this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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These are West Virginians. The poverty is staggering and coal work is all they have, what very little remains of it.
Appalachia in general has been spat on, kicked, and left to die by the ruling class after their usefulness ran out. When everything ran on coal it was the most lucrative region in the US and the labor movement was incredibly strong. The people there voting for trump is more the result of Democrats abandoning working-class politics than anything else. Trump pretends to be a champion of the working class and promised the return of the coal industry while Democrats dismissed them as unreachable and said they would phase out what remains of the coal industry to prevent climate change. When Republicans tell them climate change is overblown and clean coal is possible they want to believe it because they want a return to "the good old days" when Appalachia was booming. Democrats could have reached out to these people and offered an alternative, but their wealthy donors wouldn't have liked any real solution and that's who the party actually answers to, not the people.
This guy creates some of the finest journalism I've seen, maybe ever.
https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello
One man and a selfie stick. No drama, no leading questions, no bullshit. He goes to places in America that few outsiders see or understand. His interviews in Appalachia leave me a bit weepy.
There's one where he stops to talk to some adolescents fishing off a bridge on a back country highway. The fat kid is obviously quite smart, wants to be an historian. Made me sad to think such people are stuck there.
Yea but if their education system failed them and they succumbed to generational poverty and saturation level propaganda that makes them no longer my countrymen and undeserving of any sympathy.
Go watch some Peter Santenello journalism from Appalachia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9lSZlDJAC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3O6bKdPLbw&t=1s
(dozens more from all over America)
You won't, because you fear that empathy might change your view. I posted that for any non-fascists that might see this comment.
That's my Saturday morning jam, mixed with Chris Okay going places white people are highly unexpected to be, Afghanistan right now.
I was being facetious above, I think too many people don't realize how effective generational economic trauma and populist rhetoric and propaganda are.