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Rural Americans are ‘Bad People’ Who Deserve to Be Shamed, Says Berkeley Instructor

By Megan Fox

If you live in the farmlands of America, or in the vast mountainous regions far away from cities, a University of California Berkeley instructor wants you to know you’re a bad person who has made bad choices and you deserve to be uncomfortable. The obviously brilliant person who came up with these groundbreaking conclusions is named Jackson Kernion, a self-described “Graduate Student Instructor at University of California.” The since-deleted tweet that got him in trouble read, “I unironically embrace the bashing of rural Americans. They, as a group, are bad people who have made bad life decisions. Some, I assume are good people. But this nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is stupid and we should shame people who aren’t pro-city.”

Campus Reform reported,

Kernion began the thread by advocating against affordable healthcare solutions in rural America, saying that “Rural Healthcare Should be expensive! And that expense should be borne by those who choose rural America!”

He argued that promoting a need for “affordable rural healthcare” is equivalent to arguing for rural Americans “to be subsidized by those who choose a more efficient way of life.”

“Same goes for rural broadband. And gas taxes,” Kernion added.

“It should be uncomfortable to live in rural America. It should be uncomfortable to not move,” he wrote.

Kernion tried to justify his statements with economic arguments about not making rural life “*artificially* cheaper,” but quickly devolved into personal attacks against rural and not “pro-city” Americans.

The good news is that Kernion had the self-awareness to realize he had insulted half of America and deleted his inflammatory statements, issuing a half-hearted apology. “Pretty sure I did a bad tweet here. Gonna delete it,” he wrote. “I’ll want to reflect on it more later, but my tone is way crasser and meaner than I like to think I am.” We’ve all put out a bad tweet here and there, but Kernion’s long rant about rural folks sure seemed like he meant every word and that his tone was exactly how he meant it.

Since the online kerfuffle, Kernion has either been banned from Twitter or has left, because his page no longer exists. But the Twittersphere isn’t going to let it go any time soon.

full story at  https://pjmedia.com/trending/rural-americans-are-bad-people-who-deserve-to-be-shamed-says-berkeley-instructor/

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