#But I hate working corporate retail so much. So. Much. I’ve never recovered from my burnout and have no patience for their bullshit.

[inga-don-studio]

Half considering applying for a night stocking job at Fred Myers if only to work there for 5 nights.

[rendezvous-ramblings]

I graduated college (undergrad) last spring and started working at a job in an industry I hate. I want to leave because the work environment is stressing me out so much that I broke out into hives (which has never happened before) and I have mini panic attacks every weekend before the work week. I also have chest pain due to stress and I’m only 22!! I really want to leave but my parents are encouraging me to stay or find a similar job because of how well it pays. Because of the pandemic, there aren’t a lot of options right now. I’m honestly okay working at a Barnes and Nobles part time in order to get a bit of money while I figure things out but also, I want to purse my own business and I would have time to do so with a less stressful part time job like that. My parents want me to work in an office though because they think I shouldn’t work in stores since I have a degree. And then I think maybe I should stay only because I’m scared of making the wrong decision and regretting it even though I’m pretty sure this job is slowly killing me. Any words of advice? I know we’re pretty much the same age but I would love to hear your thoughts.

Hi, 

First of all congrats on graduating because that’s an achievement you should be very proud of given how chaotic the last few weeks of our senior year of undergrad went! I’m sorry you’re experiencing these negative health symptoms from your work environment. When I was in the PhD program I didn’t have any extreme external symptoms that you have, but I was very self-aware that I was experiencing a mental low that I’ve never dealt with before. I knew in the long run I would end up burning myself out and it would be detrimental towards my mental health. I also realized from the few months that I was in the program that despite getting good grades and feedback in the A range that 1. I was not as passionately invested in a research idea as my peers were 2. I felt I was not getting the proper amount of guidance being the youngest student with only a BA degree even though I was actively reaching out to professors 3. I just realized that my actual career goals and what I wanted were no longer aligned with academia after experiencing it. It wasn’t worthwhile for me to invest 5+ years of my life to enter an oversaturated job market with the perspective financial instability as an adjunct lecturer. One of my recommenders/former professors actually told me I was brave to realize that this path just wasn’t for me so early on, accepted it, and moved on with another plan in motion. I once met someone who was stuck in a PhD program and ended up dropping out when she only needed to complete her dissertation/final year! Sometimes it is much harder to walk away from an opportunity that is hurting you more. There’s so many people who end up staying and ignore their own wellbeing. 

Thankfully, my parents did support my decision because they saw how I was emotionally and mentally drained/not myself. At first I was unsure if I should get a job as a substitute teacher for a year before reapplying in Fall of 2021 to a teaching program that I rejected in the Spring of 2020. I was actually in the process of doing so until I reached out to another high school teacher of mine. She gave me advice and talked me through all my options and in the end I decided to reapply for Spring of 2021. I left the PhD program as soon as I was able to without any financial penalties because I had to stay for at least 3/4s of the semester. I found a retail job during the hiatus period after leaving the program. It’s not the most glamorous job but it’s in my neighborhood and I don’t have to commute/be exposed to people outside of my area. I’m using that to fund my degree and pay my own personal bills for the time being. I’ll consider an internship or higher paying position once things become more settled after the vaccine rollout.

My advice would be to try to reason with your parents and explain to them the adverse health symptoms you’re having (if you haven’t already). If you’re dependent on them (to whatever extent) discuss your plan and options moving forward. You could try applying to some of the retail jobs that you want and other corporate jobs that might be a better fit for your personality/interests. I am sure there’s different team dynamics and work cultures out there. It sounds like you might just be stuck in an environment that is toxic or incompatible with you. My best friend’s sister recently got out of a toxic work environment and she was unsure if she wanted to continue in that industry. However, she applied somewhere else in the same industry and it was a much better fit for her mental health/team wise! You might want to consider talking to a mentor, professor, or close friend that is unbias and has your best interests at heart. That way you can get a professional opinion in your field + a personal one. 

If you cannot leave your current position right away then I would suggest seeking therapy if that is an option for you. The best scenario is to have your exit plan aligned by the time you leave the door, but I understand how that’s not always an option for every circumstance. If you must leave before you have your next plan in place then just give yourself the time and proper environment to recover before making your next moves. Don’t see this as a failure but just a minor setback. There’s people who invest YEARS of their life in an occupation, relationship, etc. that does not serve them well. So at least you discovered this early and you can now readjust your life goals and plans. I’m slowly learning too that there’s no set “timeline” for our lives. You might have a plan but sometimes your plan doesn’t always play out exactly the way you imagined it. There might be uncontrollable circumstances that make things harder or enjoyable pitstops (you didn’t schedule) where you’re still moving closer to your goals only at a slower pace than you imagined. 

