Imagine working for the US forest service and voting for the leopards.
Read the article, and maybe one day I'll find a place to extend empathy. But do not bullshit me when she claims she did everything right, yet voted for Trump. We're all in this hell because of your selfishness or lack or moral conviction. Good luck finding a job. Maybe spend the next lifetime educating your community against these people.
Pretty much all of outstate MN and WI is like this (elsewhere too, I'm just from this area so I can testify firsthand). Working poor. Reliant on food banks (govt grants), Medicaid healthcare, subsidiaries for their healthcare insurance, government grants for housing starts or multi family housing, government funding for low income childcare and preschool, government jobs, and on and on.
But these people read at a sixth grade level and do math lower than that. Younger people only get information from TikTok. Older people from Fox News or Facebook. Most have never earned a post secondary degree or even attended college. Most adults haven't read a book since highschool. Many have never traveled more than 150 miles from home their entire lives.
It's like the absolutely perfect group to be duped again and again by propaganda and ruled by robber barons. When viewed as a group, it's easy to say, "haha get fucked." But interacting with many of these leopard victims, especially the young ones, I just kind of feel bad for them. Unpopular take here I know, I enjoy the schadenfreude as much as the next person.
Yet, I usually end up talking to someone at a bar or somewhere and we talk about a lot of other things first, animals usually or kids or the weather. And I think, "hey that's cool... they adopted 3 shelter dogs and are volunteering at the school and so on." But then the political shoe will drop and I'm like, "Really? You too? Don't you know x, y, or z are all the things you, well, need to survive?"
They're just ... Well... Dumb. Dumb in the way little kids are dumb. Naive and unable to tell truth from fiction, mentally and emotionally stunted people who will never grow out of it. Lied to and taken advantage of so many times they eventually become diehard bigots and lonely assholes.
Sigh...
This comment sent me on a deep thought train. These places are populated by those that remained, while others left and became the sophisticated urbanites that broadened their horizons. My father was one of those people that left, he left the day after his mother died and joined the military, a common enough story. He was quite the teacher, and it made me the person I am today.
My father often also pointed out those who had also left, who had also done well. There's a selection bias there but I feel like having a mix of both a rural and urban experience is extremely helpful in human development.
Those that stay... well my father was often disappointed to hear how poorly things went out there, but with no family remaining there he never returned. Abused, poorly supported (though sometimes it seemed not for a lack of trying), with an evaporative cooling effect removing the best and brightest as they went to urban areas seeking better lives, and perhaps resentful they didn't get to leave. The crab bucket effect is in full play as well, dragging back down many who climb but don't get out.
In the end the remainers feel not quite unlike a medieval peasant: A prize for nobility to fight over, an accessory to the land they work, and body that can be drafted when someone threatens to take that prize away.
I grew up in one of those places. It was a town that anyone from a real city would think of as tiny, but was seen as the "Big City" in the area: population of around 35k, by far the largest in a several hour drive. I left when I graduated to go to college and have never returned from more than a holiday break to visit friends and family. Some of my friends and family left and some stayed. Everyone who stayed... well, it hasn't worked out well for them. They all ended up with dead end jobs in a dying town, hoping for the boom times again that will never come. They've become bitter, paranoid, and fearful of the outside world. The last time I was there, in 2021, was so damn sad. The town is so run down, there is a bad meth problem, and everything just felt despondent. Yeah, the town has chosen to do it to themselves in a lot of ways and I wouldn't be part of this community if I didn't enjoy at least some schadenfreude, but I also have to wonder how will those 35000 people, and their kids, ever have a chance at a better life?
These are people of the land. The common clay of the new west…
you know, morons.
You hit the nail on the head. I know good, wholesome people who voted for this evil, awful man and it blows my mind.
I grew up in rural Minnesota and can testify that all of what you said is accurate.
After she was sexually assaulted at 16, Cooper had sworn she would never be caught unprepared. But here she was. Betrayed by her body, which would not cooperate. Betrayed by her family, who supported firing federal workers like her. And, perhaps most painfully, betrayed by herself.
She did not want to vote for Trump. Cooper hated what he said about women and hated how he treated them. Her family always said the women who accused the president of sexual assault had either made it up or deserved it. Cooper heard them and kept her own experience a secret, thinking that they might feel the same way about her.
Sexual assault victim votes for sexual assaulter is in the same vein as Jews for Hitler. Maybe not to the same degree, but definitely in the right direction. How stupid do you have to be?
Trump, at a campaign stop an hour and a half south of her, had promised to make IVF free. She knew that from a video clip she saw on TikTok. And she had believed him.
This is what boggles my mind. The continued uncritical belief in anything Trump says
If you think she was at all aware of Trump’s rape case you’re dreaming. She was probably too young to even remember “grab her by the pussy” Because I don’t have the feeling she’s ever been engaged politically.
It's deeper than the job; she voted also based on the promise that IVF would be free. Yet another promise that Apricot Asshole is likely to walk back. After all, the govt is downsizing; what grounds do they have for making specific kinds of Healthcare free? Who is going to oversee those cases?
It's stupidity in the highest degree. How is he going to make an incredibly expensive procedure free while getting rid of any teeth the govt has in oversight and reducing medical coverage across the board?
All the cruelty and hate, all the blatant lies and rampant criminality, that's fine as long as he wasn't lying about that one thing, right up until it's her turn to get hurt and it turns out liars lie.
Don't worry, tax free tips and overtime are coming any day now... Right?
That bill had the framework to allow it, don't you see? We have to do that first, and then we can do the other thing. We have to navigate the legislative system.
Oh, also we need to fire tens of thousands of govt employees. Just have Big Balls tweet about it, they can come get their stuff tomorrow between the hours of 3:20am-3:27am.
"Have the day you voted for."
Reading stories like this are going to be the only solace I’ll have for the next 4 years.
Don't forget the alcohol. And drugs!!!
Oh man, I totally forgot about alcohol and drugs! Thanks for the reminder. Gonna start the weekend early.
Idiot.
Didn't bother reading the article. I don't need to hear the excuses and regrets of asshole dipshits that drag everyone down with them because they can't be bothered to educate themselves about the people they vote for, which is their civic duty.
If you can't be bothered to do a little homework, don't fucking vote.
Hope she suffers.
It's not a matter of intelligence. Trauma does awful things to a person, especially when you're surrounded by awful human beings and don't have the tools to be able to cope.
What a shame... anyway....
