Hey, this hits close to home so I just want to say: small rural towns are fucking HELL HOLES. They are dying because even yokels like me have found that once you get to a place over like 50k people there's enough economic opportunity that one or two families can't just own everything and everyone.
Somehow the "lying vermin" never seem to think about what happens if/when the violent GOP regains the WH, and the dictator on day one decides to get revenge against the press.
The post 9/11 "real america" propoganda of white farmers and 40s sensibilities was the cigarettes and the White Guy on roids driving a massive truck and wearing tactical gear talking about "them" is the inevitable cancer.
I really need to read this book now
Saying that their critics -- whose books they cite -- write about one subset of their findings for general-interest publications but whisper about other things in academic panels is a pretty damn good takedown.
this is a much, much better piece than last month's low-effort Krugman column on the book, which was positive towards the book... but in hindsight, it suffered from the same exact problems discussed in this piece, as the words "race" and "racism" did not appear once in the Krugman column
