The paradisiacal and the terrifying

King's Court, Hopkinsville, Kentucky

Photo Credit: Boston Public Library

In the Pennyroyal region of southwestern Kentucky, amidst the smoky ranges of dark-fired tobacco, rests the town of Hopkinsville. Initially claimed in 1796 by Bartholomew Wood as part of a grant for his service in the American Revolution, a small tract of land quietly grew, until a town was formally established in 1804. Nearly 150 years later, in the fall of 1952, Hopkinsville welcomed its newest citizen, a baby girl born to Rosa Bell Oldham and Veodis Watkins.

Gloria Jean Watkins came roaring into a segregated world that was unprepared for the robust impregnability of a young Black girl’s voice. Raised by a man who worked as a janitor for the United States postal service and a woman who worked as a maid for white families, Gloria Jean described her rural childhood as “a rich magical world of southern black culture that was sometimes paradisiacal and at other times terrifying.” Amongst a white hegemony that could offer both the benefits of literature and the punishments of discrimination, Gloria Jean, a loner with “too much spirit”, crafted one of the most enduring identities in American social critique. bell hooks.

Greetings from Kentucky

Photo Credit: Shook Photos

A hymn for the pastoral 

bell hooks, a pen name borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother and stylized in lowercase in order to decenter the author, would go on to write nearly seventy published works, spanning from poetry and children’s literature to memoirs and magazine articles. While hooks is perhaps best known for her foundational contributions to the modern conceptualizations of intersectionality, the initial focus of this reflection is a small book of poetry released in 2012.

Appalachian Elegy opens with the following sentiment:

Even as a child I knew that to be raised in the country, to come from the backwoods, left one without meaning or presence. Growing up we did not use terms like ‘hillbilly.’ Country folk lived on isolated farms away from the city; backwoods folks lived in remote areas, in the hills and hollers. To be from the backwoods was to be part of the wild. Where we lived, black folks were as much a part of the wild, living in a natural way on the earth, as white folks. All backwoods folks were poor by material standards; they know how to make do. They were not wanting to tame the wildness, in themselves or nature. Living in the Kentucky hills was where I first learned the importance of being wild.

The collection itself, a series of “intimate untitled poems”, is a meditation on the threads that bind us, for better or worse, to our places of origin. Interrogating the enduring ways that ancestry tattoos our personage long after we leave the places we once called home. hooks’ exploration informally tracks her return to her Kentucky birthplace “blending memory with the harsh realities of destruction and the erasure of Black Appalachian history." While the work does not present a singular, nor stagnant iteration of what it means to claim an identity rooted in the rural, the introduction does, notably, distance the work from the concept of terms like 'hillbilly', a rather ironic sentiment, given what followed just four years later.

Postcard from St. Clairsville, Ohio

Photo Credit: Boston Public Library

The name taker

As of the writing of this post, there are probably few Americans unfamiliar with J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, at least in name. Within weeks of its release, the book was a New York Times bestseller and went on to be dramatized in a film directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard. Not to mention, of course, that Vance is currently serving as Vice President of the United States.

At the time of its release, there wasn’t significant notice taken, at least in most circles, of the similarities between hooks and Vance’s titles. The Hillbilly Elegy Wikipedia entry makes no mention of hooks’ work, despite referencing several other Appalachian literatures. Perhaps that is suitable, titular similarities are hardly rare in the realm of publishing, and beyond their rural origins, no one has evidenced any particular connection between the two authors or that Vance has any knowledge of hooks and her writings. The similitudes were, it seemed, pure chance.

That is, until Vance announced his second memoir, set to release in June later this year. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith is:

A spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian in all the seasons of life JD Vance has experienced—as a child, a young man, a husband, a father, and a leader. Picking up in some ways where Hillbilly Elegy left off, Communion recounts how Vance's pursuit of material privileges ultimately led him into a secular wilderness. Communion reveals how Vance regained his faith and discusses his conversion to Catholicism, how his faith guides his work in public life, and how it shapes his thoughts about the future.

Given the subject matter, the title is entirely apropos. Communion is defined as “the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level." As such, on its face, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about Vance’s selection. However, as first noted by Claire Guinan for Jezebel, what is noteworthy is that his book isn’t the first to bear that title. Who else wrote a book titled Communion? Well, bell hooks of course.

Postcard from Castalia, Ohio

Photo Credit: Sent from the Past

The agrestic aggressor

On the sliding scale between complete coincidence and full-blown conspiracy, it is unclear where this story situates itself. While I find it difficult to suggest that Vance is uniquely plagued by a desire to co-opt the titles of hooks, to suppress her works to make room for his own; that is, in many effects, exactly what is happening. If you conduct a simple Google search for ‘elegy book’ or ‘communion book’ his works appear before hers in both iterations.

In theory, there should be room for a multitude of rural voices, but critics are beginning to express concern that Vance’s parallelism is hostile in either intent or effect. Guinan writes “I’m choosing to believe that [Vance] is a huge fan, rather than the other, more likely option, which is that he is appropriating IP from a prominent black, feminist voice.” Author B.N. Russo further opined:

Not only is this plagiarism of a Black woman’s work, it’s also search engine manipulation and keyword appropriation that will result in the detraction from Black feminist thought. Now, a student searching for “Communion book” may find promotional resources for a pseudo-religious political propaganda piece, rather than resources on hooks’ critical social philosophies. In this moment of attacks on Critical Race and Feminist Theories, removal of sociology studies from state schools, historical revisionism in National Parks, schools, and museums, censorship of public service organizations and institutions, book banning, ‘DEI’ investigations, and curriculum challenges, this is de facto censorship in the digital age.

Postcard from Lompoc, California

Photo Credit: Sent from the Past

An Arcadian mouthpiece 

One female. One male. One Black. One White. One queer. One straight. One passed on. One living. One lowercase in an attempt to decenter the self. One seeking the most powerful title in the world. Diametrically opposed, yet united in a desire to contribute to the cultural consciousness on rural identity. Only time will tell which narrative will devour the other, or whether, perhaps, coexistence is possible. I, for one, will be monitoring the situation with careful fascination, anticipating Vance’s third memoir title with bated breath.

Further readings

For further reading on these subjects please direct your attention to the following blog posts:

“On bell hooks: Black, female, working class and ‘semirural’” 

“J.D. Vance pulls ahead in race for Republican nomination for U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, prompting comparisons to positions he took in his book”

“Hillbilly cosplay and the privilege coverup”

The Banshees of Inisherin: Friendship and the village

Irishmore, Ireland

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons (2005)

The Banshees of Inisherin is a dark comedy film that came out in 2022. It is set in the 1920s and was written and directed by Martin McDonagh. The movie centers around two longtime friends, Colm, and Pádraic, living on a fictional remote island called Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland. These two friends used to spend their days in the pub, drinking the day away, until Colm decides to abruptly end the friendship.  Colm explains that Pádraic is just too “dull” for him and that he has no desire to waste more time hearing him talk. Colm is a composer and is motivated to leave a legacy through music. When Pádraic refuses to accept the termination of their friendship, Colm escalates the conflict by threatening to cut off one of his own fingers every time Pádraic talks to him. 

