UC Berkeley Instructor: Rural Americans “Bad People” Who’ve Made “Bad Life Decisions”
Richard Moorhead
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A University of California-Berkeley instructor and graduate student attacked rural Americans in seemingly contemptuous terms in a now-deleted tweetstorm posted on Wednesday night.
Jackson Kernion is a graduate student at UC-Berkeley who teaches philosophy courses to undergrads. He made himself a target for criticism, some of which came from other left-leaning academics, when he came out with his surprisingly bigoted views against rural Americans.
Perhaps most shockingly, the elite-university philosophy academic went on to actually call for increased health care costs for rural Americans.
“Rural Healthcare Should be expensive! And that expense should be borne by those who choose rural America!”
It’s unclear what the young punk thinks that eroding rural healthcare programs is going to accomplish, but it’s more than likely that his desire to do so is more firmly rooted in prejudiced rancor than a real, coherent worldview.
Rural Americans are often left with a lack of decent health insurance options under the current American system. Some on the left, such as Bernie Sanders, have sought to offer policy solutions to this problem, but it appears that at least some coastal elitists such as Kernion actually don’t think rural Americans should even have healthcare.
Kernion ended up deleting his Twitter shortly after his tweetstorm, being widely rebuked for his prejudice. However, he did apologize shortly before for his remarks, admitting that his remarks came across as “crass and mean,” leaving open a chance that he could possibly learn and grow from the incident that revealed his starkly bigoted views. It does go without saying that an entire geographic demographic of Americans don’t even deserve healthcare is a bit more than “crass and mean,” though.
Ironically, many of the rural Americans who Kernion has voiced his dislike of would be quick to forgive the elite university student for his slighting of them. The men and women who he speaks of are instrumental in growing the food of urban America, and extracting the natural gas and oil used to power their cars, buses, trains and planes.
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