Last week, I sent a Letter to the Editor of my local paper, and they published it on Tuesday. The full text of the letter is in the image.

Whenever I have an LTE published, I like to browse the comments section to get a little peek into hearts and minds in my area. Keeping in mind that it’s not a representative sample, the comments - and especially the responses to comments - do provide a feel for how people are thinking about a given topic.

Just in my own my daily interactions, the audience in my area appears still predominantly religiously red. They may grumble about high prices under Trump right now, but a lot of them still haaaaaaate perceived liberals with a reflexive rage that I personally believe should be reserved for, I dunno, child traffickers and war criminals and such.

When I write LTEs that criticize Trump, I get a flurry of bot/troll-style comments - hyperbolic claims about the best economy ever, along with a generous helping of personal insults. And, thankfully, a sprinkling of blue dots bringing the logic and reason and information and such.

But in this latest LTE, I criticized the rich. And that seemed to draw a very different crowd of dissenters. These folks wrote treatises nearly as long as my LTE about why rich people weren’t actually the problem :)

One argued “not all rich people”. I feel like this may be repurposed from some of their other value systems.

One did some tax rate math and argued that “rich people account for most of our tax revenue”. They didn’t do any wealth inequality math, though.

And one worried that “if you tax them, they will leave”. lol Don’t threaten me with a good time.

One even concluded that voting against rich interests would kill the American dream for those who aspire to be rich one day, too. My friend, I’m busy aspiring to healthcare right now, I’ll worry about that later.

One also said that I shouldn’t stir up a violent mob with vague accusations that rich people are bad. I should make constructive requests to address specific issues. Like, for example, when I concluded by saying that people should vote for grassroots public servants who will advance the interests of ordinary Americans instead of CEOs and insider traders and crypto bros?

I personally think that’s both constructive and specific, and that anyone who feels like voting for progressives is comparable to mob violence might just be projecting. It’s not like I said eat the rich or something. Although someone else in the comments might have said that, though 😂

Idolizing the rich is a weirdly tough hold to break. I was sad to see people thumbs-upping the benevolent-rich fiction, mindlessly carrying water for the parasites that are very literally the reason why they (and all the rest of us) can’t have nice things. I was happy, though, to also see people wading in to dispute the billionaire-evangelists. I was happy to even see a few no-war-but-class-war rallying cries! It seems there are at least a few people, even in my deep red district, who have legit had it - and they are not fooled about who is really to blame.