“White Rural Rage”—does the book predict or provoke violence

Either way it provides political cover for violence directed at those who’ve suffered greatly under neoliberal policies of late-stage capitalism

(editor’s note: media assets have put this rather short piece near “email limit” — just click on “view entire message” if it’s truncated by your email provider)

THIS IS ALL GOING SOMEWHERE…BAD

Joe Biden’s abysmal polling and obvious cognitive issues present a serious problem for political consultants trying to get him reelected. They’ve abandoned the use of policy prescriptions to make life better for voters. Now the consultant class turns to The Darkest Political Arts to engineer outcomes. Since 2016 and Russiagate these tactics have included methods previously used only in CIA coups…only in foreign lands. That’s over. Since 2016 they’re accustomed to using that power domestically, and if there’s one thing we know about power, it’s that no one relinquishes it without a fight.

The switch from foreign to domestic use of “Arab Spring” tactics was originally meant to stop Bernie Sanders (and Jeremy Corbyn in UK). Everything thrown at Trump was created for intended for use on the “socialist.” Trump wasn’t seen as a threat in 2016—that’s how he won that election.

Russiagate broke the seal, setting the American intelligence community loose to influence US elections using their old playbook: NGOs, mass media, big tech and lawfare. These are the same resources that have empowered a new priesthood of government contractors and NGOs with tools to control public opinion, censor speech, and manage social media.

“White Rural Rage” is ‘the next current thing.’ The book details an insurgency of domestic terror that is predicted to materialize before November and judging by the way it was introduced into public opinion, I believe it’s an electoral strategy.

---

“White Rural Rage: the Threat to American Democracy” by authors Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, has already made the rounds to all major media, which reports uncritically of a threat to Democracy from white rural people. The book makes the case that Trump voters will inevitably turn violent this election cycle because it’s in their nature to be:

1. racist

2. conspiracist

3. anti-democratic, and

4. prone to violence.

Here’s a snippet from a transcript of the authors’ guest appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Mika Brzezinski sets up the interview by asking:

“Why are white rural voters a threat to democracy at this point?”

Schaller takes it from there:

“We lay out a four-fold threat that white rural voters pose.”

“They’re the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geodemographic group in the country.”

“Second, they’re the most conspiracist group. QAnon support and subscribers, election denialism, COVID denialism and scientific skepticism, Obama birtherism,” Schaller said.

“Third, anti-democratic sentiments. They don’t believe in an independent press, free speech. They’re most likely to say the president should be able to act unilaterally without any checks from Congress or the courts or the bureaucracy,” he said.

And lastly, this demographic is the most likely to “justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discussion,” Schaller, who’s apparently unaware of Portland, Oregon claimed.

---

Saying white rural people are a threat to America is every bit as bigoted as saying the same about Pakistani-Americans of Muslim heritage, especially given that the books spends a lot of time pumping up the menace of the faith traditions of rural people. Furthermore, it signals a willingness to act upon the bigotry. Coastal elites in general, and Democratic Party Elites specifically are already quite bigoted against rural folks. For every $1 spent in rural America by the Democrats, the Republican Party spends $14—but apparently this can’t be why Democrats do so badly in rural America. Nor could be about a history of economic inequality resulting from a history of labor exploitation and refusal to invest in these communities—nah, it’s the voters—something is wrong with the voters.

Thus, the “strategic vision” for reelecting Joe Biden has shifted from ‘Trump is dangerous’ to ‘Trump voters are dangerous.’ Rural folks are so treacherous, we are told, that they’re the prime threat to American Democracy.

I believe that evidence of this threat will be “produced” whether it exists or not, and according to the scholars who collected and analyzed the data used in Schaller and Waldman’s book, it most certainly doesn’t exist.

Scholars of rural America, Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis have come forward to denounce “Schaller and Waldman in the strongest terms, calling “White Rural Rage” is “academic malpractice.”

According to Jacobs and Munis, “rural identity is not reducible to these beliefs,” such as racism, conspiricism, violence, and anti-democratic sentiment, and moreover these beliefs “are vastly more numerous outside rural communities than within them.” In other words, the data upon which the book is based, according to two of the researchers who actually gathered it, shows the exact opposite of what “White Rural Rage” claims. If you’re looking for racism, conspiracism, anti-democratic sentiment, or propensity to violence in American demographics—look to urban areas, not rural. Jacobs especially doesn’t mince words in his criticism of “White Rural Rage”: “The book reeks of tell-tale signs of being written first and finding facts second. Only after they settled on a salacious title, it seems, did they go out and try to find what they already agreed to see, with little to no attention paid to whether any of it was true.”

Jacobs observes that the book is based on the “ecological fallacy” of political geography, which is a mistaken conclusion drawn about individuals based on findings from groups to which they belong. This applies to all four of the book’s claims, which are each articulated as characteristics that apply to individuals, not social groups. You can’t infer from a group down to a person. This is the same fallacy conservatives often use to racialize crime. A study of crime rates may find that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of African-American residents had higher crime rates. When that same data is analyzed correctly, African-American individuals are no more likely to commit crimes than other races.

