Terry Zink has spent 57 years building a life in Montanaās backcountry. The 57-year-old third-generation houndsman from Marionāa remote town nestled deep within the Flathead National Forestāruns a small archery target business serving outdoor recreation workers and guides who, until recently, had steady employment managing Americaās public lands. Contents
Those workers are disappearing. Their jobs are gone. And Zink, who voted for Trump in 2024, is watching his customer baseāand his livelihoodāvanish before his eyes.
āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for this,ā Zink told Politico reporters as he surveyed the damage. āYou cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, water restoration, and healthy forestsā (1).
Folks from rural areas prioritize cultural signaling for conservativism over economic growth. Iād hazard that Mr. Zink would probably vote Trump again, given the opportunity, if the opposite candidate publicly supported trans rights or was just a Democratic black woman.
Edit:
Goosechase.jpg āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for thisā
āWHAT DID YOU VOTE FOR THENā
they love vice signalling as well as virtue signalling.
Conservatives: āWe voted for the child rapist.ā
for white unarmed mother of 3 to be murdered and called a terrorist because she was murdered
God people in rural communities are so stupid when they vote. I live in a very lopsided state. Just for ease of understanding, about 80% of the state is rural, but also 80% of the people live in the cities. Rural folks often forget just how many more people live in cities.
So they get resentful and say āwhy are MAH tax dollars going to all them city folksā! Iāve had this talk so many times with them, why should they pay (like pennies or their salary) to my city improvements just because theyāre state taxes?
Well, rural guy, because in actuality āus city folkā subsidize all of the rural state. They think theyāre paying for our stuff but turns out density is way cheaper and way more economically viable than rural. So we subsidize them all the time. I always remind them who do they think pays for the roads, the infrastructure, their state parks? Itās not them and their low tax income. Their life depends on the city people
And then they vote to hurt us by cutting programsā¦ And forget that we were paying for them to be on those programs.
āI love the poorly educatedā- TRUMP and ever GOP ever.
As LBJ famously stated back in the 60ās to his then-press secretary Bill Moyers: āIf you can convince the lowest white man, that heās better than the best black man, he wonāt notice that your picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on and heāll open his pocket for youā¦ā
This is exactly the classism couched in racism that took our erstwile Mr. Rural for a ride. All them āblacksā on welfare taking their tax dollarsā¦ (because the unspoken bit is, ONLY blacks and minorities and uppity unwed women that breed like rabbits - the welfare āqueensā donātcha knowā¦ are on welfareā¦)
Every goddamn decade these poorly educated idiots fall for it.
Their only connection to the outside world used to be newspapers, then radio and television, now itās the internet. This makes them extremely vulnerable to disinformation.
I canāt count the number of times Iāve been lectured by some yokel on how the city Iāve lived my entire life in is actually a warzone with shaira law.
mostly fox news for conservative milleneals and older, and now with NEWSMAX/OAN right wing grifters, and consistent convincing them into the manosphere.
Same! Theyāre absolutely terrified of my city and to me itās like, what the place where I walked to get my bagel this morning?
its a hellhole and fire, says fox pundits. in hindsight, the homeless problems, drug addicts are brought on by the gop truncating these 2 groups to liberal cities, its not by accident you see an increase every few years, they are being bussed or given a ticket here. MSM/fox will never report on it, because it just makes the gop states look bad.
We were always vulnerable, just to a very selective group of content creators. Now itās open to anyone with the flashiest bullshit.
We should have learned about media in the 80s when everyone was telling us this would happen. But we didnāt. Heil Trump.
We were always vulnerable, just to a very selective group of content creators. Now itās open to anyone with the flashiest bullshit.
We should have learned about media in the 80s when everyone was telling us this would happen. But we didnāt. Heil Trump.
There is a grain of truth in that rural areas get worse government service. Power outages last for longer, often they donāt even have sewer hookups and have to maintain septic systems, roads are maintained at a lower level, etc. They really do get less benefit (in outcome terms) than city folk.
I think @[email protected] hit on the information environment as the reason they canāt see that that lower service level comes at a way, way higher monetary cost. Our information aggregators are in the business of making money from engagement, and telling people things they want to hear that sound true is the most effective engagement tool. I donāt see the problem getting any better unless we figure out a better information model.
It is true, and I counter that with if you choose to live far away from people then you will be prioritized less. Things get fixed faster when there are more people affected, so when you choose to live miles away from anyone, when your power goes out itās not a high priority. I argue that thatās their choice, and that itās deserved when it also costs much more for that one person to have power compared to thousands of people getting power for relatively the same cost in an urban area. Harsh I know, but thatās how the money flows. They can always move to an urban area if they choose that services are more important than living rurally. More or less I agree with you, but I would tell them āyou chose thatā.