This film has a lot to say about the nature of friendship in remote areas. After Colm cuts off his first finger and throws it at their door, Pádraic’s sister is convinced it is time to leave the village and move to the big city. She tries to convince Pádraic to join her, but he remains committed to the village.  

This raises the question: could a feud escalate like this in a big city? I doubt it. The extent to which the two friends are entangled in one another’s lives would be highly unlikely in a big city.  In this village, there is just one pub, only a handful of roads, and Colm and Pádraic continue bumping into one another. 

Despite the conflict, neither is willing to give up their village life.  Pádraic loves his donkey and his daily rituals. The social fabric of Inisherin gives him a sense of rootedness. Is it because he is dull that he has no ambition beyond the remote island? This is a central tension in the film. On the one hand, Pádraic does not crave legacy. Rather, he enjoys modest pleasures: arriving at the pub at 2 p.m., taking care of his donkey, chatting about nothing, really. This contentment reflects his orientation, not his intellect. He values kindness and kinship. 

Colm, by contrast, equates ambition with depth. His prioritization of ambition may reflect a kind of urban-centric orientation. A post from 2014 demonstrates popular culture contributes to simplified or stereotyped portrayals of rural life.  Those tropes exist in Banshees, but by complicating them, the film offers a more layered representation of rural life. 

Why can’t the ambitious composer leave the island? Colm craves the quiet of village life, so he can focus on his composing, but he is unwilling to accept that village life requires him to tolerate the villagers. Would he actually be happier in the big city? In Dublin for example, what he would gain in anonymity, he would certainly lose in other ways. Yes, he wouldn’t have to put up with Pádraic, but he would have to deal with consequences of city life like noise and chaos. Colm’s anxiety about legacy would not disappear in the city; it would likely intensify.  The competition and indifference of urban life could make fear of insignificance more apparent to Colm. In a place crowded with other musicians and artists, he may be forced to confront how ordinary he might be. By the end of the film the irony is apparent. The ambitious composer, Colm, has self-mutilated. His ambition does not make him morally superior to Pádraic.   

The film also invites us to consider whether there is an obligation to remain friends with people we can’t stand. Most people are comfortable with the idea that individuals have a right to decide not to be someone’s friend.  In a big city, Colm could more easily exercise this right. On a remote island, less so. Island life necessarily conflicts with the individual rights urban dwellers take for granted. Individuals cannot freely choose their associates in a place this small and remote.  In a rural context, residents must coexist, even if that means tolerating an unwanted interaction from time to time. This demonstrates that individualism and notions of free will are often constrained in practice by forces like geography. 

The central tragedy for Pádraic is his realization that the social order is collapsing. When his fellow villagers don’t believe in the community, he can no longer experience the sense of belonging he craves. Inisherin represents the type of rural environment that is stuck between two worlds. It is unable to deliver the sense of community that Pádraic relies on, but it also cannot deliver the sense of individuality that Colm seeks to assert. The tension between community and autonomy is thus at the heart of the film’s tragedy. 

The rural other in American horror films

Horror films reflect societal fears, often in a very literal sense. Rosemary's Baby (1968) deals with contemporary societal fears of a loss of bodily autonomy and John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) reflects the "eerie discomfort" of suburban life. Some of the most strikingly violent of these societal fears seem to manifest in the conflict between rural and urban.

An earlier post on this blog identifies the source of this horror as "the countryside’s lack of institutional and technological development mak(ing) for a terrifying landscape." The author argues that rural horror originates from this fear of rural landscapes. While the isolation of rural spaces certainly contributes to their use in these movies, the source of the horror in the majority of these films is the portrayal of rural people as monstrous others. 

The most famous example of this phenomenon is Tobe Hooper's underground slasher The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). The film follows a group of Austin hippies who get massacred on a road trip through the countryside after encountering the Sawyers, a monstrous family of cannibals (though notably only one actually gets killed with a chainsaw). It illustrates the archetype of "backwoods horror" where urban people encounter rural spaces as a horrific underworld filled with backwards cannibalistic murderers. 

The Sawyers' backstory has echoes of modern discussions of rural decline. They find themselves in their current condition of poverty and decay because their family slaughterhouse was shuttered. The Sawyers kill their victims with these slaughterhouse implements, using meat hooks and placing one of them in a large chest freezer typically used for recently slaughtered animal meat. Their association with slaughterhouses indicates that the film perceives the inherent violence of that rural industry as a corrupting force, and with the slaughterhouse gone, those violent tendencies are now turned towards wayward urbanites. 

The Sawyers and other backwoods murderers also represent an antithesis of modernity in a way that is meant to horrify the (primarily urban or suburban) audience. In The Rural Gothic in American Culture (2013), Bernice Murphy describes the chaotic clutter of the Sawyers home as an example of how they: 

like nothing better than to hoard junk that will then be strategically placed around their home in order to create an atmosphere of maximum creepiness…This focus upon the pack-rat sensibilities of the backwoods aggressor emphasizes the fact that mainstream American culture appears to find something inherently suspicious about the self-sufficiency of those who make their own belongings rather than buy mass-produced products in a store like ‘normal’ folks. The ‘make do and mend’ philosophy of those who recycle or salvage what others would throw out, though seen as admirable in narratives which emphasize ‘positive rurality’ (such as The Hunger Games trilogy and Walden) are here further markers of deviants.

The Domain, Round Rock, Texas, where parts of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" were filmed.  Image Source: creativecommons.org  

The Sawyers are so monstrous as to appear almost inhuman, with heavy makeup and elaborate costumes otherizing them from the rest of the cast. This characterization does not reflect rural Texans in any real sense. 

In contrast, John Boorman's Deliverance (1972) at least treats its Appalachian villains as recognizably human. One of the most famous scenes in the film even involves a kind of cultural exchange, with one of the city dwellers engaging a local in a banjo contest.

 Still, as a Guardian 50 year retrospective on the film highlights, Boorman portrays the rural subjects as "ghoulish caricatures" who arbitrarily commit heinous acts of physical and sexual violence. The film treats them as part of the wild and untamed natural landscape. The urban dwellers, intending to conquer the wild Chattooga River via canoe, find themselves in over their heads because they fail to recognize the savagery of the area's rural occupants as a part of the landscape they intend to conquer. 

The Chattooga River, where Deliverance (1972) takes place. Source:  creativecommons.org

Both films tap into the urban/suburban audience's fear of rural spaces and people. Tobe Hooper emphasizes an inherent violence in rural industry redirected due to economic misfortune. Boorman portrays his rural subjects as wild and untamed as the Appalachian mountains they inhabit. And both films associate the divide between rural and urban with viscerally portrayed acts of violence. That they were both so financially successful and culturally significant speaks to widespread perceptions of rural spaces as fundamentally apart from polite society. 

Another NY Times take on rural culture, in relation to Trump and MAGA

Today's New York Times Opinions podcast features a conversation about "The Aesthetic that Explains American Identity Now."  The alternative headline is "MAGA and the Country Aesthetic."  Here's the NYT's overview description of the episode: 

Rural aesthetics are in, from cowboy boots to country albums by pop stars to pastoral idealism peddled by influencers. The New York Times Opinion editor Meher Ahmad speaks to the columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom and the contributor Emily Keegin about what these cultural touch points mean for our politics and society at large.

