G-ddamn White Trash
[February 2026]
G-ddamn White Trash
[February 2026]
Uneducated and ready for war (help)
We need your help (help)
They tasted blood, and now they're ready for more (help)
We need your help (help)
The goddamn white trash
-Ministry
One of my favorite bands, Ministry, released a song in 2023 called “Goddamn White Trash,” aimed squarely at MAGA.
The song fucks. It's on a few of my playlists.
And yet, I bristle.
I don’t disagree that MAGA politics are destructive, and I respect that Ministry has been consistently leftist for decades. But I have been called “white trash” more times than I can count—for growing up poor, for being disabled and living on a fixed income and public assistance for over twenty years. When that phrase gets deployed, even in righteous anger, it lands as a reminder that poverty is still an acceptable target, that class slurs are somehow permissible if aimed at the “right” enemies.
I am queer. I am trans. I live on a fixed income. I vote blue no matter who.
And I am exhausted by the classism that runs rampant among liberals.
We talk endlessly about systemic oppression. We analyze privilege. We dissect power structures with academic precision. But when it comes to class—especially poor and working-class white people—liberal compassion often curdles into contempt.
I have seen it up close.
When I met my ex-husband in 2006—whom I will call G—he was a centrist libertarian. By the time I left him seven years later in 2013, he was Tea Party, militia-adjacent, calling Obama a “radical communist” and a “secret Muslim.”
But there is a detail that complicates the story.
His mother was a real estate agent married to a Boeing executive, both pulling in six figures a year, and his mother and stepfather were fervent Obama supporters. Well-to-do Marin County liberals. Yard signs. NPR. The whole aesthetic.
And my ex-mother-in-law called me “poor white trash.” She mocked her neurodivergent son for working at McDonald’s. Later, for working as a security guard. She looked down her nose at anyone on welfare or disability while paying lip service to progressive values. She made fun of me for making green bean casserole for Thanksgiving and called it "quaint" and "redneck"; she lectured me about buying non-organic food and non-recycled toilet paper.
On the holidays she would give us $50 gift cards to Whole Foods or hoity-toity home decor stores like Crate & Barrel which during the recession of the late 00s/early 10s not only didn't go far but her fifty dollars could have gone a lot farther with gift cards for regular supermarkets or big box stores or even IKEA for furniture. She was out of touch to the point of being on her own planet.
Do you know what that does to a man who already feels economically insecure? It confirms the narrative that liberals are elites who despise you.
When someone’s lived experience of “liberalism” is a wealthy parent sneering at blue-collar work while preaching about social justice, the word “elite” stops sounding like right-wing propaganda and starts feeling like an accurate description.
G chose his path. I do not absolve him of responsibility for that evolution.
But I would be dishonest if I pretended that kind of class contempt did not fertilize the soil.
My mother is part Black. She voted for Donald Trump three times.
She did hold bigoted views at the time—racism and transphobia that, as of 2025, she has disavowed. She no longer supports Trump or MAGA and is deradicalizing.
But when I asked her why she voted the way she did, the answer was “the economy.”
It was resentment toward what she perceived as “the liberal elite” making life more expensive through environmental mandates, pushing “green” consumer products ordinary people could not afford, and disrupting coal mining and other working-class industries without providing viable alternatives.
My mother’s resentment toward what she calls “liberal elites” did not begin with Obama. It dates back to the 1990s. She worked at a factory that shut down in the wake of Clinton’s NAFTA policy, and she experienced that as a direct blow to her livelihood. His welfare reforms made it harder for her to access assistance, and we had winters in New England with no heat, and we had nights when dinner was a bologna sandwich on Wonderbread or a bowl of cereal (decades before discovering I am celiac).
So when she talks about Democrats as out-of-touch elites, that memory is part of what she means. Whether her political conclusions were right or wrong, the economic wound underneath them was real.
If the only visible face of liberalism is affluent professionals who can afford electric car payments and organic groceries, then “elite” again stops being an insult and becomes an observation.
And then there is my own life.
I live in a small town in a deep red Midwestern state. I am within ten minutes of farms, and about a half-hour from the Amish; it is an hour one-way to my doctor's office in the nearest major city. One of my neighbors flew his American flag at half-mast after Charlie Kirk died and his wi-fi name alternates between stuff like "MAGA Patriot", "ATF Is Gay" and "Antifa Killer" to name a few greatest hits. He randomly shoots off his rifle in his yard on weeknights.
I live here because I cannot afford to “just move.” I moved to this state to avoid homelessness (my best friend took me in). My roommate (who is also liberal) and I remain here because this state has one of the lowest costs of living in the US.
Economic hardship is not a moral failure. It is not a punchline. It is not proof of ignorance.
Yet I have sat in liberal and leftist circles where people casually joke about “rednecks,” “hillbillies,” and “poor white trash.” Mocking people like myself who shop at Walmart or Temu because that's what we can afford. I have heard people say that if a natural disaster hit a red state, “nothing of value would be lost.” I have watched the same mouths that speak eloquently about compassion turn vicious when discussing poor conservatives.
I live in a red state.
Disabled people live in red states. Queer people live in red states. Children live in red states.
Minorities live in red states. There is a Black family in my little semi-rural neighborhood. There is a large Black community in the nearest major city. There is also a large Latino population, a non-trivial population of Asians, Muslims, etc.
When you dehumanize entire regions because of voting patterns, you are not striking at power. You are punching sideways and down.
Class contempt does not become enlightened just because it is aimed at the “right” demographic.
There is a particular cruelty in mocking poor white people while claiming to fight systemic injustice. Poverty is still poverty. Economic precarity still grinds down the body and the mind. Disability still limits options. Not everyone can relocate to a blue coastal enclave. Not everyone has the financial cushion to “vote with their feet.” And until and unless we reform our voting system to a true popular vote rather than the electoral college, there is also a structural reality people rarely acknowledge: when liberals and left-leaning voters flee red states for blue ones, they concentrate their votes in places that are already blue while leaving red states even more lopsided. That migration pattern reinforces the very imbalance people claim to be escaping, contributing to why Republicans continue to win national power despite losing the popular vote. “Just move” is not only economically unrealistic for many of us; it is politically shortsighted.
If your politics only feel humane toward the upwardly mobile and the college-educated, they are not humane politics.
It is possible to condemn racism and transphobia without dehumanizing the economically struggling. It is possible to critique reactionary movements without sneering at the working class. It is possible to fight for climate policy while acknowledging that transitions must be materially survivable for the people whose industries are being dismantled.
If liberals want to understand why populist movements gain traction, they need to look not only at right-wing propaganda but at their own blind spots.
When poor people hear themselves described as backward, disposable, or “nothing of value,” they do not become enlightened. They become angry. And someone else will be waiting to weaponize that anger.
I am not asking for coddling. I am not asking for moral equivalence between bigotry and economic frustration. I am asking for consistency.
If dignity is a universal principle, it must include the rural poor. If class analysis matters, it must apply to white poverty too. If empathy is real, it cannot switch off between coasts and cornfields.
You cannot sneer people into solidarity.
And if we do not confront the classism within liberal culture, we will keep feeding the very movements we claim to oppose.