Jackson Kernion, a UC Berkeley graduate student and instructor, is the center of well-deserved media backlash. He recently tweeted that “I unironically (sic) embrace the bashing of rural Americans. they, (sic) as a group, are bad people who have made bad life decisions. Some, I assume, are good people. But this nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is stupid and we should shame people who aren’t pro-city.”
Kernion’s tweet drew such an outpouring of online opposition that he deleted not only the original tweet, but his entire Twitter account. Most of the responses to his tweet responded emotionally to the first part of the tweet. It would be easy for me to get my feelings hurt, since I was born and raised in rural America and am raising my own children in the sticks. But I’m going to choose to be thick-skinned like a rhino and analyze Kernion’s statement from a factual point of view. Maybe some of us country folk have made bad life decisions, just like many city dwellers have as well. Statistically, more city people have made bad life decisions than country people, because more people live in the city.
Kernion should stick to philosophy (where everyone gets a participation trophy and the job prospects are nil), because analytical reasoning is not his strong suit. Neither are grammar, public relations, or fact-based logic. His claim that the pastoral way of life in America is nostalgic and imagined is supported by neither factual nor anecdotal evidence. Americans who live in rural areas lead lifestyles that are both real (as in “not imaginary”) and not purely nostalgic (as in “keeping up with modern technology”).
The so-called pastoral way of life is a fancy phrase for “country life.” As countless others have pointed out, vital industries such as agriculture, mining, natural resource management, and many more exist in rural America. There’s nothing nostalgic about farmers using GPS systems to plant row crops in perfectly straight lines. Old-fashioned sentiments don’t motivate loggers to fall timber and plant seedlings: Ensuring sustainable production of lumber, copy paper, and toilet tissue does. Today’s farmers are not chopping wheat with a scythe and hitching Bert and Bessie to the wagon to haul the harvest to market. They are using biodiesel to run heavy machinery that chops corn stalks, which are unfit for human consumption, into silage, which is nutritious for cattle. Nothing goes to waste, a policy which bestows both environmental and financial benefits.
Kernion’s call to “shame people who aren’t pro-city” makes me wonder who is not pro-city. I don’t live in the city, but I am pro-city. Mostly because if everyone left the city and moved out to the country, the country wouldn’t be the country anymore now, would it? Cities are a wonderful way for people to live near each other in an organized fashion. After all, human beings are a social species by nature. Cities provide a central gathering place for our society’s governing institutions, centers of higher education, medical establishments, and centers of art and culture.
Whether an American citizen wants to live in the city or a rural area because it makes him or her happy, then that right falls squarely under the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” clause of the Declaration of Independence. Calling for widespread shaming of a specific demographic due to personal prejudice is an example of unconstitutional bigotry. Berkeley prides itself on its progressive measures, like frog tunnels and natural gas bans, but it produced a philosophy instructor who has regressed hundreds of years with his poorly formed, anti-American rhetoric. Let’s hope Kernion is removed from his teaching position and thus prevented from spreading his regressive suggestions to more impressionable students.
these so called intellectuals, with their self-proclaimed superiority, would not last long nor survive long, in an enviroment, lacking silver spoons and entitlement benefits. Close the hiways and supply sources from the intolerables, and these precious snowflakes, would be quickly revealed for the ignorant, brainwashed elitist they truly are.
I long for the day when we “bad” country folk decide that city folk aren’t worthy of our labors. Then they’ll learn that food doesn’t just come from the grocery store.
God summed it u the best: Ecclesiastes 10:2 The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.
Fire his stupid ass!!
This is exactly why we are in the trouble we are in today! This
is the stuff that poison our Kid’s minds today in schools and
University all around this great country today!
All these people should be fired and REAL AMERICAN good
Teachers should replace them! These so Called “intellectuals”
don’t have your kids best interests at heart! Nothing wrong
with good wholesome Country People & Living!
God help our youth of today!
“Professor” Kiernan is a grad student, which means he’s, what, 22 or 23? He’s studying and probably teaches a lab or a freshman course to earn a little extra to pay his tuition. He’s a kid, and doesn’t represent US Berkeley, or Californians, or liberals, or any other group you intend to disparage. His opinion, right or wrong, smart or stupid, bold or tepid, doesn’t mean shit.
Your article is intended to blame universities for corrupting the minds of poor innocent Christian boys and girls. I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that I can go out into the public media and find conservatives, Christians, Republicans, nationalists, and plain old good wholesome folks from Iowa or Minnesota who say a lot worse things about people from various other segments of society. And some of them might even be from UC Berkeley. Give us a break from your fake outrage while defending US citizens from the opinions of intellectual toddlers.
He is listed as faculty on the UC Berkeley web site.
This is a representative of UC Berkeley expressing a heinous prejudice. If he had been talking about black people or gay people he would have been fired in an instant. Instead he was talking about a culture that built this country, and is still vital to its survival.
And if he is a product of UC Berkeley, what the hell are they teaching there?
BTW, you know he was talking about you, right? Did you make a “bad life decisions”?