Before including some key quotes, I'll just observe that I think the commentator's argument is overstated.  Here are some excerpts:  

Ahmad: Both Tressie and Emily are keen observers of the cultural zeitgeist, and in their own spheres they’ve been noticing an ongoing mainstreaming of all things country and rural. Think shows like “Yellowstone” and “The Hunting Wives”. Pop stars like Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter produce country songs as part of their repertoire. And tradwife influencers like Hannah Neeleman, popularly known on social media as Ballerina Farm, has now more than 10 million followers.

* * *

McMillan Cottom: There’s a show where a farmer takes a wife ... But you can even get into shows that aren’t as character driven, where the rurality is actually a character. So then you’ve got shows where there are alligator hunters in Louisiana, a show called “Swamp People.”

* * * 

Keegin: Yes. I think we’ve had a very long romance with rural aesthetics in this country.  (emphasis added)

And after the second Trump win, what I noticed was there was a big cowboy trend that took off. Denim is big. Western culture is big. “S.N.L.” this season had a musical act in a hayloft. Realtree coming in and dominating the sweatshirt world.

Ok, honest confession, I had to look up "Reatree."  Had no idea what that was.  I had heard of a realty company with a similar name selling rural properties.  As best I can tell, the two are not related. 

Keegin: Well, OK. Where would you have seen it? You would have seen the pattern on the merch of Chappell Roan. She has a hat that says “Midwest Princess.” And Midwest Princess, I think, is part of this trend, as well. That was picked up by the Harris Walz campaign. If you recall they also had a Camo hat.

* * * 

McMillan Cottom: When we’re talking about being romantic for rural life, we’re really talking about an imaginary place. This isn’t really the rural life that actual people who live in rural America tend to be familiar with. These are signifiers that are maybe less about a physical place, a geography.  (emphasis added)

I would say the divide is between nostalgia and today’s politics. It manifests in many different ways. But when you say something like “Make America Great,” that’s a backward-looking vision. That is not about the future — although it’s trying to own the idea of what the future should look like. It is really calling to a nostalgia for an imagined American past where all families were “traditional” and all women were real women and home life looked this way.

* * *

Keegin: We look at how culture changed through the Clinton years and what was on TV. And when the rural revolt happened in 1994, we had a narrative around that about a shift in a rising conservative culture in this country — which was absolutely true. Narratives are based in truth. And our television shows followed that. 

* * *  

McMillan Cottom: [K]eeping in mind that when we talk about Donald Trump being a sort of a quintessential New York urban figure, that may be true in his biography, but we’re not talking about real places when we talk about urban versus rural.

And when you appeal to rural, you are always, always, calling up the idea of urban. These two things exist at the same time. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is: I would say that what Donald Trump does — the way he enters into the rural imagination: He does it through Southernness.

* * *

I think that what Donald Trump does is he becomes associated with rural life because of how often he has appealed to Southernness, when he, of course, raises the specter of racism or raises the specter of genteel womanhood — all of those things that the South is kind of known for.

They came in the figure of Donald Trump and his rhetoric, so we keep this big treasure chest — a repertoire of ideas in the South. And when somebody wants to call them up, they can go and open the toy chest, and there it is. You can pull out the Confederate flag, and you can pull out songs of the South or whatever it is.

And suddenly, people’s imagination is in the South. Well, once you are in the South, in the imagination, you are just a — if you’ll forgive me — you are just a hayride away from rural America.

And so those two things, I think, are happening simultaneously with Donald Trump. Appealing to nostalgia will always have political power, especially when people are very anxious and afraid, which is what I would argue people are — for many, many reasons. And that’s why I think Donald Trump reads as rural to some people.

Although I’d pay money to see Donald Trump in actual rural America, for what it’s worth.

* * *

Keegin: You know, Donald Trump shows the seams. You see where the makeup ends on his face. It’s very clear that his hair is done by himself, and you see the grease in it. There’s a photo of him where you see that he holds his tie together with tape.

I think when we boil down what a rural aesthetic is, regardless of who is engaging with it, it is about the human hand and showing what humans create — versus the urban aesthetic, which is based in machines and in technology. We think about our urban centers: That is where we produce a lot of our culture, but they’re also the center of our governments and our financial centers.

All of the aesthetics that we associate with urban life come from those occupations, which are about the mind over the body. This is not where you are toiling and making things with the human hand and with your physical self. And that is the schism. When I look at Trump, I think: Yes, there are a lot of things about him that are very rural — because he’s not slick.

Then there's more in this podcast about the "Renaissance of country music" and what it suggests about this political moment.  I'll leave that to you readers to assess.  Some of the illustration of what these NYTimes folks label "rural"--especially matters related to cowboys and Taylor Sheridan's "Yellowstone"--seem to me more specifically about the imaginary associated with the "wild west" and with patriarchy.   In the latter regard, I was reminded of Kristen Kobes Du Mez' Jesus and John Wayne, a book I highly recommend.  

Rural public media struggling in the face of funding cuts

We became aware this summer, when the Trump administration announced cuts to public broadcasting and the abolition of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that rural areas would be hit especially hard.  This is because rural stations are more reliant on federal funding.  Rural areas also tend to have fewer media outlets, which means that those supported by public dollars are less easily replaced by the private sector--including in the reporting on weather and natural disasters.    

This week, Reveal reported on the closure of a public radio station, KYUK, in the Bethel/Kuskokwim Delta region of Alaska.  Here's an excerpt: 

When a typhoon hit Alaska, public radio station KYUK was on the air, broadcasting critical information about conditions, evacuations, and search and rescue operations. An estimated 1,600 people were displaced, and many were saved in the biggest airlift operation in state history.

“The work that we do in terms of public safety communication literally does save lives,” said Sage Smiley, KYUK’s news director.

KYUK is small, scrappy, and bilingual. It broadcasts in English and Yugtun, the language of an Indigenous population that lives in villages along two massive rivers. The station airs NPR content, but also high school basketball games, local call-in talk shows, and even a show hosted by the volunteer search and rescue team, answering listeners’ questions about ice conditions and safety. The station is a lifeline for this unique region.

KYUK covers an area the size of the state of Oregon, but after Congress passed the Rescissions Act over the summer, it lost 70 percent of its operating budget. Republicans have targeted public media since its inception in the late 1960s. But this is the first time they have successfully ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wiping out more than $1 billion in funding for public media.

For more on that typhoon in mid-October, see NPR's coverage here. 

NYT's Thomas Edsall on the current food stamp controversy, including rural and racial differences

Thomas Edsall's column in the New York Times this week is under the provocative headline, "It Would be Trump's Honor to Pay for Food Stamps."  Here's the part of Edsall's column that mentions rural Americans:  

In “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy,” the coauthors Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown point out that while urban and rural counties relied on government transfer programs at similar rates in the 1970s and 1980s,

They diverged from the 1990s onward as rural places faced economic tumult and residents came to rely more on government benefits. By 2019, the eve of the pandemic, rural people benefited from social transfers by $1,749 more per person per year than their urban peers.

