From the International House of Hot Takes

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-content Generator

It's a cold Saturday morning here in Worcester (although not as cold as Charlottesville, today, amirite?), so who isn't ready for a sizzling stack of hot takes served fresh at the International House of Hot Takes, d/b/a The New York Times Op-ed Page?

What's on the menu today?  How about long-time favorites like both sides, served with a dollop of smug liberals?  Or tribalism bad, hot and tasty and guaranteed not to contain anything derived from America's sordid history of racism and sexism?  Perhaps you'd like a side of character is everything, with your choice of tortured Biblical allusions?

We're just bullsh**ting you.  At the International House of Hot Takes, you'll lap up whatever you're served and you'll like it, unless you want to be branded closed-minded, intolerant, or, heavens forfend, arrogant.

Today they're serving up hot, steaming portions of one of their classic menu items: why won't liberals listen to “small-town” America?  In today's version, it's why can't coastal elites understand why out in Green Acres no one has a problem with buying and shooting high-powered assault rifles at anything that moves, like your classmates in third-period U.S. History?

At the outset, we're wondering if there's anything about the slice of small-town America being quoted in extenso and with the most tender sympathy.  How many people of color are quoted in the piece, supposedly set in rural Iowa (3.7% black, according to the Census)?  There's plenty of rural places that have lots of PoC's.  Where's their op-ed column?  Are they down with assault rifles 'r us?

In fact, to find out whether all small-town dwellers think alike, you'd have to go all the way to the same day's Washington Post.  Guess what?  They don't!  In fact,

So, now we know that today's hot take doesn't offer up the views of small-town America, but of white small-town America.  That might be a just a tad different.

As usual with such hot takes, the problem is stated to be the deficient understanding of us smug coastal elites.  We just don't get the wisdom of small-town whites:

The reaction to mass shootings highlights this difference. Liberals blame the guns and want to debate gun control. For conservatives, the blame lies with the shooter, not the gun.

To my conservative friends, it’s a matter of liberty and personal responsibility. Even after a horrific event like the school shooting in Florida, where 17 people were killed, more gun control would be compromising those first principles. For them, compromising those principles would be even more horrific and detrimental to society than any shooting. What my conservative friends see is not gun control, but rather control, period.

Take that, you insufferable liberals.  Now you understand why laws are futile, and why these salt of the earth types oppose laws banning abortions (because people will get them regardless of what the law forbids) or murder (because bad people will kill no matter what).  Duh!

As for the dead students and traumatized survivors, we're sure they'll feel better knowing that keeping assault weapons out of private hands would be much more horrible than being slaughtered in class and so much more detrimental than living with the trauma of having seen the carnage or lost a beloved child.  How do we know this?  Because white small-town America tells us so!

And what about the organization that pimps out high powered weapons as the last line of defense against UN black helicopters landing in your cornfield and forcing your children to take mass transit to government indoctrination centers (which liberals call public schools)?

Not everyone here is an N.R.A. nut, but they think the N.R.A. may be the last line of defense for the Second Amendment. The apocalyptic videos about gun control from the N.R.A. spokeswoman Dana Loesch are over the top, as my conservative friends here know, but they think they are fun for the basic reason that liberals grow faint after viewing them.

The best part: it drives liberals crazy!

Small-town white America knows what's good fun: anything that causes liberals to splutter.  That must be why they loved lynchings so much.  And those hilarious Hillary T-shirts laden with obscenities and sexual references – in white rural America, the fun, like the meth, never stops!

Even taking the premise – that we should know what motivates white rural gun tossers – seriously, the hot take fails to satisfy.  Could it be that asking white racists what motivates them might not generate the right answer?  Could it be that they either don't really know why they voted for the Tangerine-Faced Grifter, or they know damn well and are ashamed to admit it?  Could it be that they understand that their views on people of color, immigrants, women, and anyone else perceived to threaten their position are, to coin a word, deplorable?

The chef of this delectable hot take, one Robert Leonard, is both an anthropologist and journalist at KNIA radio, Knoxville, Iowa's tower of information power.  He's a jack of many trades but he'll always have a job at the International House of Hot Takes.  We'll leave you with another one of his unforgettable creations, this time from 2015, via Salon.com:

With Bush now active on the stage, the dynamic has changed. Every candidate of both parties will have to up their game to keep up with him on the issues. Republicans will have to decide which they dislike more, a Bush dynasty or another Democrat in the White House. Of course, there is a large wing of the party that sees Bush as too moderate, and that they need a Tea Party favorite to win. Which is what every Democratic strategist I know wants them to continue to believe.

In fairness to the chef, there were plenty of cooks in the kitchen involved in the prep of that unforgettable hot take.