I for one have seen good christian teenager go to Oregon Colleges and get brainwashed into anti-American, whites are no good and the same bull that this Professor states. I’m sorry but the brainwashing from the sixties when the so called socialist Marxist movement and the “We the People removed them from the streets”. Well they in turn worked underground by becoming the Professors who taught the far left teaching propaganda in our Colleges that has instilled several generations with the mindset anti-god, Anti-American, Anti-work … take from the working class who made something of themselves and demand everything to be paid for by the Government. In other words the leaders of the Far Left in Congress, were taught this form of thinking and want a dictatorship structure form of Government and they want to be the dictators. Kinda like Hitler.
You entire rant proved one thing, that you have zero understanding between truth and fiction. What this professor is regurgitating is pure bullshiite! The fact is that he has totally reversed the truth and insists on projecting leftist city-dwelling ideology, ignorance, and stupidity onto the very people who keep this nation alive. I might also add that the “dumb” rural segment he is likely referring to are the leftist city-dwellers who insist on moving to the country and then trying to force farmers and ranchers to fit their ideology of what they think farming or ranching is. We “farmers/ranchers” see it all the time, a city leftist moves to the country on a one acre home lot surrounded by livestock and crops and then constantly complains to the county inspections about smell, noise, and/or the farmer’s collection of tractors, implements, trucks, and scrap materials because it doesn’t conform to their HOA mentality.
Sorry, but you doth protest too much. Berkeley and universities like it are the bane of America, if not Western Civilization.
Just where do you think this “scholar” got his convoluted ideas from? He perfectly represents much of the left leaning academia, which control much of higher education today.
If we are such bad people I have a suggestion for kennion, my suggestion is go find you a perfect country and get your a** out of the US since it is such a bad place to live, we don’t need traitors living in this country so the sooner you find this perfect country and move the better
The city Berkeley announced that you won’t be able to build a house that has natural gas, only electric service? Do these smart people know how most electricity is made?
Where would this guy get his food if it wasn’t for rural areas, do they think food is made in the grocery stores?
DEAR JACKSON KERNION:” IF YOU CAN PULL YOUR SWOLLEN HEAD OUT OF YOUR PUCKERED ASS, PLEASE ATTEMPT AERONAUTICAL INTERCOURSE WITH A CIRCULAR PASTRY IN MOTION.
WHAT A SCUMBAG THIS PROF IS. SOMEONE SHOULD KICK THE SHIT OUT OF HIM THEN FIRE HIS SORRY ASS
Is ANYONE surprised that this came out of the “cesspool” at Berkeley??? I wouldn’t send my kids there if they paid ME $100,000 a year.
Lets put it in simple terms. Country folk can get along just fine and live a great life without the spoils of any city folks and that has been proven over and over again. Where as City Folk can last about 3 to 5 day without the spoils of what the country folk provide for them in food, energy, raw materials, and common since. UC Berkeley has been known as a cess pool of Idiot-ology for decades as it turn out some people that become radical idiot-ology professors. But then again, I look at where its at, deep in the heart of Kalifornia where socialism, communism, and other non American ideas seem to flourish, in a land that was once the Golden State of ideas, leading the nation, and of the richest state in the Union. Today we look at these major cities of crime, drug infested, criminally complicit illegals and wonder what happend until we see the same controlling families who have governed the state for the last half century and doing the same thing over and over again knowing it does not work while they rape what Kalifornia use to be. Who in their right minds would want to move there now?
I get an uneasy feeling that people find the need to give this supposed professor wannabe any creds at all by responding to his fantastical assertions. Let’s not give people like this the notoriety they seek. Let’s instead simply ignore them, as if they’re downtown on a street corner mumbling to themselves.
Please do not forget to mention that the majority of American agro land is in the hands of Chinese corporations. So, not Americans. And the rest of the land is mostly under American corporationns.
MAGA!!!!!!!!! enough said
“AMERICA WAKE UP” The Socialist Move is trying to take out our AMERICAN Democracy!!!! FREEDOMS, CONSITUTION, our 243 years of other country’s wanting to have what we have!!!! The Greatest Country in the World!!!!!!
This professor is teaching these idiot ideas and ideologies to students. But he is just the tip of the iceberg. The elementary school teachers and high school teachers all across America are doing this exact same thing -Teaching ideologies and changing our history books. And they are also unchecked…..Scary isn’t it……
Great idea. Shoot all the country people. Then the grocery stores will shortly have no food to peddle. The good choice slum dwellers will starve. Natural selection at work. This guy has lost touch with reality… It this is what one of his shrinks said?
Nimrod kernion is a straight up anti-American pukester!
An interesting, and surprising example of an educator in a great university… I’m a bit shocked and feel he needs to be shunned at the least. Tarred and feathered is also a possibility.
A closer look at this fellow by some good ole highly educated girls and boys from Montana, Nebraska, Kansas, or other areas closer to California are also a possibility.
My, my my but how our values have changed. At 65+ years of age, I’m really starting to believe we are on are way in a hand basket…