😂 This gave me a good laugh, thanks.
There are two points I'd make here. First, it's a huge mistake to judge society at large by online interactions. People say things online they'd never say in real life, they say things just to get a reaction, and there's no way of knowing whether the person on the other end of the keyboard is, in fact, a twelve year old (or more recently a bot).
Secondly, I'd say that manufacturing and coal jobs brought more than that to many people. They were the lifeblood of their communities, the places where their families had lived for generatiioins. They were their social circles.They represented the lives they had planned for themselves and their children. I can easily empathise with their pain. Which sadly does nothing to change the fact that those jobs are gone forever.
But when they're dealing with that pain, being told, "Ah, suck it up and get with the times. Learn to code or something," isn't going to be well received. We're human beings first. We have to rememeber to treat each other as such.
As for racist rhetoric being about controlling white women, I disagre pretty strongly with that. Are some white men racist because they're afraid black men are going to steal theiir women? Sure. But I think it goes a lot deeper than that. Especially when you consider how white women have weaponised racism against black men themselves. From Emmet Till to Christian Cooper, it's clear that some white women are not the victims when it comes to racism. And let's not forget, more white women voted for Trump this year than in 2016.
Lastly, and this might be a whole separate converstaion, I'd say that in 2020, a vote against feminism isn't necessarily a vote against women. To claim that femininsm today is the same movement dedicated to giving women equal rights and equal standing, is to overlook increasingly vocal extreme elements of the movement. Anybody with half a brain can agree that women should be equal in society, but the movement has been co-opted by women who quite clearly hate men. And again, if people make the mistake of thinking that the online world is the same as the real world, they end up with a very skewed picture of what feminisim is.
It's exactly the same problem BLM faces. The amount of racist, hateful garbage you can find, even on a site like this, about how disgusting and inhuman and untrustworthy white people are, is truly horrifying. On any given dayyou can find articles by black people who clearly hate white people. If I was white and reading these articles, I'm not sure what i'd make of the BLM movement.
