Rural America is Epic, Actually

Responding to the legitimately deranged "Every Entitled White Rural Farm Kid Is Trained to Be a Mass Shooter" article.

“Article” for context: Every Entitled White Rural Farm Kid Is Trained to Be a Mass Shooter

Normally, I ignore these sorts of posts because they are written by particularly decadent libtards that are so detached from anything worth discussing that squishing them is just not very satisfying. It’s like crushing a bug under your tire while you back out of the driveway.

However, this Walt guy is different. He authentically lived the “Entitled White Rural Farm Kid” life and came away with some very negative conclusions, arranged in suprisingly thoughtful (if poorly written) vignettes.

Of course, I am going to rub this guy’s nose in it because his article is an attack on the product of basically everything good about white America: deer hunting, sports, masculinity, father figures (lmfao), Christianity, whatever. None of that stuff is very exciting, done to death by far more capable writers than Waltuh. Walt tries to make up for this by going for a series of low blows that are outlandishly attention-getting such as calling all white kids potential school shooters. It’s a slam dunk with his target audience: similarly decadent, childless or divorced white women. The infamous “cat ladies” as JD Vance described them. Seriously, go look at the pfps of the people engaging with his drivel.

Waltuh is banking on a cacophonous echo chamber of childless white women offering little resistance, providing the wind under his triple-vaxxed sails as he coasts into a victory lap of self-indulgent critique of the best parts of America that he was privileged enough to enjoy while contributing to their destruction.

He is probably not banking on someone like me responding to him. I grew up in a nearly carbon-copy environment: a small farm 45 minutes outside Atlanta surrounded by other small farms. So, maybe the Truth Nvkes I’m about to drop will resonate with him.I’ll sprinkle my own vignettes in along the way. I doubt he’ll sincerely consider anything, though. He has a sensitive trigger finger with the block button.

This is what 95% of America looks like. Good.

Also, go listen to the voiceover he recorded for this article. It’s so funny.

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I remember playing “guns” with my cousins on sprawling farm land littered with dilapidated structures. We’d duck inside crumbling buildings to use them as cover as we switched between the roles of stalker and stalked.

These are the first lines of the article and you can already tell where he’s going with it. No Walt, little kids playing war is not indicative of some mental health crisis.

If you never saw one of these bad boys as a Blunderbuss you missed out. I used to cry when my friends never let the grapeshot I loaded in there count.

Instead, this is a healthy expression of imagination often through some of the only shared experiences a boy of 7 or 8 has: stories he got from someone else. You and I both probably watched hundreds of hours of WWII documentaries on the History Channel growing up. Or the Gen X equivalent, I have no idea how old you are. The dramatic music, the real-life interviews, the epic narration, the silent approval of father, all of these pull a young boy into a world that he wants to act out. Also, like it or not, men are biologically inclined to seek conflict and violence to protect their in-group and boys playing war is a healthy expression of this.

No, this is not “dulling the minds of America’s whites to violence” or whatever. This is an age appropriate acting out of heroic tales, imagined or learned or even a mixture of the two. True heroism occurs in an enviroment where the good guys don’t always win (hard concept, I know) and real risk of death is possible. That’s what makes it heroic. Of course, a child cannot conceptualize the actual consequences of blowing someone’s head off. When a kid holds a stick gun up at his friends, he’s waiting for his pal to uphold his end of the bargain: sprawling backwards and playing dead on the ground for a moment. Children are not capable of dwelling on the death and gore aspect of shooting someone. Since you’re probably incapable of divorcing this mental imagery from AR-15 silhouette stock photos on CNN articles, I will say it is also appropriate for young boys to sword fight with sticks. My parents got me a foam sword for Christmas one year, and I re-enacted scenes from Narnia with my brothers. It is a social experience that actually has very little to do with violence at all. If you think playing war in elementary school has anything to do with the willingness to take the lives of real life human beings, you should be red flag lawed.

We carried military satchels for our caps, along with an assortment of knives and maybe a few candy bars in case all the killing made us hungry. The buildings smelled of wet hay and manure. Weathered boards hung from rusty nails and there was always the risk of snagging your clothing or skin on the ragged metal. Many times I looked at a torn finger and saw the stain of orange next to the blood which meant I was going to need a Tetanus shot.

