Kansas Should Go F— Itself – Reporting by Matt Taibbi
This began before Trump. As Bernie Sanders told Rolling Stone after the 2016 election, when the small-town American saw himself or herself on TV, it was always a caricature. Some idiot. Or maybe some criminal, some white working-class guy who has just stabbed three people. These caricatures drove a lot of voters toward Trump, especially when he began telling enormous crowds that the lying media was full of liars who lied about everything.
After 2016 it became axiomatic that the Trump voter, or the Leave voter, was without exception now a crazed, racist monster. As detailed here multiple times, ruminations on Republican voter behaviors became not merely uninteresting to pundits after November 2016, but actively taboo. By 2020, the official answer to What s the Matter with Kansas? was Kansas is a White Supremacist Project and Can Go Fuck Itself.
Frank in 2004 wrote about how confused Midwestern voters were, watching TV images of the beautiful people of the time. Movie stars and hedge-funders donned ribbons in support of animals or the underprivileged, while spending huge sums on pictures of Jesus covered in ants or on crucifix-shaped popsicles that supposedly were comments on fanaticism and violence. This, while factory towns were basically being moved en masse to China.
Imagine the reaction in these places now, to editorials in the New York Times instructing white liberals to cut off their relatives (by text, incidentally) until they donate to Black Lives Matter, or a CNN tweet instructing individuals with a cervix to start getting cancer screens at age 25, or to widespread denunciations of Mount Rushmore as a monument of two slaveholders when visited by Trump, after those same outlets praised its majesty just four years earlier.
These stories are as incomprehensible to Middle America as the pictures of MAGA fanatics going maskless and dying of Covid-19 to own the libs are to blue-state audiences. Yet both groups are bombarded with images of their opposite extremes, with predictable results: we all hate each other.