In 1970, Mettler and Brown calculated, rural and urban households received social benefits of $2,220 and $2,244, respectively, a 1.1 percent difference. By 2019, the average annual government benefit for rural residents rose to $10,558 and for urban residents to $8,809, a 20 percent difference. 

Mettler and Brown cite research by Jennifer Sherman, a sociologist at Washington State University, to describe the agonized struggle of the rural poor who, when faced with a major economic setback, are forced to turn to government for help:

When they themselves need to use such benefit, they experience a deep sense of stigma and shame. They drove to stores far away to use SNAP benefits, hoping to avoid the gaze of their neighbors and community members.

Given the way people have traditionally talked about these programs, one of the most striking things about government data on SNAP use is just how high the white share of food stamp recipients actually is.

In West Virginia, 97.7 percent of SNAP recipients whose racial and ethnic identity was recorded are white; Indiana, 66 percent; Iowa 75.5 percent; Kentucky, 83.4 percent; Missouri, 67.1 percent; Montana, 76.6 percent; North Dakota, 66.9 percent; Ohio, 64.9; Oklahoma, 60.9 percent; Utah, 86.6 percent; and Wyoming, 78.8 percent.

On this issue of "white share of food stamp recipients" I am pleased to see Edsall note that.  It's an issue I've often foregrounded, along with the fact that middle class folks who are resentful of those who receive public benefits are as resentful as the whites who do so as they are of the people of color who do so. The resentment is not driven by racism, certainly not solely so.  The intra-racial tension is as significant as the inter-racial tension.  Read more here and here.

An unduly provocative headline from the Ezra Klein Show about rural-urban tension

Image from today's New York Times Ezra Klein Show podcast.

The headline for the Ezra Klein podcast today--the one that popped up on my NYTimes audio feed--is "The Rural Power Behind Trump's Assault on Cities."  I found that very provocative--unhelpfully so.  It seems to place blame on rural America and rural Americans for Trump's assault on urban America.  In fact, it's not only provocative, it's a bit misleading regarding the content of the podcast, which is an interview with Suzanne Mettler about her book, with Trevor Brown, Rural versus Urban:  The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2025).  I'll come back to that, but first I want to excerpt the part of the interview where Klein gets closest to backing up the provocative headline: 

Klein:  

I’ve heard a lot of people who study civil wars say it is a bad sign when the federal government is ordering armed troops from some states into other states over the objections of those states’ governors and — these are all cities they’re ordering them into — those cities’ mayors.

And you can look at this, and I think I have been looking at this, and say: This sure looks like a rural coalition militarily occupying the cities it has come to see as the power centers of their enemies. (emphasis mine)

What I don't understand is how Klein can assert that a "rural coalition" is militarily occupying U.S. cities.  Who makes up this purported "rural coalition," exactly, when there are too few rural voters to have put Trump in the White House?  Klein's assertion completely overlooks the much more robust numbers of urban voters who chose Trump.  (Nicholas Jacobs, co-author of The Rural Voter, has commented on this in various publications, most recently here).  Perhaps Klein is thinking about the disproportionate power of red states in the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College?  If so, he should consider that the rural voters in California and New York are as underrepresented as those states' urban voters--and that "red states" like Idaho and Arkansas have "blue cities" like Boise and Little Rock, whose urban residents are overrepresented.  (I wrote more about this here and here).  

Or is Klein somehow claiming that rural is occupying urban because a disproportionate number of rural young people join the armed services?  whatever Klein means, I see this framing--this attribution of what Trump is doing to a "rural coalition"--as inflammatory and therefore unhelpful.  Of course, it is also inaccurate unless one uses a really capacious definition of "rural."     

Here's Mettler's response to Klein's comment.  Unfortunately, Mettler doesn't actually respond to Klein's assertion that some rural coalition is militarily occupying U.S. cities.  She says:  

Well, it’s unthinkable. It’s so un-American to be telling the military you can use cities as training grounds and to be sending in federal troops and federalized National Guard into cities. And this comes on top of Trump, for the past few years, using a lot of rhetoric against cities — but now using actual violent force against cities.

So how is this possible? It’s possible because of the rural-urban divide. It’s possible because this us-versus-them politics has become so deep.

By the way, the headline for this podcast on the NYT home page right now is a less sensational "How the Democratic Brand Turned Radioactive in Rural America."  Both the provocative and less provocative headlines show up when you click through. 

Here are some of the more interesting exchanges about the book that are featured  in the podcast:

Klein: 

Before we get into what created the divide, beginning in the ’90s, what kept urban and rural America politically united for so long?

Mettler:  

If you go back to, say, the late 19th, early 20th century, as industrialization is happening, rural areas really feel left behind. There’s a big agricultural depression in the 1920s. Then the Great Depression comes. And rural people at that point are really upset, and policymakers are worried there’s about to be a revolution in the countryside, as they call it.

But what happens is that Franklin D. Roosevelt steps in and creates this big rural-urban coalition. And to an extent that I was unaware of until we wrote this book, he really put rural Americans front and center in his vision of what needed to happen for the country and created all of these policies that were really designed to lift up rural America.

Archived clip of Franklin D. Roosevelt: 

I cannot escape the conclusion that one of the essential parts of a national program of restoration must be to restore purchasing power to the farming half of the country. Without this, the wheels of railroads and of factories will not turn.

* * *  

Rural Americans really appreciated that. They felt the Democratic Party was there for them, and many of them remembered it for their lifetimes. And then their kids did, as well, all the way up until the 1990s.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, rural places were more likely to send Democrats to Congress than Republicans. Only a few decades ago, there was still a coalition where there were rural politicians who were really at the forefront in Congress in brokering compromises on all sorts of important policies.

Klein:

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. And that kicks off this process of ideological polarization, where the parties sort into liberal and conservative. The Dixiecrats die out.

And I think the most commonly believed story about what happened in the urban-rural divide is that they hated the Civil Rights Act. I think if you look at a lot of Democratic accounts of this, you’ll see something like that.

But you don’t buy that account. Why?

Mettler:

Yes, that’s wrong. So for one thing, just look at when the rural-urban divide emerged: It’s not until the late 1990s.

The story that you’re telling, usually the follow-up is that the South left the Democratic Party. Well, in fact, there were a lot of urban Southerners who left the Democratic Party. But rural Southerners stuck with it up until the 1990s, and then they left.

Klein:  

The way your book is structured, you sort of say: There’s this economic divergence, and then layered on top of that very quickly is what you call elite overreach. That’s what we’re talking about here.

The way you describe it is: “It was not any one issue that tipped the scales but rather the persistent commonality that ran across them. From 2008 onward, rural Americans perceived an urban elite that sought to impose itself on far-flung places, controlling residents’ lives through new rules and procedures, in which they felt they had little voice.”

And you argue that the issue here is not the policy but the sense of respect or disrespect, of listening or not listening, of representation or absence of representation — that there was something sort of beneath policy that drove this.

Klein: 

Political scientists use this slightly strange tool called the feeling thermometer, where they ask people to rate other groups on a 1-to-100 scale.