Young boys like the feeling of being entrusted with something serious. That is why the Boy Scouts (RIP) placed them in positions of seemingly great authority at young ages. Remember how kids used to clamor to be the line leader?

Boys also want acceptance, particularly from men. The military gear combines these things: you feel like a member of the in-group on a very serious mission. The buildings (I also grew up playing in buildings that smelled the exact same) are indicative of this seriousness, of being trusted with them as real-life props to help the imagined battle come alive. Any kid could go play in the woods, it took a special mission to get access to the hay loft where the enemy forces were hiding. Whenever I acted out the scenes from Narnia, I always envisioned my dad back-to-back with me. I was far more focused on waving my sword in a way that would make him approve than the literal ramifications of slicing an orc in half with my sword. Because I was a child.

Every time I go into the house of rich people and they proudly show me their antique furniture made of weathered boards, I recall indulging in a childhood murder fantasy.

If you “fantasized about murder” as a child, you had a very different childhood than me. What even, dude. This is just weird.

When you were hit [by paintballs], the impact delivered enough force to knock you down. Actually, I could have withstood it, but I found that falling absorbed the impact and lessened the sting. After playing paintball, I was covered with quarter sized welts.

After one weekend of paintball, I had a doctor appointment. The doctor looked at the bruises all over my body with concern. “What are these from?”

“My daddy beats me with a chain,” I said with a laugh. That was the kind of comment that passed as humor when I was growing up.

The doctor looked at my dad, my dad laughed nervously and explained that we had been playing paintball. All of this was duly noted in the report. On the drive home, I was lectured about making the kind of jokes that could lead to a police inquiry. I felt really bad about my mistake, but no police officer ever came to talk to us.

So did you live in an enviroment where joking about this “passed as humor” or did you live in an environment where people would call the cops on you for saying that? Also, I cannot imagine a single place in America outside the Deep (black) South where saying “my dad hits me with chains” qualifies as a joke. As I’m sure others can attest, If I were to say this to an adult it would conjure an army of angry neighbors outside my house. In what universe do people consider serious child abuse funny? Maybe the trashiest trailers of West Virginia, but this guy already claimed he had a bourgeois upbringing. Also, getting beaten with chains leaves much bigger welts than your “hand cocked” paint ball guns. Especially these:

These guns were so bad that half the time the paintball would blow up in the barrel.

spring powered Walmart purchases. At that age, you’d probably have broken bones. No doctor with an IQ above 70 is going to see paintball bruises and think “Ah, yes. This could plausibly come from a chain swung by a full grown man”.

Again, what even is this dude. Paintball does not hurt that much. I’ve played paintball in paper thin long-sleeved cotton shirts and gotten lit up from my retarded redneck friends, it’s a pretty tolerable pain. Assuming this was 20ish years ago at least, a non-air non-gas operated paintball gun is not going to hurt much at all. Even for a kid. Was the flying through the air after getting hit by a paintball just a prelude for being a theater kid in high school?

Derrick was the first to kill a buck, and I remember watching him gut the animal.

“You have to take off your coat.”

“But it’s cold.”

“The heat of the animal will warm you up, gutting a deer is hot work.”

“But, aren’t we supposed to wear blaze orange in the woods during hunting season?”

“It’s okay, you’re surrounded by blaze orange.”

This just sounds like a gaggle of retards, honestly. You take the coat off because the heat from your own body keeps you toasty, not the carcass of a dying animal. This definitely sounds like a Redditor that thinks he’s re-enacting the Tauntaun scene from Star Wars. Also, where are you gutting this thing, the field where you shot it? Why aren’t you hanging it up to drain the blood in the barn? You know, where it’s fifteen degrees warmer?

Why would an adult respond to “Aren’t we supposed to wear orange” with “It’s okay, you’re surrounded by it?”. Not only is that just a stupid answer, it reinforces that this stupid family is somehow processing the deer out in the field where they killed it. Deer weigh hundreds of pounds. What is the plan here? You’re not going to hold X and disassemble the deer into neat little chunks like a Ubisoft game, you’re going to have a 2/3 processed deer carcass that is either going to be dragged back to the house (good luck) or loaded, soaked in gore, on some guy’s ATV or pickup bed. You certainly don’t have the necessary tools to do it on the spot. Why.