Jacobs shows exactly how the fallacy is applied to elections in a critique published in Reason: “Because authoritarianism predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries and because rural residents tend to support Trump, [Schaller and Waldman] say rural residents are the most likely to be authoritarian.” The ecological fallacy is actually in the premise, which ought to be avoided by serious researchers, but Schaller and Waldman premise their whole book on this casuistry.

“White Rural Rage” itself is disinformation manufactured to influence our election—which is, according to its authors, the cardinal sin the book is supposed to address. Despite this mendacity, they’re given free reign in legacy media—from cable news to coastal elite print media including the New York Times—to ensure that Americans are suitably freaked out about country folk.

Another scholar of rural America, Kristin Lunz Trujillo, who teaches Political Science at University of South Carolina notes that Schaller and Waldman also cite her work and again, “get everything about rural America wrong.” She wants people to know that “researchers and academics do genuinely care about being meticulous and measured and about getting things right..many of us care about reducing the rifts in society rather than stoking them,” she writes in Newsweek.

Trujillo reflects my own sentiments when she says rural Americans deserve far better than being cast as villains and “dangerous boogeyman of modern America.” She agrees with Jacobs, that Schaller and Waldman are guilty of precisely that which they proclaim to fight against, saying they “seem to miss their own complicity (or worse, understand it but don't care) in further inflaming the societal discord that they so vehemently criticize in others.”

To everyone who is of the same mind, I just want to say, this has nothing to do with rural America. What’s happening here is that Democrats occupy an exceptionally weak position going into the election. If politics were poker, then the Dems are drawing for an inside straight while their opponent almost certainly has two pair. They’ve run out of options, and they think (or desperately hope) they can bluff their way out.

OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING—WRAPPING UP THE SMEAR

Elites will turn up the volume on this impending threat with a big, new HBO documentary on the Oklahoma City bombing called “An American Bombing: The Road To April 19th.” This will further abet the disinformation project to attack rural white folks in the sphere of public opinion by “layering” and then “merchandizing” the threat. This is called a “Wrap-Up Smear,” according to Nancy Pelosi who describes the process in a viral video. First you manufacture propaganda and find “placement” in media for it. That smear is then “merchandized” through PR networks and picked up by other media, who then “layer” it with more smears (lies, half-truths) to further assail those who’ve offended their feudal lords. Once the smear is established, it becomes integrated in public opinion so that it’s taken for granted as “common knowledge” which is no longer questioned or examined.

---

In the case of HBO’s Oklahoma City Bombing documentary, I noticed that its description could’ve been cribbed from the “White Rural Rage” book (quoting from Rotten Tomatoes): “The film looks at the surge in political violence through the story of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, showing the roots of anti-government sentiment and its reverberations today, along with the emotionally charged warnings of those who suffered tragic losses in the deadliest homegrown attack in U.S. history.”

Under the auspices of State Department, USAID, and intelligence cutouts, the US government is no stranger to foreign anti-democratic skullduggery, but the OKC bombing is considered by many to provide a view of those capabilities put to use on domestic terror. According to new OKC researchers, McVeigh’s first contact after embarking upon the national gun show circuit in early 1993 was a man with CIA connections who was an international arms dealer who was also involved in the covert wars in Central America, and even claimed to have trained Cuban counterrevolutionaries. Cuban terrorist groups Alpha 66, Brigade 2506, Omega 7 were all CIA-backed anti-Castro terrorist groups of this subgenus. Not saying he trained those group, but do have a look at them to understand what’s being considered.

You might say, “Sure, the US does this sort of thing in other countries, but they wouldn’t do that here, would they?” Well, that’s the point. It’s a question that must be answered because if this is true, it turns our entire “democracy” into a clown show.

It wouldn’t be the only time this happened, either. Remember the Liberty City Seven (aka Miami Seven)? The much-hyped “terror cell” was supposed to prove that Al Qaida threatened us domestically. The group was described as a bizarre cult bent on killing Americans. They were “arrested and charged with terrorism-related offenses in 2006” and the media hyped the threat despite the fact that none of the men were from the Middle East (two were Haitian; five African-American—none Muslim). Holes appeared in the tale after it was reported that their actual operational capability was extremely low.” It became obvious this was an FBI entrapment scheme when reports circulated that an FBI informant had been promised reduced jail time for domestic violence if he delivered some terrorists.

That’s some next-level domestic skullduggery by our intelligence community, and it barely scratches the surface of chicanery associated with the OKC bombing. With years of combing through archives of local news, a new generation of researchers have uncovered information that didn’t reach 90s-era mass media audiences. Many now argue that evidence suggests the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building was known beforehand, and possibly assisted by government assets. Once you examine those assets, the question becomes: Did they instigate it? This would be quite significant if true, and we deserve the truth no matter what.

If it has indeed been decided that “white rural rage” is necessary to keep Donald Trump out of office, then my fear is that someone will produce more evidence of a “white, rural threat to Democracy” than Schaller and Waldman’s fraudulent book.

