homesteaders are so “inefficient”.
In hindsight, this is part of why the left and Con Inc hate JD Vance so much. To them, he should have been a Hicklib - a poor rural kid from a dysfunctional family who graduated from Harvard on a military scholarship, married a lawyer, worked in Silicon Valley, and wrote a bestselling book about his upbringing. But he’s not. He genuinely loves and cares about the people he grew up around, and he recognizes that liberals and David French-type “conservatives” have nothing to offer them.
I’m a true lower midwestern hick come to California 35 years ago. The Navy brought me here. SF then LA. Then back and forth again. I’m now a lawyer. I’ve mixed with all the high and haughty. For the entirety. And I remain completely rooted in my rural culture. I imagine there are few as fake as those who’ve come from my place and who’ve embraced city culture as their own.
As an outsider looking in, I’m English, I always found the phrase flyover states to be the most contemptuous and dismissive of phrases and more reflective of the arseholes who coined and used it than the people who live in those states.
I distinctly remember wanting to hang Kevin Williamson over a precipice, after I read that piece from him, after it came out.
Bageant by contrast was a true journalist who could sit in any local bar comfortably and talk to anyone like a peer.
I do not believe they are entirely genuine. If they are they are profoundly stupid. Anyone who examine the aftermath of government subsidization and determines that this is necessary for their own small town is functionally retarded.
You describe how I feel about Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson when I see their fake podcast sets and plaid shirts. They may not qualify as Hicklibs, but they seek an image for a flyover demographic that sometimes seems fake.
Being a woodchuck raised in the region of the Catskills that Williamson describes, it’s apparent to me that much of Mainstream Con Inc we see is pretty much an act. They offer a brand of collectivism aimed at supplanting values to compel people to build and craft things for their own satisfaction and well being. Big Ag is fine as long as it is American based multinationals, as small farmers and homesteaders are so “inefficient”.
Big cultural divide.