It was true, all the uncles and cousins were there to watch like this was some primitive celebration of manhood.

Like? It is a primitive celebration of manhood. Understanding man’s role in the ecosystem as protector, steward, and apex predator is often an important part of the rural lifestyle. It’s very common to make kids take a bite out of the heart of the animal, something I’m glad my parents and neighbors never made me do. This isn’t to “flex” on the animal, it’s to understand that this was a living, breathing thing that has served a higher purpose and should be respected.

I lost my interest in deer hunting in that moment. I didn’t want to do that to the body of an animal. It wasn’t so much the act itself, it was the congratulatory attitude. It didn’t seem an appropriate moment to be making jokes. I felt the need for some reverence. It seemed to me that we were in the presence of death and everyone could have shown a little respect.

I actually somewhat agree with you on this, I think some hunters have a bad habit of treating the animal as if it were a disposable toy. I know an equal amount that refuse to act “unsporting” to the animal out of principle. Nearly every family I know is a “nose to tail” family, even using the intestines and stuff so nothing goes to waste. Sort of sounds like you just had a trashy family.

The only place we ever showed anything approaching respect was at church. I remember walking in past a statue of a man being tormented to death, pain in his eyes, blood trickling down his body. I remember thinking the dead eyes of the statue looked a lot like the dead eyes of the deer.

I understood the statue better after going deer hunting, but not in the way that was intended.

The idea that human sacrifice is something to be revered turned my stomach. I looked at my uncles and cousins and knew that every one of them could shoot an animal and cut it up like a butcher leaving a neat little pile of entrails in the forest.

This is why the Orthodox typically don’t depict Jesus as in agonizing pain on the cross. Still, you said this in the gayest way possible. In the same way making a kid take a bite from the heart shows the seriousness of the act that has just occured, seeing Jesus writhing on the cross shows you the literal events of what happened. He suffered one of the most painful, torturous executions the brutal Ancient world had to offer, despite being the least deserving of such a fate. He’s not a cartoon character. He’s a historical figure that really underwent that process. If your denomination chooses to depict Him like that, maybe ponder why instead of crying about it.

American society is built on the concept that human sacrifice is necessary, human sacrifice is noble, human sacrifice turns men into gods.

Yes? Why is that bad? Well, yes for most of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Waltuh thinks Jesus’ execution made Him morph into God like the second phase of a Dark Souls boss. Sacrifice is sometimes necessary, often noble, and might turn men into legends but WASPy America doesn’t think you turn into Prestige Master demigods because you died for something or someone. Spamming “human sacrifice” is not creating the “Aztecs carving hearts for better harvests” imagery that you think it is. American society was actually built on Christian love, the love of John 15:13

Self-sacrifice, particularly of men, is a prerequisite of civilization.

This is where it starts to become genuinely insane.

We know that most mass shooters are most often white.

No we don’t. You falsely claimed this because you have the incorrect notion that it’s the “quiet white kid” that typically perpetrates mass shootings. The truth is that it’s very often black kids. Of course, that depends on your definition of “mass shooting”. If the definition is “three or more victims in one incident”, then the data is overwhelmingly black men typically shooting people that they know. You don’t know that because the front page of Google sees a meaningful distinction between “mass shooting” and “gang violence” which is a false dichotomy. And, of course, the white shooters are often linked to grooming conducted by groups like FBI. This muddies the waters considerably.

“The Violence Project”, a source extremely biased towards your views, concurs. This is despite obvious manipulation like saying there have been ZERO black school shooters, when in reality they make up something like 2/3 of them.

They’re the type of person who is fascinated by the thought of owning a military grade weapon. I wonder if all of them played guns and paintball and killed deer and went to church.

No. Most of them have never owned a gun before, and almost all guns used in mass shootings are stolen. Which is an erm.. unfortunate reconciliation with the fact that most of the mass shooters are black. For every “quiet white kid brings an AR-15 to school”, there’s like 5 “Daquan steals a glock out of someone’s glovebox before letting it rain on his cousins that owe him money at the neighborhood cookout”.

