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The call is coming from inside the house [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-09
As a relatively new transplant, I'm impressed with all that is deep and beautiful in Bristol and Southwest Virginia and am enthralled with Central Appalachia.
My husband and I came here to work for the rest of our lives, devoting ourselves to education, economic development, and community organizing. As survivors of the 80's as gay men who suffered hazing and mockery by Ronald Reagan and the administration's callous response to the AIDS crisis, and again to survive the Covid plague, we are seasoned protesters and community activists seeking access and opportunity for our neighbors and those less resourced around us.
It's easy to expect that conservative leaning media would ignore or dismiss our low-income and rural city, given the current politics of 2025. What wasn't so expected is that as courageous persons have stood up to provide alternatives in the ballot box to Republicans who've held offices, mostly unchallenged for years and decades, was to read Ivy Main's "The call is coming from inside the house" moment in the form of her opinion piece in the Virginia Mercury June 30 mocking one such brave person.
Her scathingly sarcastic assessment of a father, husband, and community development specialist whose whole family works to build up their rural community is beyond the usual pale, white privileged elitists who've spent decades destroying the trust and participation of our rural unions in the coalfields, forests and farms: it is a travesty.
Josh Outsey is brilliant, resourced, active across state lines and social strata, and is selflessly standing up to offer voters and alternative to 31 years of unchallenged, extreme conservative legislative representation. His sincerity and realism are contagious. His kindness glows and warms the heart and cools the fiery caldron of partisan hatred.
What Ivy did, and her editor supported, was to castigate people for standing up like Josh. Like Cindy Green. Like dozens of candidates that have ignored the VA Dems shady treatment of folks hearing the beacon call of 90for90 and Dr. Fergie Reid Jr., who has singularly recruited people to run in 20 or more challenging districts.
Nobody doing this valiant work is foolish or worthy of attacks from within. They understand their candidacies are going to be hard. They realize that the Democratic Party has effectively disenfranchised Democrats by refusing to engage in Rural Virginia and really, Rural America. This arrogance has led to losing the narrative in our country, and the losses which put our land in a slide to the lowest common denominator of depravity and hopelessness.
The United Mine Workers of America used to be a reliable bloc of Democratic voters, until the smugness of the establishment elite decided that destroying coal communities was a popular tactic in their urban "competitive races" rather than doing the harder work of helping these communities find economic solutions for their newly underemployed members. By pulling up stakes and heading to liberal bastions, the party has communicated clearly to Rural America that they do not care, that rural communities don’t matter. Guess what? They do. We do.
While a clean economy and green jobs are lofty and worthy causes, turning your backs on the labor that has no alternative employment aside from relocating away from home places has been short-sighted and deeply damaging. Terms like "deplorables" didn't just offend rural conservatives, it colored regions and districts as indefensible and unworthy of representation.
When supposedly left-leaning media insult and mock heroes like Josh, we all lose. When party machines promote ineffective and outdated policies and paid operatives to deflate rural candidacies, the party loses. When the “establishment” sends non-native 20-somethings with no resources to rural communities and expects locals to quarter them for free in their “spare bedrooms” it communicates that they are second-hand and not worthy of investment.
You can't win if you don't show up. And we won’t win back Rural America if we don’t support the fight.
Josh Outsey VA HD 45
Angela Chainer HD 56
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