Coastal elites can’t stand those of us residing in the American Heartland. We work sometimes tedious jobs and shop at Aldi. We don’t share their taste for social depravity and chardonnay. We love America and appreciate its history, warts and all.

If we’re honest, though, the contempt is mutual, but that’s because coastal elites have been ruining our country for decades, all while hating the very Americans who made it great.

In 2008, it was Barack Obama mocking those who are “bitterly clinging to guns and religion.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton scornfully derided “the basket of deplorables” — supporters of Donald Trump, whom she said are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” Only last fall, Hillary declared that half the country needs “a formal deprogramming.”

Those were only “gaffes” in the sense that the comments revealed what Democrat elites truly think about average Americans. We are the hated commoners to be ruled, not heeded.

Indeed, President Joe “Unity” Biden has spent much of his presidency battling the phantom threat of white supremacy from all the “MAGA extremists.”

Those sentiments are not limited to Democrats. They extend to the propagandists in the Leftmedia and the Marxist indoctrinators in academia.

Several folks from both fields gathered this week to discuss their utter disdain for the racist masses that dominate middle America. Tom Schaller, professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Paul Waldman, a journalist and opinion writer, have written a book to explain this, and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a tome titled White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.

Democracy, you see, is threatened by … certain people participating in democracy.

Hmm, where have we heard that before?

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski set up the discussion by contrasting the two presidential candidates. On one side, you have Joe Biden, the middle-class son of a used car salesman who went to public school. On the other, you have Donald Trump, born with a silver spoon, educated in private school, and who “became a millionaire at eight years old.” She then asked a question: “Why are white rural voters a threat to democracy at this point? You would think … looking at Joe Biden’s background and Donald Trump’s, that the opposite would be true.”

That opened the floodgates of hate from Schaller:

We lay out the fourfold interconnected threat that white rural voters pose to the country. They are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and anti-gay geodemographic group in the country.

Second, they’re the most conspiracist group. QAnon support and subscribers, election denialism, COVID denialism and scientific skepticism, Obama birtherism.

Third, anti-democratic sentiments. They don’t believe in an independent press, free speech. They’re most likely to say the president should be able to act unilaterally without any checks from Congress or the courts or the bureaucracy. They’re also the most strongly white nationalist and white Christian nationalist.

And fourth, they are most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.

Sheesh, where to begin?

First, this guy clearly abhors about half the country. Second, his assertions are either patently false, or they project the faults of the Left onto the Right. Leftists are the ones who make everything about race and gender; deny the science of life in the womb, chromosomal DNA, and COVID response; intimidate and censor political opponents; deny, overturn, and rig elections; elect and cheer presidents who ignore the law to do whatever they want while trying to remove an opponent from ballots and perhaps even jail him; and justify or ignore violence when perpetrated by favored victim groups, like blacks or Palestinians.

Leftists also happen to control every major institution in this country — government, media, education, and entertainment. If this country is a racist backwater, why is that?

Here, it might be inconvenient to point out that for decades, white rural voters were the backbone of the Democrat Party, which was the party of slavery and Jim Crow and is now the party of affirmative action and DEI. All race all the time.

We would concede one thing. The political rhetoric in this country has ramped up in vitriolic intensity in recent years, and some of the blame for that lies with Trump and other Republicans.

Yet that concession also only goes so far. We’re no longer disagreeing over how much to spend on government programs, whether we ought to start this or that initiative, or if we have different plans to reach a similar goal. We can’t even agree on what a woman is anymore. Leftists have upended reality itself and called us bigots for objecting because certain truths were true for all of human history. Progress, they tell us. Right side of history.

Is it any wonder that there’s some white rural rage out there? It’s almost entirely justified.

Waldman admitted that there is indeed some justification for the anger, though he argued that, at least in part, it’s due to the “problematic education systems,” “poorer infrastructure,” and “a lack of economic opportunity” in rural areas. “That kind of left them open to someone like Donald Trump, who would come along and tell them something that was true, that there is a system that has not served them well.”

“They’re pissed off,” Brzezinski interjected. Waldman agreed, calling Trump “a conduit for their rage, their anger, their resentment.” Mark Alexander noted this same thing in 2015.

Where Waldman went wrong is asserting that white rural voters like Trump despite the fact that “none of their problems got any better under him.” He hadn’t established utopia, sure, but by 2019 the economy was humming, people could keep more of their money thanks to his tax cuts, and the world wasn’t on proverbial fire. That Joe Biden summarily wrecked all that doesn’t mean Trump hadn’t made tremendous progress.

A final point: The authors thumped their chests over the “entire chapter” in their book dedicated to why minorities in rural areas might also be mad, bemoaning that no one talks about it. They didn’t say why those minorities are mad in the interview, mind you, but they wrote a chapter about it!

Might it be because rural folks are mad for the same reasons regardless of skin color? That doesn’t fit the narrative they were selling.

Ultimately, the bottom line for Waldman, Schaller, Brzezinski, and the rest seems to be that white people are racist because they’re white people. Which is kind of racist, don’t you think?

(Updated)