I was in the process of typing up the same list as I saw your comment. Unless these people share some of the blame, they’ll be more than happy to carry on doing the same work with a new face.
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As someone who grew up working for my families’ travelling midway, that visiting practically every small town in southern Ontario over a period of about 15 years worth of summers, I can say with some authority that small towns in Ontario are hotbeds of racism and bigotry carefully concealed behind politeness and suppressed by a lack of reason for most folks to bring it up in the first place.
The further you get from the “big city” in southern Ontario, you drift into areas that are mostly “white”, and the sorts of prejudices you’d expect are very prevalent there, especially towards first-nations people (until you move far enough north that they become a significant part of the population), but very especially towards POC, which are practically unknown in many small towns due to the different demographics between the US and Canada.
My stepfather worked for the OPP in Orillia back in 2010 when it was a big deal that the first POC was hired for their force there. The ridicule that the officer had to put up with was disgusting. And Orillia is hardly rural. Canada has its own problems with this sort of thinking, especially in the predominantly white parts of rural Canada.
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I do appreciate the precise prescriptive message:
Then take a bat of sturdy oak…
Not just: grab something solid. No, it should be both “sturdy” and “oak”, or equivalent.
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I’m not sure about the concealed part, especially when it comes to First Nations, but it’s generally bad all around. Even in cottage country. That was from 2020! I remember being called a “little yellow n———“ the one time I visited Peterborough with my school in 1985. Looks like nothing much has changed since. Then there’s Thunder Bay…
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“Cuss out a cop, spit in his face”
Isn’t that just high spirited “tourist” behavior?
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One is reminded of the Westerns that were so popular in the 50s
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Gunstrokers want to live in the Wild West of the movies, a lawless frontier where a man needed a gun to defend his home and his family.
They don’t want to live in the real Wild West, where you weren’t allowed to carry a gun in town.
The one-man law seen of TV and film Westerns is how we remember the West today. It was a time and place where rugged individualism reigned and the only law in the West that mattered was the law on your hip – a gun. Most “cowboy” films had nothing to do with driving cattle. John Wayne grew his brand as a horseback vigilante in decades’ worth of Westerns, from his first leading role in 1930’s The Big Trail to 1971’s Big Jake, in which the law fails and Wayne’s everyman is the only justice.
But as the classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance tells us, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
As the West developed, towns pushed this mythos of the West as their founding ideology. Lax gun laws were just a part of an individualistic streak that manifested itself with the explosion in popularity of concealed carry licenses and the broader acceptance of openly carrying firearms (open-carry laws) that require no permit.
“These Wild West towns, as they developed and became more civilized and larger, there was an effort to promote their Wild West heritage very aggressively, and that became the identity of the town,” says Winkler, “but that identity was based on a false understanding of what the past was like, and wasn’t a real assessment of what places like Tombstone were like in the 1880s.”
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You’re forgetting domestic abuse, which if anything is more likely to be known and yet accepted as ‘normal’ in small communities – where people know perfectly well why someone often shows up to church with a black eye, for example – so the victims never get justice.
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You mean, the westerns that somehow turned all of the (historically accurate) Black and Native/Mestizo cowboys into white men?
Yup.
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They want to live in the lands of my ancestors.
Under border law, a person who had been raided had the right to mount a counter-raid within six days, even across the border, to recover his goods. This “hot trod” had to proceed with “hound and horne, hew and cry”, making a racket and carrying a piece of burning turf on a spear point to openly announce their purpose, to distinguish themselves from unlawful raiders proceeding covertly.
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This is the same chickenshit who had to flee the Las Vegas Shooter’s fusilade.
Now he’s writing songs for mass murderers.
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… “Okie from Muskogee” for a new generation 
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I think the point about crime in small towns is that proportionately, a violent crime is statistically more probable in a small town, but since you live in the next small town instead of a couple of subway stops away, you never think about it. Everything is more remote.
It’s also common in small towns to see violent crimes as tragedies, as black swans rather than as the confirmation bias that happens in cities. Domestic violence is easier to hide in a single home as opposed to an apartment which shares walls with other families who can hear it happening.
I’ve encountered more cold shoulders in small towns than in cities in my life: a lot of small towns are only superficially welcoming, as they have stronger senses of “us” versus “them”, and of “that’s the way things have always been”. If you are part of “us”, then great. But if you’re “them”, expect the locals to be standoffish at best.
This hateful song is full of boasting about how badass he and his in-group is, a bully boasting and warning others not to fuck around and find out. The irony is that this is a case of fucking around with his threats, and now he is finding out.
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…that he’s number one on iTunes.
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This guy and his wife are the worst. Headlining at a GOP event near you soon!
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If not actually running for office.
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