The implication that rural whites are represented AT ALL in mass shootings is insane. Ironically, it’s rural whites that stop mass shootings when they carry concealed pistols or work in the police force.

These are the type of people who revere authority, they worship “the father,” they love the concept of military discipline, and they know exactly who they’re supposed to hate.

Uhh, no actually. Many of them didn’t grow up with fathers at all! Pretty racist for you to say this about black men, though.

The MAGA Americans you’re describing are some of the most law abiding people on earth. They’re basically masochists with the abuse they tolerate from cretins like you and the people you elect. Go on any gun forum to read discussions of newly manufactured legal minutiae to see what I mean. Listening to fudds pick apart SBR laws or even flagrantly retarded “rules” like Section 922r will change even your mind.

Once, in Australia, some friends and I were touring an amusement park and there was a shooting game. A corner of the room was set up with targets in the form of various animals.

I was the only American. The Australians were city kids, and they couldn’t hit anything. I tried to show one of them how to use the sights, and he snapped at me. “Hey, if you think you can do better, then go ahead.”

I’m assuming this was the pellet gun game we all played at the carnival. Feeling bad about being able to safely operate a fake tool is beyond reason. This is like being embarrassed about being able to drive stick-shift transmissions. Guns are a symbol of America because there is no America without guns. They’re a symbol of rugged Anglo defiance, something Australia used to share before they were defanged. Look where that got them.

I took it, aimed, and systematically shot every target in the game. It seemed to me it was absurdly easy. I turned to hand the gun back, “You see…” I began, but I noticed everyone was looking at me. They weren’t impressed. In fact, they seemed nervous at how easily I could pick up a random weapon and “kill” everything that was put in front of me.

With a pneumatic pellet gun bolted into the frame of a pop-up carnival game? Did they think you were going to find an “assault weapon” (not a real term btw) under a rock in Australia? And then turn it on them? That says more about you than it does about guns in America. I’ve taken several kiwis from the ruggy team back to the family ranch over Easter break, and they were delighted by my shooting ability. And then we grilled out after, hit the gym, and went to Waffle House after that. This sequence of events would melt your mind if you were present to witness it.

Shooting a bow is equally hard for people without training. Your friends would’ve been equally impressed if you’d shot every bullseye. Or any other feat of coordination and technical know-how. Australians are impressed when you can spiral a football overhand. Not that you’d know what that’s like.

At the time, I thought they were being silly. It was just targets. It was harmless. I was just harmlessly practicing going into a room and killing everything that I found. Didn’t they understand? Sacrifice is necessary in life. I was making gods of those things! Maybe one day they’d grow up and appreciate what I could do…

WTAF is this? Is this some kind of Joker monologue? Closing your eyes and salivating over a self-imposed imaginary mass shooting scenario and then bragging about that on Substack is probably not a good idea. Deeply indicative of a disturbed individual. Take your SSRIs and chill out dude.

Our country makes heroes out of murderers, rapists, liars, insurrectionists, and enslavers.

Ya, they’re called illegal immigrants from Latin America.

We revere ignorance.

How rich.

We worship at the altar of obedience.

Erm… aren’t you supposed to be saying this is a good thing? Pretty sure the “altar of obedience” was erected during Covid.

We’re filled with promises of our own manifest destiny, and when those dreams fail to become reality, we learn a twisted reflection of accountability that comes in the form of self-loathing.

Yeah normal people don’t experience this, they get depressed. You keep forming really, really weak links to wanting to hurt other people through your own experiences. That is genuinely concerning. Some of this garbage qualifies as manifesto material.

The United States of America is the only country in the world that has to deal with terrorist mass shooters

No. Incorrect.

The murder of children is normalized

Ya it’s called abortion.

just like racism, just like misogyny

Can you find even a single example of either of these things being tolerated by mainstream cultural organs? Like, is Time magazine putting racism on the cover or something?

just like the exploitation of labor, just like a million other forms of uniquely American abuse.

To be fair, everyone in this picture is going to vote Democrat in the 2028 election.

