I normally look for tweets to write about that have a lot of engagement — the fun is in the replies to something stupid Adam Schiff or Eric Swalwell had tweeted. This tweet is different, though. Vanity Fair has 4.7 million followers on Twitter … and yet this tweet has no replies, no retweets, and 15 likes as of this writing. It hasn’t been up for long, to be fair, but the teaser was too ominous for me to pass up: “F** Biden,” “Don’t Tread on Me,” and a Wisconsin Death Trip for Our Times.
“I am for some kind of revolution," said on Wisconsinite. "I think people should be prepared to arm themselves, because it’s been shown to women that we can’t trust our government to protect us.” https://t.co/fU3nrqLMwZ
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) December 10, 2022
Reporters got a lot of flak after President Trump was elected for visiting diners in rural areas and talking to red-staters. “Nobody wants to hear from these people,” liberals complained. Salena Zito made a name for herself by interviewing Trump voters and revealing their actual concerns. Vanity Fair’s Jeff Sharlet, though, knew he was on a Wisconsin death trip and would be knocking on doors “bearing the darkest symbols.” He writes:
In How, Wisconsin, I broke my rule of never approaching a house hidden from the road if it advertises itself with Trump flags, which is why I found myself backing up, very slowly, before two barking black labs. Their owner was Jerry Pinchart, a fit former contractor with white hair and skin almost exactly the same color as his salmon T-shirt. It was the afternoon of Dobbs, which Jerry told me was good news but also bad. Good for God, bad for the nation, which now faces “chaos.” He was a proud no-exceptions man. Rape, incest—God lets it happen for reason. Life of the mother? No, sir. That’s up to God. Prayer was all the medicine a mother needs.
Jerry didn’t consider himself a zealot. Almost nobody I met was particularly pious. Jerry liked wearing his Trump shirt, he said, because the ladies gave him hugs. James, concerned about the exile of God from the schools growled many times that he didn’t give a fuck what anybody else thought. Jerry said he’d heard “they”—the others—were calling for riots. Part of the Democrat plan for “total control” that began with killing babies and would end with war in Wisconsin. “It’s bled through here too.”
Not a word Jerry said was fully his own. I’d been listening to Fox, to right-wing radio, as I drove, and I’d already heard variations of every syllable he uttered. Jerry followed the news. He was a follower. He had not been a good student as a boy, he said. But now he had learned his lesson. The lesson was fear, the lesson was bitter, the lesson was that other people were getting more than their fair share. That grievance flowed naturally for him from his feelings about baby killers—as if women, by getting to choose, were getting more than their fair share too.
Wow, Sharlet even listened to Fox News radio for the piece? Talk about going above and beyond. “It was the afternoon of Dobbs,” he writes ominously, believing that there should be no limits on abortion whatsoever and thinking that’s “normal” in America.
OK, we’re up to six retweets and 15 likes since I started writing this post. Check out the Vanity Fair piece if you want all of your liberal priors confirmed.
Recommended
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Related:
Dan Rather wants journalists to look outside ‘country diners’ when looking for ‘average voters’ https://t.co/hcYr6TNH0j
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) December 16, 2019
