this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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West Virginia exists because they didn’t want to be apart of that bullshit, though I suspect they’ve lost their way in the last couple of generations.
I was going to say as much. WV flipped hard in 2000. But it's simple to understand - WV has always been pretty socially conservative, but was Dem because of the unions. They flipped because the Dems decided to turn on the biggest union industries in the state. The coal miner's union isn't a good base for your power when you're overtly talking about actively working to destroy the coal mining industry. To be clear about how much WV cares about coal, it's the state rock and there's a coal miner on the state seal. The libertarian bent of a lot of GOP doesn't hurt either, Montani Semper Liberi and all.
Democrats didn't "turn on" coal, they recognized that it was a collapsing industry doing immeasurable damage to the environment and it would inevitably be phased out. The union failed to account for the future and threw a tantrum about it rather than negotiate re-training or any kind of transition plan.
So they turned on coal. It is out of fashion purely because of political pressure. There's still a ton of coal in the ground and many people don't believe that carbon dioxide does anything but make plants grow faster. We're talking about a gas that is .0004 in our atmosphere. The climate predictions are always wrong. The science is not settled, modern coal plants are very clean, and it is an affordable energy source.
The science is very much settled, if anything the global warming predictions weren't alarmist enough, but I shan't waste my time and energy trying to change your mind.
Huh, maybe you're thinking of different predictions. None of the ones I'm thinking of came true at all. We still have ice at the poles. Florida isn't underwater. Not that the wind patterns aren't shifting, and yes some places are a little hotter. But not so much hotter if you remove the adjustment they did to the historical data. Where I live, although it is hot this week, the temperatures aren't abnormal and our last fifteen years have been below average temps.
Not only that but the government offered retraining programs for people who lost/were going to lose their jobs due to a decline in coal. From the outside the "my pa was a coal miner, I'm a coal miner, and my son will be a coal miner" attitude made a lot of those programs not as effective as they should have been.
While unfortunate, it's not like keeping coal is even remotely viable. So it was kinda inevitable.
Last time I drove through WV, there were confederate flags on a lot of porches.
I remember when I got my CDL and started driving OTR. I got my license about 4 months before Covid locked everything down. Once the lockdowns started it was kind of surreal. Ontario was empty. NY, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Washington, the highways were so quiet.
And then I crossed into Virginia. It was like driving through a portal. Cars and trucks everywhere. It looked like it was Black Friday sales. NO ONE gave two flying fucks about the international reality.
It really solidified my opinion on how utterly stupid Americans as a population are.
I'd have stayed home but nobody was paying my bills for me during it.