What are these men thinking when they pick up a rifle and decide to murder innocent children?

“Man, I sure hope my FBI handler lets me do drugs with Tom Hanks on Obama island after this like he promised”

What do they think they will achieve? Is it an expression of desperate frustration? Are they trying to get the attention of the patriarchal deity they’ve been trained to revere?

Most mass shooters are profoundly mentally broken for a long time before they consider hurting others. They also live in inner cities and suburbs, where the “patriarchical deity” was exorcised in the 1960s. Do you really think Bubba is coming off his combine to go shoot up a mall an hour+ from his house?

They know they have no escape from their awful job.

They know they’ll never be able to retire.

They know they’ll never be able to afford a house.

They know that nobody will ever love them.

They know the price of healthcare will take everything from them.

Which is why white men are increasingly turning to suicide, either on purpose or through drugs (fentanyl) and alcohol. This little narrative about 21st century Yeomen going out in an orange blaze of glory shooting up randoms is a complete fantasy. When white men do target minorities, like the Buffalo shooting, they’re certainly not MAGA-ites. They’re the worst of the “incel” / online NS community, who will be the first to tell you that Trump et al are hardly their friends.

These are the lurking fears that churn beneath the bland expressions of every American as they stand up reverently to pay their respects to the flag.

Nobody does the Pledge of Allegiance anymore, even most public schools. They’re certainly not “reverent” about it. What is all this Cold-War era hippie drivel coming from? Certainly not the experience of someone who has been in an average American city post-BLM.

We all live in a constant state of terror, everyone, that is, but the small percentage at the top that feels entitled to take everything from us.

Extremely on-the-nose antisemitism for no reason lmfao.

Mass shootings represent the culmination of the fundamental American delusion

Uhh.. how? You make these super pedantic allegations without even fact-less rhetoric to back it up. What is the American delusion? How do mass shootings represent that? Is the American delusion that people can safely handle firearms? Because hundreds of millions of people do so every day..

More and more people are succumbing to this, and it’s not working. We keep getting caught up in doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Stand for the anthem, pledge to the flag, work, drink, divorce, get sick, be miserable, and die.

Hmm. I wonder who sent manufacturing overseas in the name of faux environmentalism before massively depreciating the value of labor with an incalculably large wave of low-skilled illegal immigration and another approaching tsunami of high-skilled labor.

We are living in the zenith of neo-liberalism. Everything you guys wanted has been achieved: open borders, the destruction of the family, free porn, Door Dash, legalized weed, “assault weapons” bans (twice), a surveillance state, Jewish nepo-oligarchy, basically your entire grocery list. The only significant victory the Right has had in, like, 20 years, was the inarguably correct decision to return abortion to the states by striking down the inarguably unconstitutional Roe v. Wade. Correctly interpreting the Constitution a single time in the last several decades has sent millions of childless cat ladies, ghetto princesses, and decadent losers like Waltuh into a frenzy.

In some depraved inversion of logic, these frustrated, entitled American men come to think that their only chance of hope can be found in murdering people.

You’re making huge claims about the whole of American society (400m people) that are completely delusional. Let’s do some simple beer math.

There are 219,000,000 whites in the US. Let’s assume half are men (~110m).

If even half of one percent of white men followed the logic you claim they all do, there would be hundreds of thousands of mass shootings every year. Thousands every day.

Instead, the US averages in the double digits. Of course Waltuh, most of those are black men despite being roughly 7% of the US population. Not exactly helping your point.

They never even consider embracing ideas like raising minimum wage, implementing universal healthcare, implementing universal education, or making any kind of progressive change in our society. All of these are concepts that they’ve been trained since childhood to denounce.

Your assumption here is that rural men are just too stupid to embrace your cosmopolitan, enlightened progressive ideals that radiate from major cities like rays from the sun. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Anecdotally, most rural white men I know are pretty smart. Even if this is procedural intelligence, like memorizing the steps on replacing an alternator, they’re still quite clever. Rural American men, since before America was a country, have typically been better read than their metrosexual counterparts. This is counterintuitive, I’m sure, because you have this mental image of another Enlightenment spilling out from LA to the unwashed hordes. But, it is a quirk of uniquely white American culture that still produces “Yeomen”: untitled upper middle class landed white men a la Thomas Jefferson. On the frontier, it was unremarkable to find collections of Shakespeare next to the Bible. The Bible, a complete anthology of near-eastern Antiquity, produced particular zeal in literacy. My great-great uncle memorized every verse: he’d pull out his pocket KJV at the turn of every row in his field before committing the words to memory. After decades of plowing, he’d accomplished his task and would humbly provide recitations to the local congregation—some of whom could still only read German.

