The latest one comes from John Dick (via excerpts from Mark Cuban), founder and CEO of a company called CivicScience who hails from Hyndman, PA. We read that small-town PA doesn’t care about the global economy. We read about population decline, closing of schools, the paucity of jobs, and the shorter life expectancy of its residents compared to residents of nearby Pittsburgh. We read about the people of Hyndman valuing their “way of life” more than money. We read “both sides” condemnation of left elite snobs and right elite pols grasping for power, and justification of their continued support for Trump because there’s a 1% chance he might bring back those high-paying manufacturing jobs. We’ve heard and seen and read many variations of this story. NYT Pitchbot has mocked them with increasingly impressive accuracy for years. But I am sick and tired of these stories.

Unspoken in seemingly every one of these dispatches from the so-called heartland is the overwhelming whiteness of the specific places they come from. The reported demographics of Hyndman as of 2000 are 98% white. But rural and exurban America does not consist solely of white folks. Nearly 25% of rural Americans were non-white, per the 2020 census. They’re living through all the same trends—if not worse, because of racism and xenophobia—as the people of Hyndman, and while Trump’s share of those voters increased, they fall far short of significant majority share of the white vote Trump has always had. These wannabe tribunes of the white working class never have an explanation for why non-white working class people subscribe to Trump’s worldview at such significantly lower rates.

“But the economy is rocking! Why don’t they just go to community college, move to the city, and learn to code?” How are you sneering at community college and accusing others of being morally superior? Community colleges educate and train the vast majority of people who work in hospitals that aren’t MDs? My mother and many of their friends came to the country and went to community college to earn their LPN and then RN. So do people who work as radiology techs, or phlebotomists. Those jobs helped them build middle class lives for their children so we could build better lives for ourselves and our children. One of my best friends has taught computer science at one of our local community colleges for a number of years. People need to know what they’re talking about before they open their mouths to trash-talk community colleges.

It isn’t moral or intellectual superiority to say that at least one reason that places like Hyndman are dying is because of their hostility to immigrants and other forms of change. Plenty of rural places in this country got a new lease on life because immigrants came and took the least attractive jobs, put money into housing and elsewhere in the local economy and helped revive otherwise flagging tax bases and dying main streets.

Resistance to change isn’t about education or culture, it’s about entitlement. You can believe all you want that you are entitled to live the life you want to live without having to make any adjustments or changes, but that’s not the actual world we live in. I was raised with a very clear understanding that the world doesn’t owe me a living, that success would require work, and that even hard work was not a guarantee of success.

Not caring about the way of life of other Americans isn’t a virtue—it’s selfishness. And voting for Trump because he tells the lies that comfort you and hates the same people you blame for how your life has turned out will not improve your life in the slightest. Continuing to support him even as he fails to deliver for Hyndman and every other majority white rural and exurban place in the United States in his second term exactly the way he failed to do in the first—while enriching himself and the same people he did the last time he was in office—makes you just the latest marks in his lifetime of fraud.