You have this data for white rural America, and on a scale of 1 to 100, they put Black Americans at a 70 — pretty good; Hispanic Americans at 67; gay men at 57; illegal immigrants at 39 — pretty low; and Democrats at 14 points.

So Democrats are rated at less than half illegal immigrants’ rating.
By the way, this is not just rural America — white urban Democrats put Republicans at 17 points. But the hatred is much more concentrated at the political outgroup, at least in these measures, than at any other group.

Klein:

White rural America’s sense that the Democratic Party sees all these other groups as in need of help and respect and is prioritizing them ahead of them — Arlie Hochschild’s idea about other groups getting to cut in line. And then there’s a real rise of discourse around white privilege. And this creates — we’ve seen this in our politics — a lot of anger.

Like: You’re telling me — in a poor community that has very few jobs now, where life expectancy is going down — that I have white privilege, and your urban coalition is what needs the help? Or that illegal immigrants need the help?

I’d like you to talk a bit about that distinction between the divide being discriminatory, and the divide being a feeling: That coalition doesn’t prioritize me, so I’m going to go with a coalition that does.

Mettler:  

It’s a really important issue in that I think a lot of urban Democrats assume that what’s at play in this rural-urban divide is that rural white people are racist. What we find is that it’s not reducible to that.  (emphasis mine)

The way we understand it is that it’s in this same period that there’s the sense of elite overreach on the part of Democrats, where rural Americans are looking at the Democratic Party and thinking: They don’t understand us. They don’t care about our communities.

And on this, they’re viewing the Democratic Party as really prioritizing the needs of people of color in urban communities and immigrants — but not really understanding or caring about rural people who are struggling, as well.

This last bit from Mettler is, to my mind, so important.  What Mettler doesn't say is how academics contribute to this problem of saying that so-called rural resentment is all due to racial animus.  See some nuanced and thoughtful pushback to that notion--or at least the notion it is all so simple--in this academic article.   

I'll no doubt have more to say about Mettler and Brown's book in future posts, after I've read it.   For now, I'll just say that three of my recent publications aim to take a more optimistic tack regarding rural voters.  They encourage progressives to play to rural residents' rural identity--to show them that they and their needs are seen.   Read more here, here, and here.  I'm somewhat less optimistic here, while still taking seriously the need for politicians--including those on the left--to respond to rural needs.  

Lots of rural (and Southern) stereotypes in today's NYT opinion

Today's NY Times opinion podcast featured three southerners in conversation under the headline, "There is No Trump Without the South."  Here are some excerpts that play to stereotypes of the South--and its conflation with rurality. (That conflation is not entirely inaccurate in that the South is the most rural region of the nation).  Rural-urban tension is also touched on, as a sort of parallel to the tension between the South (and what it represents) and the rest of the nation.  

Jamelle Bouie:  

One observation everyone in this conversation has made and other people have made is the way that there has emerged an almost generic national rural culture.

It’s a certain kind of country music. It’s a certain kind of pickup truck. You see it if you go to rural New Hampshire, if you go to rural Montana, if you go to rural Illinois. It’s very much rooted in a franchised version of a white Southern rurality.

And I bring that up to say that it’s both the case that the country will shunt its difficult conversations, as Tressie said, about race to the South and make it a Southern problem. But it’s always been the case that the rest of the country has been fascinated by the South in really important ways.

* * * 

Tressie McMillan Cottom: 

Every time a Southern politician goes out and they congratulate themselves about building the new car factory or the new battery maker in some rural part of their Southern state or municipality, what they have generally done is they have made a deal with either a national or a transnational conglomerate that says: You do not have to worry about unionizing.

* * * 

And what we are seeing here is not just a transplant of people but of ideas that don’t necessarily create that kind of mobility for Southern workers across the South, which then leads to a war, a battle for the soul of rural America that you can feel very tangibly in the South.

David French: 

I come from a town — when I was growing up there, it was about 8,000 people. We had three stoplights in a rural town in Kentucky. That’s where I spent my elementary and high school years, and it’s unrecognizable now because a Toyota manufacturing plant came there and completely transformed the city.

But these are good, high-paying jobs. They are transformative jobs in these parts of the South, but it is absolutely true that they also pull and draw jobs from other parts of America. And it’s one of the reasons I think so many people have been moving to the South.

Bouie:

But I also want to say that part of the allure of the South as a cultural object — and this is getting back to what Tressie had said earlier about cost of living — is not simply that things might be cheaper but that you have an opportunity to use your wealth, for lack of a better term, to dominate other people.

You can have a big compound in the middle of Texas and drive a gigantic vehicle and use all the resources you’d like and boss people around.

McMillan Cottom: 

It’s the “Yellowstone”-ification of the country, Jamelle.

Bouie: 

Yes. And that aspect of it — there’s no policy you can do to compete with that, I guess. Because what a place like California is offering, the trade-off is it’s going to be more expensive to live there. Unless you are in the highest echelon of income earners, you’re not going to be able to hire someone to look after your house for dirt cheap, right? You won’t be able to exploit someone so easily.

But you are going to live in this multicultural, cosmopolitan place where people are going to exist, at least culturally, on some plane of equality. And if you like that kind of life and experience, that’s what you’re in L.A. for, that’s what you’re in New York for, that’s what you’re in Chicago for and all the places that are their own places but offer a smaller or more manageable versions of that thing.

* * * 

McMillan Cottom: 

Now, I think at the state level — again, especially in a place like North Carolina — we tend to prefer a more socially conservative performance of Southern politics. But on the ground, especially when you’re talking about local elections, it is that the Democratic Party wants to run a far more conservative candidate than can excite the base across the rural parts of the South.

Bouie: 

I think that it would be a good idea for the Democratic Party to make serious investments in Mississippi, a state where Democratic candidates with no investment routinely hit the mid-40s in statewide elections. That’s a clear sign.

It’s going to be really hard to close that gap because of racial polarization in the state. But the gap can be closed, and making Mississippi competitive would be a huge blow to Republicans if you’re a Democrat. It changes the game.

Cutbacks to public media likely to hurt rural communities the most

The disporportionate impact that federal funding cuts to public media will have on rural communities has been a theme of several publications in recent weeks, all in the run up Congress' vote to do just that--take back $1.1 billion previously allocated in support of public media.  

The first item I want to highlight is this July 11, 2025 episode of The Daily (New York Times audio), "Is Congress about to Kill this Local Radio Station?"  It discusses the likely impact of the proposed cuts on a public radio station, KFSK, in Petersburg, Alaska, population 3,000, in the southeast part of the state.  Jessica Cheung of The Daily sets up the interview with KFSK Station Manager Tom Abbott:    

Small rural stations, like KFSK, rely on federal funding to exist. And in a town like Petersburg, that is conservative, a town that voted for Trump by almost two to one in the last election, people are grappling with the Republican Party that is now trying to defund an important resource within the community — a radio station that a lot of people love. So I wanted to talk to Tom about what that’s been like, what’s at stake, and just what a station like KFSK offers people.

They start with a discussion of the place, including its beauty, economy, wildlife, and remoteness. 

