DISPATCHES FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY: Trump Country, it turns out, is more tolerant than the left.
Since President Trump’s election, journalists, political scientists and others from across the United States and around the world have visited our little southern Ohio town, population 6,600, to study the natives. Naturally, patronizing local eateries at breakfast or lunchtime is usually part of their itinerary.
Some have told me later that, during their interviews, they went out of their way to identify themselves as liberals who have little use for our president. To their credit, they wanted to be honest about who they were and what they were doing. They were sometimes treated with a degree of skepticism, but without fail, they say that people were polite and willing to talk to them — not to mention serve them breakfast or lunch.
We contrast this, of course, with the recent episodes involving Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, both of whom were essentially evicted from restaurants — Nielsen heckled away by customers, Sanders asked by the restaurant owner to leave — for the crime of Trump association, similar to a misdemeanor but quickly approaching felony status.
Nielsen was targeted by a liberal mob mentality that is no longer confined to college campus reactions to conservative speakers. The Sanders case is at least as disturbing, both for the precedent it sets as well as much of the media’s rather sympathetic portrayal of the restaurant owner who “stood by her principles.”
Read the whole thing, even though none of it comes as a surprise to anyone outside America’s parochial and mistrustful Blue enclaves.