An Open Letter to My Southern Brethren

We aren’t supposed to be bootlickers.

I was born and raised in East Tennessee, in the foothills of Appalachia. I’ve got some of that don’t-tread-on-me mentality baked into my bones. But I’ve always understood it a bit differently than some folks. I don’t feel that prickliness just toward the government. I feel it toward anyone who uses power to oppress, extract, or dominate. Cops. Corporations. ICE agents. Border patrol. Doesn’t matter who’s wearing the boot. I’m against it.

I felt it in the 90’s watching the Branch Davidian’s compound, filled with women and children, burn in Waco, TX. I felt it when they murdered that family at Ruby Ridge shooting a mom in the face while she held her baby and a 14 year old in the back. I felt it every time I saw a cop shoot an unarmed person in their car, in their house, in the street. I’ve felt this way my whole life.

And let’s be clear about who is getting shot. We are. If you’re Native American, you’re most likely to be killed by a cop per capita. Black and brown folks are next. But in raw numbers, poor white folks take the prize. We get killed by police more than anyone else. And too many of my neighbors ignore the bodies piling up in our communities because they’re too busy cheering for the badge.

It never mattered to me what side the victim was on. It mattered that someone with a gun and a badge decided they got to play God.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still proud of my heritage. The real heritage. The politeness and the kindness. The self-sufficiency. The gardening and the farming, putting up corn, making tomato juice, running moonshine and birthing NASCAR. I’m proud of the folks who’ve been growing pot in Granger County and Cocke County for generations. I’m proud of the land, the rivers, the lakes, the mountains that raised me. I’m proud of the moonshiners who told the government to go to hell. The union miners who fought and died at Blair Mountain. The ornery, stubborn, don’t-tell-me-what-to-do spirit that built these hills.

That heritage isn’t dead. But it’s dying. Too many of my neighbors have turned into bootlicking cowards to support a New York City tanning bed loving con man.

An ICE agent shot Renee Good in the face and the videos are Rorschach tests.

When I watch them, I see a woman standing up for what she believes. I see her acting more politely than I might have, saying “I’m not mad at you” through her car window. I see her try to drive away. I see an agent open fire. I hear a man’s voice say “fucking bitch” after she’s been shot.

Then there is the other reality. It shows a justified use of force. In that reality you see a cop defending himself. You see someone who should have complied. I really hate that idea… just do what the man with the gun tells you to do because he said so.

J.D. Vance, a man who wrote a whole book about people like us, who built a career translating our struggles for coastal elites, says ICE agents deserve “absolute immunity.” I don’t know what’s in his famous memo, but I bet ya his mamaw would be ashamed of the man.

The guns-for-tyranny crowd has gone silent. Or worse, they’re making excuses. Because it turns out it was never about tyranny. It was about who the tyranny targets. As long as the boot is on the right necks, immigrants, liberals, city people, anyone they’ve been trained to hate, they don’t give a damn. They don’t see it’s on their neck too.

And what are we getting in exchange for selling our souls?

Trump says we’re taking Venezuela’s oil. We bombed Caracas, killed 100+ people, kidnapped their president. Now oil executives are at the White House being promised “total safety, total security” to invest $100 billion. Their money, not ours. Their profits, not ours.

He says we need Greenland. “Whether they like it or not.” For what? We can’t process the minerals. China controls 90% of rare earth refining. We’re talking about seizing territory from Denmark, one of our closest allies, for resources we can’t even process.

Meanwhile back home, housing costs keep climbing, wages stay flat, healthcare bankrupts families, and the opioid crisis the Sackler family started has killed 800,000 Americans. Nobody’s getting helicoptered out of their mansion for that.

We’re selling our souls to Satan for pennies that never even trickle down.

The Democrats are no better. The supposed opposition. Hakeem Jeffries says he’s “not ruling out” impeaching Kristi Noem for calling Renee Good a domestic terrorist. Not ruling it out. How about you just say you’re going to fucking do it?

Steny Hoyer gave a retirement speech this week warning that America is “headed toward lawlessness.” He’s been in Congress for 40 years. He was part of the leadership that let this happen. The militarized police. The expanding executive power. The selling off of the country piece by piece. And now, on his way out the door, he wants to warn us?

Back in 2019, I told the Washington Post that the greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party. I stand by that. But it’s not just cowardice. It’s complicity. It’s the broken-windows policing they supported. It’s the crime bills they championed. It’s their participation in making us poorer and poorer, making us work harder and harder for less and less, all while keeping the boot on our necks.

They’re terrified of saying something wrong. Terrified they might not win a slim majority next year. So terrified they won’t do the hard work it would take to actually transform this nation into something better. They’re not even trying.

I don’t know what happened to my people.

I don’t know when “don’t tread on me” became “tread on anyone but me.”

I don’t know when the fighting spirit of these mountains got replaced by bootlicking cowardice dressed up as patriotism.

But I know this. When a woman gets shot in the face for driving away from federal agents, and the people who spent their whole lives warning about government tyranny start making excuses, something has broken. Something fundamental.

We’re losing our place. We’re losing our footing. We’re losing our way.

So this is my open letter to my Southern brethren. To the folks I grew up with. To everyone who ever told me they needed their guns in case the government came for them.

Where the hell are y’all at? We ain’t supposed to be like this.

The government is here. It’s shooting American citizens in the street. It’s calling us terrorists for observing. The Vice President is demanding “absolute immunity” for the people pulling the trigger.

This is the moment you said you were preparing for.

And you’re cheering.

Corbin Trent

PS. Lets talk about dangerous jobs. About the risks our heroes take. Here are seventeen jobs more deadly than being a police officer:

Fishing workers. Loggers. Roofers. Construction helpers. Pilots. Garbage collectors. Structural ironworkers. Truck drivers. Miners. Farmers. Groundskeepers. Power-line workers. Construction laborers. Equipment operators. Agricultural workers. Landscaping supervisors. Mechanics supervisors.

Cops come in at number eighteen. Behind the guys who pick up your trash. Behind the guys who roof your house. Behind the farmers who grow your food and the truckers who deliver it.

But when a roofer falls off a ladder, nobody calls him a hero. When a logger gets crushed by a tree, nobody demands absolute immunity for the logging company. When a trucker dies in a wreck after driving thirty hours straight because that’s what the job requires, we don’t wrap his coffin in a flag.

We save that for the guys who shoot unarmed women in the face and call it self-defense.