Tom Abbott:  We also don’t have any chain stores here. Everything is mom and pop. Even though if you go to the post office, you’ll see a lot of Amazon boxes coming across the counter, because on occasion, there are things that can’t be found here, just because it’s a small market and it’s a small community. And that’s what brings us back around. radio. That’s why there’s only public radio here.

Jessica Cheung:  And if you turn the dial in Petersburg, can you hear any other radio station out there?

Tom Abbott:  Yeah, you can catch 88.5, which is the Lutheran Church.

Jessica Cheung:  And that’s it?

Tom Abbott:  Yeah, they broadcast for the shut ins that can’t make it to their service on Sunday. And that’s the only other service that’s on the FM dial. And there’s nothing on the AM dial.

What follows in the interview is a description of a service that reminds me of the "party line" feature on the local radio station I listened to while growing up in the Arkansas Ozarks.  On KFSK, it is called Tradio.  Here's an excerpt: 

Tom Abbott:  Where the caller calls in to the radio station. We put them on the air. And they either make an announcement about an event coming up. Maybe they’re having a garage sale on Saturday.

Archived Recording:  And we have tons of stuff — chairs, dozens of hand tools, fishing poles, sporting goods. There’s books and movies. And you name it, we got it.

Tom Abbott:  Well, this week, we’ve got a lot of fishing poles. Or this week, we’ve got a lot of baby clothes, something, whatever it may be.

Archived Recording:  Yes, good morning. This is Earl. I got a 2012 Nissan red vehicle with low mileage.

As Cheung expresses it, 

This is basically Facebook Marketplace on the radio.

At some point, Abbott starts talking about how the station ceased live broadcasts of some meetings during the pandemic because what some residents were saying at the meetings constituted misinformation, as locals stated their opinions about public health measures.

Cheung then turns to the likely effect of the proposed federal budget cuts on KFSK. 

Tom Abbott:  Our service would be drastically altered. The CPB funding that we receive is 30 percent of our budget. As public radio does, we rely on membership donations. And that is our largest single source. Our second largest single source funding is CPB funds.

Jessica Cheung:  And without that 30 percent you get from the federal government, what are you contemplating?

Tom Abbott:  As far as the expenses go, personnel expenses are 65 percent of our budget.

Jessica Cheung:  And how many personnel do you have on staff right now?

Tom Abbott:  Five, and there’s two high school kids that help us out when we’re doing live broadcasts in the evenings. And going forward, I foresee KFSK eliminating all staff except for two. And both of those I would like to see it remain two reporters. If you were to go down to one reporter, you’re on an endless cycle of burnout.

Jessica Cheung:  And is it my understanding that with 30 percent cut, you could still survive? Or is taking KFSK off the air an option you’re contemplating?

Tom Abbott:  I don’t think you’d ever have to go off the air, because the infrastructure is here, the antenna is here. But it wouldn’t be locally run anymore. It just couldn’t be. 

Right now, we have 27 individual public radio stations in the state of Alaska. I think that’s going to go down to two, maybe three if this rescission goes through. It’s not going to happen immediately, but it’s going to go that route. And that’s what’s under threat here.

Then Abbott discusses how some NPR reporting has been received by locals. There's a lot here, and I'm just going to include a very brief excerpt:

Tom Abbott:  [W]hat we have control over is local. I have no control over the editorial content of NPR. I have no control over that whatsoever.

In fact, I have, myself, as a station manager, contacted them many times over the years with complaints. I think there are certain subject matters that are covered heavily that are not necessarily representative. They’re certainly not representative of the audience that I serve.

Jessica Cheung:  Is there a specific story that you’re thinking about, maybe one that you wrote to NPR about?

Tom Abbott:  I don’t know. What comes to mind is the propensity for the LGBTQ+ stories. I don’t believe that the percentage of the stories that that subject matter has is equivalent to certainly the service area that I have. And I’m not saying that people are not caring about others. I’m not saying that at all.

I get the editorial decision on it. It’s under threat. But I’m just saying, what is pertinent in your personal life? And I think this holds for Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, wherever you are. Small town, rural areas, to me, it sounds like the editorial decisions are being made for the audiences that are in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, the big metro areas.

And on occasion, there is a great story that NPR does that covers small-town America or relates to small-town America plenty of times. I’m not saying that they totally have a blind eye towards it. I just think the target audience that NPR has is metro areas.

Jessica Cheung:  And what would you rather hear get coverage by NPR?

Tom Abbott:  Well, what’s the effect of the tariffs on the farmers of America, the seafood industry of America? That would really resonate here locally.

Following on this excellent and very comprehensive podcast focused on KFSK in Alaska, the New York Times editorial board published on July 16, "This is Why America Needs Public Media." Here, I'm just going to excerpt the part that mentions rural places, as well as an acknowledgement that NPR's programming (as distinct from local programming) may not reflect "the citizenry that is subsidizing them": 

When the private sector doesn’t provide an important service, the government often steps in. That is why the framers established the U.S. Postal Service; they believed no one else would deliver the mail to the entire country. Many places in America, especially in rural communities, would not have a library without public funding. Police departments, the military, Medicare, Social Security and public education offer other examples.

* * *

Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases. And they can fairly tell NPR and PBS to do a better job of reflecting the citizenry that is subsidizing them.

* * *  

We are reminded of the excesses of the “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” movements on the other side of the ideological spectrum. They adopted a fatalistic view of vital government services, suggesting that their imperfections justified their elimination. They were wrong, and so are the conservatives who want to defund public media.

* * *

Public media, like every other major institution, is imperfect. But it improves the lives of millions of Americans, and it strengthens American interests. 

I earlier commented on NPR's political bias here.  To be clear, I completely trust NPR's reporting on factual matters, such as whether the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.  It was not.  I simply think that the entity's editorial slant is often far enough to the left of middle America to fuel distrust by many--as suggested by some of the patrons of KFSK.

Finally, today, NPR's Frank Langfitt reported from Dunmore, West Virginia, under the headline, "Cuts to public media will smash budgets of some local radio stations."  I'll just include some key excerpts here:  

[S]ome of those hardest hit by Congress' decision last week to clawback $1.1 billion in federal funds are small radio operations that provide local news and information to rural communities.

One is Allegheny Mountain Radio, a cooperative of three stations which cover Pocahontas County, West Virginia as well as Bath and Highland counties in Virginia. Allegheny Mountain is not an NPR member station, but it does run NPR's daily newscast, a quick run down of top stories.

* * * 

Allegheny Mountain's mix of programming includes local news and information as well as gospel, country and blues shows. A recent episode of the Noon Hour Magazine reported on a $5,000 signing bonus to attract new teachers and how the energy demands from data centers could eventually affect this remote region where people sometimes have to drive 60 miles to reach the nearest shopping center.

Allegheny Mountain relies on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for up to 65 percent of its annual budget of about half a million dollars. Smith says his stations do have financial reserves, but the hole in their budget could become existential.

Langfitt quotes station's general manager:

There is only so long that you can continue to exist when you are operating in the red. ... At some point that well runs dry.

One bottom line, this quoting the NYT editorial:

[T]he “national” part of NPR (or National Public Radio, as it used to call itself) that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds.   

