An absolutely brilliant article by Nate Hochman appeared in American Reformer. It’s a review of a leftist screed White Rural Rage, and it’s one of those cases when a badly written, unintelligent book gives rise to a brilliant, devastating response.
I didn’t know which part to excerpt because the whole piece is excellent, so I went with this one:
Conservatives will construct sophisticated ideological theories and perform Olympic-level mental gymnastics routines to evade the obvious. At times, this verges on absurd: In a recent interview with Steve Bannon, for example, Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon angrily lambasted [the new book] White Rural Rage as an attack on the “multi-racial working class” — a notion disabused by the very first word of the book’s title — before launching into a monologue about how Trump’s base was “multi-racial” and “the majority of Hispanics” were “also part of the MAGA movement.” (Spoiler alert: They are not). Her outrage was not that the left was anti-white; her outrage was that the left was accusing her side of being white.
https://americanreformer.org/2024/04/the-angry-kulak/
If you are forced to read White Rural Rage at work, you can use this review to demonstrate that it’s been rejected by reputable scholars everywhere. I’ve bookmarked it for that reason.
It’s come to that, eh? People are forced to read insulting screeds and recite humiliating mantras as a condition of employment. I don’t know how one sits at work, knowing that there are colleagues in the room who are terrified of speaking honestly in front of you. Do people think all of us whom you forced to do these things forgot about it? That we don’t mind?
We mind quite terribly.
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