“WHITE RURAL RAGE” IS HYBRID WARFARE

When militaries engage in political subterfuge with the intent of affecting power dynamics it’s called Hybrid Warfare. Arab Spring and Euromaidan both used hybrid warfare to service the interests seeking power. It works with and without live gunfire. We recently saw hybrid warfare in action when Israel claimed Hamas committed monstrous rapes, which wasn’t true, but the smear was “wrapped up” in media so that it became “common knowledge.” The truth is that Israel lied to provide political cover for US sending money and arms.

Hybrid warfare gimmicks were recently on display domestically when every media outlet, talking head, and Democratic Party operative ran with a story that was an obvious fabrication, but fit their new Trump-as-domestic-terrorist theme. I’ll quote directly from FactCheck.org: “While speaking about the potential loss of U.S. auto manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, former President Donald Trump said if he isn’t elected, ‘it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.’ President Joe Biden’s campaign quickly accused Trump of fomenting “political violence.”

The “bloodbath” quote propagated across Twitter quicker than a rumor of infidelity at a Baptist Church. CBS News seemed to be ahead of the crowd, issuing one of the first tweets promoting a story devoted to it. Then the herd followed: Aaron Rupar, Thom Hartmann, HuffPo, Guardian, etc ad nauseum. The media hits on MSNBC and CNN were sickening with Democratic Party operatives insisting “even if he didn’t completely say it, he meant it.”

Not for nothing, Biden warned of “bloodbath” in 2020 if Bernie Sanders didn’t drop out of primary

---

In the first few pages of “White Rural Rage,” Schaller and Waldman refer to January 6 rioters as “domestic terrorists.” You’d have to be blind not to see where this is going.

In this media environment it’d be fairly trivial to substantiate such a threat with a combination of surveillance, AI and the US intelligence community’s long history of research into behavior modification. Pinpoint a few vulnerable people—maybe an ex-military bullet-catcher facing jail time on domestic violence charges—and push them until the desired act manifests.

The possibility of this sort of skullduggery was explored in the 2014 movie, “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” The Macguffin used by the villains was a phone app that transmitted an ultrasonic frequency in order to agitate people to commit violence (like cable news, but you can’t hear it). In the movie, the behavior modification gizmo was tested during Sunday Service at a white rural church in Eastern Kentucky.

It exceeded expectations with 100 percent of people in the church responding to the frequency in a bloodbath that is arguably the most important action sequence of the 21st Century. The orgy of violence is set perfectly to the score of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.”

This clip demonstrates the essence of what “White Rural Rage” prescribes: an uprising of the well bred against the hordes of barbarians.

All the villains had to do was just turn the knob until the desired amount of violence became inevitable.

Our “hero” of the movie is “The King’s Man,” a posh operative with impeccable manners who wears “Oxfords, not Brogues” and massacres the packed church of white rural folks while barely creasing his tailored suit. After the carnage, we’re faced with the contradiction of identifying with “The King’s Man,” whose actions repudiate our trust in him and forces us to think about all the dead churchgoers. The Kingsman (movie) challenges us to question our appreciation for the urbane gentlemen who showed the hillbillies who’s boss. This is why the scene hits so hard, and why I believe it’s culturally important and relevant to this essay.

ANTIDEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES, and CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Of all the claims about the essential nature of white, rural Americans, the one about “antidemocratic sentiment” is the most egregious because it’s being posed by the most anti-democratic institutions on the planet: US mass media. In a “pot-calls-kettle-black” manner, Schaller and Waldman tautologically define voters’ “support for Trump” as anti-democratic. It can’t be proven wrong in their logic because one defines the other (it’s how tautologies work).

But here’s the thing: a voter can’t be “antidemocratic” because voters don’t have the power to act anti-democratically. It’s like saying that a user of Microsoft Word impacts the world when they change their default font to Helvetica. It just doesn’t work like that. You have power over ONLY your own Microsoft Word docs in the same way voters have power ONLY over our own votes. To act “antidemocratically” requires access to the system.

A voter is as likely to bring down democracy using their powers of “anti-democratic sentiment” as I am likely to produce the Hope Diamond out of a desire for a big, expensive rock.

Those who actually do have that power include mass media, the US intelligence apparatus, oligarchs and Silicon Valley. The real bad guys are those technocrats, toadies, and mercenaries using the dark political arts to destroy foreign and domestic democracies through coups and Color Revolutions.

If it weren’t so dangerous, it’s be hilarious that the authors of “White Rural Rage” basically published a 320-page conspiracy theory of the inevitability of scary hillbillies bringing down democracy with their pickup trucks and ham biscuits. We really do have to laugh, but then we need to get serious and know this: The real threat to democracy is posed by those who point to a specific racial demographic in America, hoping to scapegoat them for all that’s wrong in a country, because that usually precedes very bad things happening. And Schaller and Waldman have provided a textbook that may (or may not) be used to engineer an electoral win for a presidential candidate that everyone knows is suffering from mid-stage dementia.

---

I have much more to say on conspiracy theory and antidemocratic sentiment. It’s already written and will drop soon as Part Two. I’ll leave it here for Part One.