It is local stations, trying to provide local programming, that will suffer most from these cuts, along with their listeners.  

One other detail worth noting on the Congressional vote to claw back the public media funding:  Senator Mike Rounds (R) of South Dakota had previously indicated that he would oppose the cuts but decided to support the package after "top Trump administration officials" said they would steer unspent funds 'to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption' for next year."  Yet, Loris Taylor of Native Public Media commented: 

There is currently no clear path for redirecting these funds to tribal broadcasters without significant legislative and administrative changes.

Are rural residents incapable of understanding government's role in health care availability?

I don't know the answer to that question, but that is a conclusion suggested by two stories in the mainstream media today.  An alternative conclusion from what these stories present is that rural residents--at least some (or most?) of them--don't trust what they see as liberal messaging about how Medicaid and hospital finances work.  That is, many Republicans and other Trump supporters assume that progressives will misconstrue the impacts of, e.g., "the big beautiful bill" on healthcare and other services those voters value. 

First, Hannah Knowles reports from Curtis, Nebraska, for the Washington Post under the headline, "A clinic blames its closing on Trump’s Medicaid cuts. Patients don’t buy it."  That headline sums up the gist of the story--and the reason why Medicaid cuts won't have the political impact on rural Trump voters that Democrats are hoping for.  

Community Hospital, the nonprofit that runs the clinic known as the Curtis Medical Center and a couple of other facilities in the region, plunged into the center of that national story when it announced on July 2 — one day before the bill’s passage — that a confluence of factors had made its Curtis outpost unsustainable. It cited years-long financial challenges, inflation and “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid,” the public health insurance program for lower-income and disabled Americans.

* * *  

The clinic has been here longer than many people in town can remember, and people are struggling to make sense of the shutdown. The changes coming for Medicaid are complicated, and some won’t take effect for years, which makes the timing even harder for residents to understand.

Many know that Trump’s bill will impose work requirements for Medicaid recipients, which seems reasonable to them, and some think — inaccurately — that the legislation was designed to end Medicaid coverage for undocumented immigrants.

* * * 

Community Hospital was already losing money, and officials said they are trying to make sure they remain financially viable for the 30,000 people they serve throughout their facilities. But the timing of their decision to announce the Curtis closure has stoked suspicions in the town, leaving some residents convinced their health provider was using the president as a scapegoat.

Here are key--and colorful--quotes from two different Curtis residents: 

“Anyone who’s saying that Medicaid cuts is why they’re closing is a liar,” April Roberts said, as she oversaw lunch at the Curtis Area Senior Center.

* * *

Arriving for lunch, retired Navy veteran Jim Christensen said he’d read an op-ed that “tried to blame everything on Trump.”

“Horse feathers,” he said, dismissing the idea.

Much more detailed re the consequences of the Medicaid cuts for rural hospitals is this episode of the New York Times "The Daily" headlined, "One Rural Doctor on the Real Costs of Medicaid Changes."  Natalie Kitroeff interviews that doctor, Shannon Dowler.  The story is a very detailed one of how North Carolina eventually came to expand Medicaid, providing health care to many folks who otherwise would not have had access to it.  Many rural characters--you could say stereotypes--are depicted in this story--most of them, I am assuming based on the western North Carolina locale, are white.  

It's only at the end of the lengthy interview when you get to the reasons, according to Dr. Dowler, that residents don't or won't blame Trump for their likely loss of health care under the "Big Beautiful Bill."  Here's the exchange between Kitroeff and Dr. Dowler: 

Kitroeff:  Do you think that your patients, for example, will blame the lawmakers who voted for this bill?

Dowler:   No.

Kitroeff:  Why not?

Dowler:  There’s just not enough of a direct correlation to people’s health care needs in the moment and what happened in DC 12 months before, 18 months before.

Kitroeff:  So you think there is a chance that the folks who voted for the people who voted for the bill that leads to them potentially losing coverage will not be seeing that those people are really responsible.

Dowler:  No. I had a patient come in the day after the election. And he said, it’s about time. We’ve got to get government out of health care. Well, ironically, he has Medicare. And he just

Kitroeff:  Wow,

Dowler:  ...doesn’t get it. And so this is not uncommon. This is a super complex system of health care. I was at Medicaid for five years. Every day, I learned something new around how Medicaid worked. It’s very, very complex. I’m not surprised that patients don’t understand all of this.

Kitroeff:  I’m wondering if you think they will blame anyone for the loss in care. And if so, who would get the blame?

 Dowler:  It’s hard to know. I think people often would get mad at the hospitals because the hospitals weren’t providing them some service that they felt they were due, not understanding how complex the system of health care is. So I just don’t think based on what I saw before, I don’t think the lawmakers are the ones that are necessarily going to bear the brunt of this, especially with the timeline where they have this stuff rolling out after the midterm elections.

This all reminds me of some of the reasons folks gave for not taking the Covid vaccine back in 2021, even as they came close to dying from the disease.  Many nevertheless said that if they survived the disease, they still would not be vaccinated.  

Small-town government run amok (Part XIII): Is Kerr County partly to blame for the high death toll at Camp Mystic?

I've already written this week about the catastrophic flooding in Kerr County, Texas.  What I am going to highlight in this post is recent reporting from the New York Times on the 2019 decision by Kerr County to let Camp Mystic build additional structures--including cabins for campers--in places that were at risk of  flooding.  (This is on top of the county's decision not to invest in a warning system, which is discussed in my prior post).

Why would the county do that when, as one expert suggested, the proposal to construct more buildings was a good time to re-evaluate the risk level associated with the existing structures?  Perhaps what the journalists are suggesting here is Kerr County officials simply trusted the camp as a long-time landowner and patron of the county.  Perhaps what is being suggested is the turning of a blind eye.  I wonder what sort of property taxes and other types of revenues Mystic and the otter camps provided to the county? 

Here's an excerpt from the NYT story: 

In 2019, Camp Mystic...underwent a substantial expansion. Camp owners received approval from local authorities to build a new group of cabins over the hillside to the south, in an area known as Cypress Lake. But even there, flood maps show, some of the new cabins were in areas at risk of flooding.

* * *  

At the same time, Kerr County officials were considering how to manage floodway areas, including those at Camp Mystic.

The county said that floodways were to be considered “an extremely hazardous area due to the velocity of floodwaters which carry debris, potential projectiles and erosion potential.” It adopted rules in 2020 to limit new construction or substantial alterations in floodways to ensure that structures could better survive flood events, and that these buildings would not result in raising floodwater levels in other parts of the river.

This NYTimes piece gives a sense of the local lore around the Eastlands, who owned and ran Camp Mystic.  This New York Times podcast, The Daily, also gives a sense of the beloved status of the camp and its long-time owners; the title says it all, "A Love Letter to Camp Mystic."   

Postscript:  Here is a July 12, 2025 NYT story that suggests FEMA over-rode Kerr County on the designation of parts of Camp Mystic as a flood zone.  An excerpt from Mike Baker's reporting follows: 

In the years before floodwaters killed more than two dozen people at Camp Mystic in Texas, regulators approved a series of appeals that removed many of the camp’s buildings from official federal flood zones, records show.

