CCD Editor’s note: A Rust-Belt voter has some messages for coastal elites and we’re highlighting one them here (From The Federalist):
It’s been disappointing and frankly offensive to hear and read depictions of what life is supposedly like in the “Rust Belt” and what kind of people purportedly live and work here.
I live on the edge of it in northern Illinois (Ogle County, 60 percent for Trump to 33 percent for Clinton), a part of the country that stretches from eastern Iowa through central and northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and western and central Pennsylvania. This swath of the country made Donald J. Trump our forty-fifth president. It’s not surprising then that there’s a quest underway to find out what makes us tick.
As someone who speaks with politically minded people all over Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and eastern Iowa on the radio (12 counties in my listening area that went for Obama in 2012 went to Trump in 2016) every day for going on ten straight years, I think I’m dialed into the zeitgeist of towns like this a bit more than a 25-year-old beat reporter from the Washington Post three years out of Princeton who spent one Saturday at a diner. I’ve built a life, relationships, a successful small business, and a home here for more than a decade now. I’m dug in.
So here’s some messages I think small towns and rural communities that voted for Trump tried to send to everyone else on Election Day 2016:
Stop Talking to Us Nonstop About Climate Change
Look, not everyone around here thinks man-made climate change is a complete hoax. Yes, we understand and appreciate science, thank you very much. I have a white roof on my house as do many others in my town, my wife and I drive two fuel-efficient cars, we buy locally as much as possible, and I live less than a mile away from my office. My family’s “carbon footprint” is minuscule. Farmer’s markets are very popular here, just like in cities. And for better or worse, we’ve got those gargantuan white windmills out here a plenty.
But please, for the love of God, stop constantly hectoring us about global warming. Stop trying to tie literally every extreme weather occurrence to the “effects of climate change.” We know all about extreme weather. We get it, literally. My city of Rochelle was hit by an EF-4 tornado last year that wiped out many of my good friends’ homes, and numerous areas not far from us have also dealt with tornados and devastating floods over the years. But every time we hear some coastal progressive scream to us about how we’re not going to exist in a couple of decades due to “the effects of climate change,” we simply don’t buy it, especially after so many of the sky-is-falling predictions of the past turned out to be totally false.
What do you want us to do, exactly? We’re being energy efficient. We’re not polluting. We care about our environment and nature and wildlife. But stop with the alarmism all the time, everywhere. It’s just not resonating, and you have the global warming boys-who-cried-wolf of the past to thank for that.
