Letters from Spectator readers, November 2024

The rise of BlueAnon

The adults on both sides have checked out completely and it shows. We are an empire on the decline and there is no denying that now.

— Virgil Hilts

As a basic foundation for this story you could do no worse than to recall an incident that occurred during LBJ’s campaign for senator in Texas in 1948. He proposed to accuse his opponent of “fornicating with a goat.” When an aide asked if he truly believed it, LBJ reportedly said, “Of course not. I just want to hear him deny it on the radio.”

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The rise of BlueAnon

The adults on both sides have checked out completely and it shows. We are an empire on the decline and there is no denying that now.

— Virgil Hilts

As a basic foundation for this story you could do no worse than to recall an incident that occurred during LBJ’s campaign for senator in Texas in 1948. He proposed to accuse his opponent of “fornicating with a goat.” When an aide asked if he truly believed it, LBJ reportedly said, “Of course not. I just want to hear him deny it on the radio.”

— Richard Lindo

The academic legacy of Donald J. Harris

It’s astonishing that Kamala will probably win with a true Marxist theoretician in the family — I guess the time is right for the US to get its very own socialist “utopia.” It will not be pretty. Perhaps we have to go through this to experience what quasi-socialism with woke characteristics feels like. It just won’t work. If anything, the woke flavor of socialism, where all are ranked according to the accident of birth in a pecking order of oppression, is even worse than Marx’s original formulation where all are — in theory anyway — exactly equal.

We already know how this story ends — but of course the left is in thrall to many bad academic theories of late, so we’ll just have to bumble along. If anything is left after four or eight years of a Kamala administration, we’ll return to evidence and facts on the ground. Or we’ll turn into a one-party system and then all bets are off. Unfortunately, I think pessimism is the wiser bet here.

— VR

This is like people worrying that her few years living in Canada turned her into a communist sleeper agent. Worst case, she worships Fidel Castro. It’s not like a US president has the power to unilaterally wave a wand and make anything happen. Whatever her policies, I’d fuss a lot more that the woman appears to be dumber than dirt.

— Andrew Simpson

Forget about the Trump assassination attempt

What is the cause of the apparent fear and loathing of Donald Trump being elected president? I don’t see that democracy was threatened the first time and I have yet to see the detailed list of what makes him a threat to democracy this time around.

— JL

What does Appalachia mean?

The older members of my family — those born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and living in east Tennessee and Kentucky — also called themselves simply “American.” But I think this was because their ancestors had come to America before the Revolutionary War and in the ensuing 150 years of impoverished, hard-scrabble farming, poor education and lack of contact with people from anywhere else, they had simply lost all memory of any ancestral home, and therefore saw themselves only as Americans. While their religion, food, music and dances came with them from Northern Ireland and Scotland, there was no oral or written family history of this, so they naturally saw these things only as “American” traditions.

— Deborah Johnson

I have read Vance’s book twice and having grown up in rural West Tennessee and living in Appalachia, I am well familiar with the area and the people. There are people in the region ranging from the practically illiterate to the well-educated. Some are miners but most rural people are farmers, usually on land that has been passed down over the centuries. I don’t recall anything about “share-croppers,” which is more associated with richer farming areas, in Vance’s book.

My main observation about the people in Vance’s book is not that they were from a rural culture but rather they were a family we would call “white trash.” The main culprit is his nutty grandmother, who had some good points. There are families like them, but most aren’t.

As for rural Americans referring to ourselves as “American,” it’s because we are. My own ancestry dates back to Jamestown — predating the Pilgrims — and includes Scots, Irish (not Scots-Irish), Germans, Welsh, English and possibly Cherokee. We are Americans because our ancestors have been in this country since long before the Founding, unlike those whose ancestors got here around the turn of the twentieth century and perhaps later.

In my opinion, most of the people in that region are simply Southern. That includes southern Ohio which is just as Appalachian as Jackson, Kentucky.

— Sam McGowan

There is always Hope

As a seventy-year-old retired fellow, I never imagined that I could love our dog, Cooper, as much as I do. And reading your article made me that much more anxious that I might outlive him! I know that’s a very selfish thought, but there it is. And so, thank you for the beautifully written piece, and I hope you will soon find “peace” with Hope’s passing.

— Spencer Cosper

I lost my bully rescue dog Locke in an identical way — to cancer, at nine years old. The silence in the house is so accurately described as a huge thing, and the phantom sounds. Two years later I’m still grieving. The “pre-grieving” observation also really hit me. I certainly did a lot of that. A beautifully written and deeply realistic piece. Thanks for it.

— Lee Wren