AWW It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

If you see someone cool having a horrible time on the internet, reach out. It's a time when someone's whole world is crumbling, and the real goal isn't just harassment. It's isolation; cutting people off. https://twitter.com/MJB_SF/status/1347078048588337152

Melinda's experience is also a great example of the "Don't scream" principle.

e.g. If somebody's kidnapping you & trying to hustle you into a car and they say "Don't scream," why are they saying that? It's bc they need silence to get away with the crime.

So you should yell.

It's funny. They'll tell you exactly how to beat them, if you listen.

If you have a moment, read through the thread & screenshots of all the threatening emails.

Notice anything odd? They're not so much threats, as they are orders. Do this! Don't do that!

Let's lay aside the sheer windbag-itude of issuing orders, in full seriousness, to strangers on LinkedIn when you can't even spell properly

There's a reason lots of people's response to Melinda speaking harsh truths about white-dominated rural areas

was to issue orders to STOP.

And orders to "make it right" by groveling on platforms where even more angry white nationalists would discover her.

There's a reason conservative voices have demanded sympathetic, soft-focus coverage of Anxious Whites.

And there's a reason that a lot of those conservative voices ain't even from rural areas. Look at the hostile emails. Lots from Silicon Valley.

Why? Because the urban-rural divide is fake.

Urban & rural elites want the same thing: drive wages to desperation levels, no worker or environmental protections, & huge tax loopholes for people who make their living by owning stuff instead of working.

aka the GOP platform lol

Lots of rural areas live under one-party control. Local elites run them like fiefdoms.

Conservative urban elites see that! They want what their rural peers have!

But they can't say that out loud. So the play is, hold up rural areas as a moral example to be emulated.

But IRL, white-run rural areas ain't different from Wall Street or Silicon Valley at all.

They're the same extractive capitalism as the concrete jungles. Again, the only difference is the local elites in rural areas have more control thnx to deliberately hollowed-out economies.

So the only way self-proclaimed Real America champions can strut around cosplaying National Moral Anchor is if nobody knows how their fiefdoms work in real life.

"Real America" hustlers need to control the rural image. Curation is key lol

That means one of the biggest dangers to their scam is when people who grew up there get out, stop being ashamed about not fitting in, & tell the truth about how it is.

Like Melinda did.

And as soon as she did, people came out of the woodwork ordering her to stop.

At that time, I had just finished a long year of doing basic health & safety checks on farms. We had some genuinely cool clients. But I also knew exactly what she was talking about.

So when she said some pretty basic Rural Economics 101 stuff out loud back in 2017 & got a huge disproportional response, it sounded an awful lot to me like someone saying "shhhh stop yelling" as they tried to stuff somebody in a van lol

We're in for a bumpy ride the next several years.

The "Real America" hustlers are gonna be issuing a lot of demands about how we should & should not behave.

And you know what? Those demands are a perfect recipe for disrupting their game.

Eg: if they ask for a light hand with prosecution for their crimes, it's not because it's going to "help America heal"! They DGAF about that!

It's because they need legal impunity to continue their hustle.

Take it away, and it falls apart.

That's what they're worried about.

Disrupting white nationalists is hard, but it ain't complicated.

Listen carefully to their demands.

Then do the opposite.

Don't take their shit! They ain't the boss of you. Speak the hard truths, and demand the inconvenient prosecutions.