The Rachel Dolezals of Blue Collar Work

Between podcasters, writers and tech workers: who is the REAL America?

I’ve been told to check my privilege before (I was alive in 2014, after all) but up until today I had never heard it from a right-winger.

If I didn’t know any better, from the looks of Twitter, I’d think that the recent (insane) tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were wildly popular with the rugged salt of the earth folks of “Real America” who perform manual labor for a living. After all, those are the people who are rooting for such tariffs—not because they’re concerned about American being ripped by off by China (or islands inhabited only by pengiuns)—but because they’re tired of a system that is “rigged” against them and are rightfully hoping to burn it all down, channeling the vibes of an Oberlin student in 2020.

According to the narrative, these people—mostly white men, who have supposedly been systematically discriminated against by corporate elites (who, for some reason unclear to everyone, choose to give high-paying fake jobs to annoying women for no financial gain)—have been toiling in the mud, and don’t own anything anyway. A recession apparently won’t affect them at all, only the aforementioned annoying women, as I wrote about before.

But there’s one glaring inconsistency. Over the past week, I saw:

• A guy claiming that “email job women” have made a big mistake by angering “all the combat-aged men in the country,” making him military-adjacent just because he’s technically old enough to be in the military

• A guy exempting software engineering from “email jobs” because he doesn’t send emails

• A guy denouncing “service jobs” as meaningless phony girljobs because they technically don’t manufacture objects.

• A guy saying that only the “elites” care about the cost of laptops because he could never own one (he later admitted he works at a startup- this mf using an abacus to code)

• This one is only somewhat related, it was too funny for me not to share:

There is a reason we aren’t hearing from men who work in oil rigs on Twitter. Twitter is a platform that selects for people who can argue with a racist who exclusively posts close-up photos of anuses (this prompted my Twitter break yesterday, by the way) at 2 PM. While I’m sure some blue collar workers use Twitter, the people speaking for them (or in some cases, pretending to be them) are tech workers, e-commerce business owners, podcasters, or the worst, most privileged and effeminate job of all: Substack writers. They are the Rachel Dolezals of the working class.