As a West Virginian, this rips my heart out.
They’ve done a damn good job making the right the “Christian” side.
People take their damn religion seriously (usually the leaders, not the text), and when you’re told every single day in an ultra religious community that being accepting of and protecting other religions is the same as a deal with the devil, it is easy to make you serve any master using your indoctrination against you. Every advance for the gays was an advance for Satan too and further solidified the demonization of the left to these people. Not long after 1921, deeply religious rural communities were introduced to an explosion of evangelical leaders and tent revivals whose preachers were all influenced by right wing Christian radio and that shit spread like wildfire. Any social advance was an advance for communism and therefore the devil.
I love my people, and you won’t find a more giving and loving people, but my god are they indoctrinated.
When driving through West “by God” Virginia, you will encounter 15 churches for every dollar general. No shit.
Around 2016 I went to several churches with my uncle, and all but one of them was politicking in the pulpit. ONLY ONE focused on the love of Christ and spiritual growth.
According the people who went to his little church, he just wasn’t “fired up” enough. To me he was the only worthwhile leader there.
I don’t know. I tell people all the time around home that their ancestors fought and died for their rights as workers. They’d all willingly walk into fire before forsaking the religious leaders in the community though.
Another big part of it is that their only source of income is coal. The left wants to end coal use. In all honesty it has starved and destroyed the place because it is so engrained in the culture that no one bothered to look for alternatives. It could have been manufacturing, and West Virginia would gladly accept lower wages than the rest of the US for such work, but it ain’t China cheap. So we’re doomed here. Everyone believes that the only hope is coal because it’s the only place to make a living.
My brother was making 30 bucks and hour when minimum wage was 5.15 (what the rest of us were making with no hope of anything better).
I don’t know. I get worked up thinking about all of this. Especially right now with my hometown under water likely due to climate change. The current flooding is the worst on record, but you can’t convince folks even while they’re drowning.
Any plan for a Green New Deal has got to include assistance for workers whose jobs will be lost. Lay off the coal miners, pay them the same wage they were making in the mines, and train them for green energy jobs. The government has the money. (Have you seen the military budget?!)
The strikes were illegal back then, too. They didn’t start out armed, and then people started shooting them for striking, and they figured over time that they better arm themselves.
The lesson there is that it will take workers armed to the teeth to take back their rights. Learn or burn kids
Well when you put it like that, I’d rather learn. I’m not particularly keen on burning kids
Fox News is a hell of a drug.
The anti-union sentiment started well before then.
It mostly started with Reagan in the 80s and was continued by Clinton in the 90s. Both republicans and democrats abandoned unions almost in lock step.
Did they abandon unions because they stopped being effective political blocs?
They abandoned unions because of their donors.
He must mean the 2021 state law that codified a 1990 state supreme court decision that called a teacher strike illegal. But using the actions of a group of coal miners, a state court and a legislature to demonstrate indoctrination seems like a strange comparison. I would compare maybe two public opinion surveys from those years.
I think he’s talking about just how anti union most of the voters and politicians have become in WV. I don’t think he’s talking abiut any particular event.
I don’t think the actions of the WV legislature necessarily reflects voters being anti-union. Lots of MAGA voters are finding out the hard way that the politicians who promised to protect them from socialism or wokeness or whatever don’t necessarily GAF about them.
