New York Times Goes On Cletus Safari, Actually Learns Something Interesting For Once

THE FUCK YOU SAY?

There's an election coming, so it's time for news organizations to send reporters out on Cletus Safaris to try to figure out what makes the MAGA pigs oink. Why do they hold what is, at this point, an essentially religious belief that the 2020 election was stolen? And are they really just all very "economic anxiety"?

So we learn from the New York Times that "In Fort Bend County, Texas, things are changing." Oh, no. Probably a good reason for some reactionary white people to overthrow democracy, we reckon. (This is the southwestern suburbs of Houston.)

"Mosques and Hindu temples draw thousands, farmland is giving way to suburbs and some Republicans feel their county is becoming more like majority-minority Houston." Good heavens, not majority-minorities or mega-mosques! Where will the white mega-churches go?

The headline of the piece is "Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated." In case you were unclear whether you were supposed to have sympathy for these people, or at least view them like anthropological curiosities.

As the Times explains, Fort Bend County is represented by noted election conspiracy theorist denier fucker moron Troy Nehls. And it is getting more diverse. Nehls apparently says they should "build a wall" between the district and Houston, and that Houston should pay for it. How cute.

The Times does provide some information in this Cletus Safari that's useful, though, namely that its analysis has found a specific correlation between the 139 Republican congressmen who voted to overthrow the government for Donald Trump and districts where the white percentage of the population is shrinking significantly:

The portion of white residents dropped about 35 percent more over the last three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other Republicans, the analysis found, and constituents also lagged behind in income and education. Rates of so-called deaths of despair , such as suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably higher as well.

This reminds us of the analysis of the January 6 terrorists by Robert Pape from the University of Chicago, which found that many J6-ers actually came from Biden counties, people governed by a sense of grievance that their majority status is disappearing. The Times says these seditionist districts are notable in that they tend to feature both the changing racial demographics and the socioeconomic issues. The theory appears to be that one feeds the other, i.e. they go full-on racist seditionist "let's destroy democracy" because they blame all the non-white people around them for their problems. (Little surprise, then, that the Times suggests that things like the Great Replacement Theory might have more traction in these kinds of districts.)

There are apparently 12 districts in America represented by Republicans that have become minority-white in recent years, and they are mostly in California and Texas. According to the Times , 10 of those districts have congressmen who voted to overthrow the government. Similarly, the lower the rate of college graduates — and high school graduates — in a Republican-held district, the more likely that Republican congressman is a seditionist. As is so often the case, education is a factor.

The article features other places with their own sets of circumstances. For example there is Montgomery County in southwest Virginia, home of Virginia Tech, which is represented in Congress by Rep. H. Morgan Griffith. This is the poverty-stricken, opioid-addiction, coal country side of the equation, and the health statistics provided by the Times are heartbreaking.

A nurse practitioner in that district says patients come into her clinic with tooth decay and heart problems, and now they ask about stolen elections: “‘Did you see that box of votes that was thrown away? Did you see they found extra ones?’ This is what we hear from our patients,” she said.

The Times quotes a restaurant owner who went to January 6 but stayed outside the Capitol, and who says you could have gone 225 miles east from the Kentucky border and seen nothing but Trump signs, and that's why nobody there thinks Joe Biden could have won Virginia.

“You could call it an echo chamber of our beliefs,” she added, “but that’s a pretty big landmass to be an echo chamber.”

Yet another white Republican without a concept of just how large the big city is, and how many people live there. Math, it has a well-known liberal bias.

Oh, there's one other big find here about the districts represented by seditionists, and it's not surprising: There are more evangelical protestants in these places. Magical thinking begets magical thinking.

But, but, but! They say it's not really all about grievance politics about the white population going down in places where the incomes are stagnant or worse and they all go to non-denominational mega-churches!

Instead, some residents said that their reasons for questioning the results should be obvious to anyone: the relatively small size of Mr. Biden’s rallies, the overnight disappearance of Mr. Trump’s early lead as more votes were tallied, the allegations about stuffed ballot drop boxes.

“It’s not a political thing. It’s a we-love-our-country thing,’” said Alecia Vaught, 46, a homemaker and Republican organizer in Christiansburg. “You’re either for America or you’re not.”

We guess these places are also marked by a higher susceptibility to bullshit. Did we mention this county holds weekly screenings of Dinesh D'Souza's hilariously debunked   piece of shit movie 2,000 Mules ?

Yeah, sometimes the simplest answer holds true, and it is that there are a lot of fucking idiots in these districts, and they vote.

[ New York Times ]

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