The President will isse an Executive Order to abolish The Department of Education tomorrow. So much for teachers, special education classes, and student loans. There is also talk of abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps to prevent abusive overdraft fees on behalf of banks, and exploitation by predatory check-cashing businesses.
80,000 probationary and low-level veterans will also be fired from the Veterans Administration. They primarily voted for the presidential administration that has ordered the firings. They will be very upset when they are.
Over the past few weeks there have been many firings on behalf of this administration. They fired 7,000 people from Social Security. They fired 500 people who help to predict weather disasters such as hurricanes. They fired 3,000 people who take care of our National Parks.
They completely did away with all foreign aid. They fired most of the military and independent regulators who provide a check on their power. Many of the firings have been nakedly political, based solely on whether you support the administration or not. That’s never the reason given though. “Poor performance” even though in most cases all recent performance reviews were fine.
America is in the process of cutting out its own heart.
Why is that? Because rural men were resentful. They worked hard and spent carefully for food in grocery stores and watched SNAP recipients buy crates of Mountain Dew in front of them in line. They saw people trading such benefits outside gas stations for cigarettes and beer. Or so they tell me. Much of this was probably not first-hand experience, but stories related to one another at the water cooler and the construction site.
Rural men also don’t understand divergent sexualities or gender identities. They have been told their whole lives – until relatively recently in fact – that such identities are mental disorders and abominations. They don’t understand transgender expression or social, hormonal or surgical transition.
All they know is that their children leave home to develop their own opportunities, and they come back gay, transgender, or countercultural and hating everyone they previously loved. They describe it as a “mind virus” but they don’t understand their children were always this way, and their own short-sightedness and closed minds are what drove them away.
They don’t like that women are independent and not reliant on them anymore. They don’t like that women can have sex with who they are attracted to just as men can. They don’t like that the playing field is becoming strange and unfair. To rural men, banning abortion is a means of control, but either they don’t admit that or they don’t recognize it for what it is.
To rural men, women should be punished for having sex, enslaved to a lifetime attached to a man she may not even love, for just one or two mistakes. This shouldn’t apply to rural men, because “boys will be boys.” Some even advocate to overlook or conceal date rape, molestation and physical and verbal abuse so “a good man’s life won’t be ruined.” I have seen this happen first hand in a few of the churches I have attended.
Rural men are also disadvantaged. They are no more adapted to the educational and professional environment in 2025 than they are the dating scene. They don’t understand computers. They don’t learn new skills. They don’t trust educators, the media, or experts. Men in particular either don’t attend or drop out of college at higher rates than women, and many of them are addicted to debilitating drugs such as methamphetamines, heroin, or painkillers. This is because they are stubborn, incurious, but also hopeless and defeated.
But you know what I think the main reason is? Rural men feel insulted. The rural Southern man, like me, is often portrayed as a villain in dramatic movies and shows, somehow perverse, bigoted, or manipulative. The Southern accent is shorthand for ignorance and evil. They are one of the few groups it is safe to make unfair jokes about, to insult, to mock the values of and denigrate. I personally believe this is a holdover from their behavior during the civil war, but surely by now it is no longer justified.
So this has given them highly emotional grievances greater than their reason. They want revenge. They want pain. And they are willing to feel it themselves if only those who mock them feel it too. It is self-destructive at this point. I have listened many times to a rural male friend claim that America is so corrupt now it is best to vote to accelerate its decline so something better can take its place. I later came to know this is a common belief called “accelerationism.” What he doesn’t understand is that the replacement will be worse than the corruption. Revolution and anarchy rarely work out for anyone.
Now, the advocates for rural men and traditional ways of life have seized all three branches of government. They did so by owning the new communication medium – the Internet – and pushing propaganda and hateful narratives into everyone’s minds by deliberately manipulating algorithms, keywords and other exploitable metrics. It is the same as it was in the 1920s and 30s. A new form of communication always results in upheaval.
It is yet to be seen what the effects will be. The administration has staffed itself not with intelligent and skilled advisors and administrators, but sycophantic and incompetent drunks, date rapists, talk show hosts and podcasters. It is highly doubtful this will turn out well. So come with me. Watch America fall apart with me. I only pray that those I love most will realize they have done this to themselves, and change their beliefs before they sleepwalk through atrocities.