The idea that rural whites, the same ones that grew up in the Cold War, seemingly “never considered” UBI is retarded. Most of them can articulate their loathing of the topic far better than you could defend it. And then they could return to their alternator project, another thing you can’t do.

The way out of this is so painfully obvious, but neither our politicians nor our media nor our parents nor our pastors ever bother to speak this truth!

The “way out” you’re talking about is banning AR-15s, which not only has the backing of the biggest political machine in human history, but it was already done in the 1990s by Bill Clinton. Billions of taxpayer dollars flow illegaly into “speaking this truth”, which is a massive industry protected by a swarm of NGOs, PACs, SuperPACs, and think tanks. Many liberal politicans have made careers over reciting the same factually incorrect statements to each other about it on CSPAN. Walt, the entire decadent liberal elite wants this to happen. I mean, come on.

Can’t they see it’s not working? Can’t they see that the billionaires who pull the strings and who orchestrate a destiny of inescapable misery until death do not so much as flinch at the loss of innocent lives? Haven’t there been enough mass shootings to prove that?

Do you even know what team you’re on? Billionaires are all progressive now, at least outwardly, because its our state religion.

They almost all support Kamala, the single most progressive member of any political body in US history.

I get this is supposed to be some foppish rhetorical appeal to emotions but you didn’t even do it right.

Can’t the frustrated, entitled men of this country yet see the futility of the lies they’ve been promised? The toxic path of mockery and murder is not the way.

Who is promising rural white men that they’ll get what they want by perpetrating mass shootings? White men are the most ignored element of society today. Nobody is addressing them, least of all telling them to do that. Well, except the Intelligence services.

The saddest part of all of this is that I feel we have a better chance in appealing to the psychotic shooters of tomorrow than we do in pleading with the all-powerful patriarchs to ease up on their commitment to cruelty.

Say one more antisemitic lie about our rightful Jewish overlords and I will personally ensure your credit score drops to zero.

I have an appeal for the future shooters, please, put aside your guns. That powerful people let you have them should indicate their possession is not in your best interest.

First of all, lmao. Implying future shooters read your Substack is not helping you beat the “deranged maniac” allegations. Second of all, they don’t “let you” have guns. Guns are a card to play for when the powerful people try to not “let you have” whatever it is that gun owners feel like dying over. Booglarp aside, that is the explicit reason that “assault weapons” were permitted in the Constitution and upheld in court over and over. It’s designed to be a counterbalance to the government.

You don’t make gods out of your neighbors through sacrifice. You’ve been deceived.

Equating mass shooting victims to Jesus Christ is such an insane conclusion to reach, idek what to say. Like, what on earth. This is genuinely troubling imagery, and not for the reason you think it is.

Saying shooting victims are like Jesus because they both died is like saying cannibalism is the same thing as eating steak because they both contain carbon. Just a complete false equivalence.

Waltuh, look at me Waltuh. I’m addressing you directly now, Waltuh.

You’re a decadent loser. You are the explicit reason America is becoming the way it is. You enjoyed the last of the ripest fruits of American society and squandered it by becoming everything the best people around you hated. Its sad that you got to enjoy this instead of the millions of other boys that grew up in suburbs and cities that would do anything to take your place. You took this gift and decided to reject it in favor of HR nannies, megacorporations, and 10 average hours of daily screen time.

You clearly didn’t learn anything from your time in the best part of the best country on earth. You should know better, having been steeped in the practical ideas of practical people in a practical place where DoorDash is not an option. Instead, you sharted out this half-baked worldview that is a wonky reinterpretation of what CIA cutouts in the media tell you is an authorized opinion. You’ve never had an unauthorized thought before, Waltuh.