Flood maps developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2011 had placed much of the camp within a 100-year flood zone, an area considered to be at high risk of flooding. Camp Mystic successfully challenged those designations, which would limit renovation projects and require flood insurance, citing elevation calculations of a series of buildings that allowed them to be exempted from the federal restrictions.

Sarah Pralle, an associate professor at Syracuse University who has researched federal flood mapping, said she found the exemptions granted to Camp Mystic, a girls’ camp on the Guadalupe River near Hunt, to be “perplexing.” Some of the buildings were still very close to expected flood elevations, she said.

“I think it’s extremely troubling that it’s a camp for children,” Ms. Pralle said. “You’d think you want to be extra cautious — that you’d go beyond the minimum of what’s required for flood protection.”

Here is the Washington Post reporting similar conclusions on the role of FEMA.  

Here is the WSJ reporting on what happened at Camp Mystic, cabin by cabin.   You'll see here featured some aspects of the impulse to secrecy regarding arguable failures of a revered Texas institution.  

This excellent episode of New York Times "The Daily" on July 15, 2025, asks if the floods had to be as deadly as they were.  It includes some attention to the rural context. 

From Congresswoman Gluesenkamp Perez on public media

I've written often on this blog of Congresswoman Gluesenkamp Perez's campaigns and stances; she represents WA-03 in the southwest corner of Washington, a district with a great deal of rural area.  I was struck by fundraising email I got from her today (I get a lot of them!) because it stands up for public broadcasting while invoking the rurality of her district.  Here's what the email says:  

Last week, I voted against a hyperpartisan package that guts federal funding for nonpartisan, independent public broadcasting, a critical resource that rural communities like ours rely on every day.

The House Majority’s plan will force public radio and television stations across the country to close, including 14 here in Washington. We depend on public broadcasting for so much: quality local journalism, educational children’s programming, and even lifesaving emergency alerts.

Lisa, I’m all for tackling waste and making sure our tax dollars are used efficiently, but that doesn’t mean compromising our safety, health, or general well-being.

I’ll continue calling out D.C.’s misplaced priorities and getting things done for Southwest Washington – but to keep this work going, I need your help defending this seat.

I'm glad that the Congresswoman sees public broadcasting as a critical resource for rural communities.  I do, too.  I am guessing many of her constituents see public media as hyper-partisan, and not in ways favorable to their interests. 

In fact, NPR does a great deal of fine reporting--nuanced reporting--on a wide range of rural issues.  I trust NPR to deliver the facts, and I listen to it everyday.  That said, there are times when I think NPR has been  unhelpfully woke in ways I suspect alienate rural voters and those with less formal education.  

As traditional media collapse, "The Epoch Times" gains a following in rural America

The newspaper racks at the Newton County (Arkansas) Library
are full of issues of The Epoch Times, along with News China 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025.

The New York Times journalist Eli Tan reported last week from Oakdale, California (population 23,181), on the evolution of that community's media ecosystem.  The headline for Tan's story focuses on events from 2020, "It was Just a Rumor on Facebook.  Then a Militia Showed Up" but the story is about the longer-term disintegration of local media, both before and after that 2020 event.  It's a story of how the local media dried up, leaving residents reliant on local Facebook groups, eventually supplemented by The Epoch Times, a publication of Falun Gong, a group associated with right-wing views and its opposition to the Chinese government. I want to focus on that part of the story because it relates to something I observed first-hand in my home county this year.  First, I'll share a bit more background on Oakdale, which is in Stanislaus County, in California's Central Valley:   

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

By the 2024 election, when its county, Stanislaus, was among the 10 in California that President Trump flipped red, it wasn’t just trust in traditional media that had vanished from Oakdale — it was the media itself.

Now, in place of longtime TV pundits and radio hosts, residents turn to a new sphere of podcasters and online influencers to get their political news. Facebook groups for local events run by residents have replaced the role of local newspapers, elevating the county’s “keyboard warriors” to roles akin to editors in chief.

Many issues of News China magazine
were also on display in the 
Newton County Library

Of the 80 Oakdale residents The New York Times spoke to for this article, not a single one subscribed to a regional news site, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

Oakdale is not alone: Between news deserts expanding in rural areas and a growing distrust of national outlets, the town’s shift toward new sources of information is becoming commonplace in small communities across the country. 

Here is more coverage of the rural news desert phenomenon. 

As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. 

* * *  

The town is still able to support a weekly newspaper called The Oakdale Leader, which shares a handful of reporters with nine other local newspapers in the Central Valley, all owned by Hank Vander Veen, its publisher and a former circulation director at the Modesto Bee.

* * *

It isn’t just local news habits that are changing in Oakdale. Since the pandemic, a wider skepticism for everything including vaccines and the price of eggs has changed the way people approach information in general: The thinking is, do your own research, and trust neither side.

Newton County Library, Feb. 2025
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025

Here is another post about misinformation influencing politics in rural communities.  Tan's story in the NYT continues:

Alternative news in Oakdale has even extended into print. In barber shops, clock repair stores and diners across town, copies of a peculiar newspaper appear on tables and bookshelves: The Epoch Times.

The media outlet is affiliated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, and it is known to include right-wing misinformation with an anti-China slant. (The outlet did not respond to a request for comment.) A weekly print subscription costs less than $15 a year, but most store owners in Oakdale said they didn’t initially pay for a subscription — the editions just started showing up in the mail during the pandemic.

This brought to mind what I saw in the Newton County (Arkansas) Library (in my hometown) when I visited in February, 2025:  the newspaper rack was dominated by just two publications, The Epoch Times and the local(ish) Harrison Daily Times, from neighboring Boone County.  Oddly, there was no copy of the local weekly, The Newton County Times, on display.  (It is owned by the same company that owns the Harrison Daily Times and currently operates out of the same office in Boone County--that is, The Newton County Times has no physical presence in Newton County except when the reporter comes over from Harrison, Boone County's seat, to cover events like local government meetings).  

I was back in Newton County in early April and again popped into the library.  Nothing had changed in terms of what was on display--well, the issues of The Epoch Times and The Harrison Daily Times were more recent because it was April and no longer February.  On this latter visit, the librarian was present, and so I asked her about the prominence of The Epoch Times--and why she carried it at all.  She said that a patron had requested it.  My facial response was skeptical, perhaps even as strong as an eye roll.  Though what I was really judging was her decision to display this propaganda so prominently, especially when there was so little counter-balance of real news.  Not a copy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, let alone any national newspaper, in sight.    

Now, however, that I've read this New York Times story, I'm skeptical in a different way about what the librarian told me.  I suggest The Epoch Times is being sent to lots of local libraries, and those without much else--and those who don't see how biased it is--simply display it.  After all, they have plenty of room, and it's no tax at all on their budgets.   

It seems this is an important bit of information toward understanding the media ecosystem that has led to a right-ward shift in the rural vote. 

It also reminds me of some billboards for The Epoch Times I saw on California's I-80 in the last year.  Those billboards proclaimed The Epoch Times the most trusted news source in America, a claim that made me very skeptical.   Here's a story about those billboards and how they showed up in Tampa, Florida. from Axios.