Make sure you list out the pros and cons for each of your options and discuss it with people who are supportive of you. If you want to maintain a good relationship with your parents and appease them in a way where it’s still a healthy relationship, you can just tell them that this is only temporary until you gather yourself together. We’re still dealing with the instability of the pandemic and taking a slower paced job could help you take a break from the corporate stress you experienced. You will just have to keep emphasizing that you’re still actively working and planning towards something. It’s not as if you’re just sitting around at home and stuck in limbo. As long as you have your set personal goals in mind I’m sure you won’t be stuck in the wormhole of a minimum wage job. I can see how maybe your parents are worried that you might get caught up in the routine or become too comfortable with it.  Regardless, you know yourself better and what you need for your mental health and physical well being. Just make sure you’re reaching out for help (this is coming from someone who bottles up all her emotions and never wants to ask for help!). I talked to my old professor, my high school teacher, friends, family, and everyone I could get my hands on when I was struggling. From talking to people you realize you’re not alone in this uncertainty and realization that you’re in a situation that you don’t want to be in.

Good luck! I hope this all helped! Feel free to dm me if you feel like I missed something or you just want to vent. 💛

[lauravanarendonkbaugh]

My day can be summarized as "Mega-corporations taking perfectly functional tools and breaking them for no good reason."

Amazon's implosion of CS for KDP paperbacks (because paperbacks through an ebook vendor makes so much sense) has had a host a problems, and today's new adventure was trying to drop-ship an order that I shouldn't have to pay taxes on, because they're going to be sold at retail. KDP didn't bring over any of my tax info, so I have to start from scratch. Only Amazon says I should have a Business account for that, but don't worry, I can keep it separate from my personal account.

Yeah, about that. Guess who doesn't have a separate Business account right now. But no worries, I have a separate account for Laura Laurel, whoever she is, with no customer history. (I did this online, no customer service agent who misheard me or mistyped. No idea where Laura Laurel came from.)

So I give up on sorting Amazon and go to order from IngramSpark, where I have to pay more per book but at least they'll get shipped. They need tax documents too, since I've done all my previous order fulfillment from CS. No problem, I can sign all the forms on my lovely Surface, one of the great things about it! Except Microsoft shut down its beautiful and efficent PDF Reader, which I used for everything from work evaluations to RPGs, because we're supposed to use Edge for PDFs now. Except Edge hates PDFs and me and your mom. I finally got the form filled (had to close and reload because erasing never did work), uploaded it, opened it to double check from Ingram's site -- and thank goodness I did, because it hadn't saved any of the edits at all, no filled data and no signature.

Tried again with Edge. Finally got it to save and uploaded.

Now I'm wading back into recovering my identity and account history with Amazon. WHY DO COMPANIES INSIST ON BREAKING THINGS WHICH WORK?

[haulix]

You'll never have it all figured out (and that's okay)

If there's one thing I've learned through my time in the music industry, it's that I'll never have it all figured out.

When I first started writing about music, I didn't really care about getting paid. I cared about making connections in the music industry and building a portfolio. I had a lot to say and I wanted to say it, so I started a music blog. Then, for the entirety of my junior year of college, I wrote a weekly column for the school paper spotlighting different local musicians. At the end of the semester, I got a (small) check- enough to have some fun over the holidays- and I was sure I was on track to becoming a successful journalist.

Suddenly, graduation was looming and I didn't have any full-time job prospects in the music industry. If I couldn't get a full-time job after graduation, would I have any place in the industry at all? I ended up going on tour for six months almost immediately, which was hard work but a dream come true. When I got home I didn't have any plans and felt pressured to seek stability, so I took an office job outside of the music industry.

I hated that job from day one, and broke down crying on the way home from my first day. I felt stifled and like I didn't belong; my coworkers didn't care about my passion for music and with the expectation of regular overtime and corporate event work, I had no time or energy to pursue the things I actually wanted to do.

I sunk into depression, and after just two months at the job I took a leave of absence to get proper help. I didn't want to ever go back to that job so I started applying for positions in the music industry. No one was responding to my applications, until the day before my very last day of treatment. I had a phone interview for a part-time beat writer position for a major website. The interviewer offered me the gig at the end of our phone call, and when we hung up I emailed my boss to tell him I quit.

When I got that opportunity, I felt like someone was looking down on me. Someone was going to pay me to write about and photograph music, and it was for an outlet where I had a chance at landing some pretty major coverage! The gig wasn't full time so I worked other jobs- tutoring, babysitting, dog walking and pet sitting- to fill in the gaps, but I didn't mind, because doing these things allowed me to do the one thing I actually cared about.

Over the next year and a half I got to do some incredible things, like cover big festivals and interview plenty of rising stars. I photographed one of the biggest popstars in the world at a stadium full of tens of thousands of people; the two other photographers there that night were men twice my age, and as a 23-year-old woman I felt on top of the world, and completely unstoppable. If I could do this, I could do anything.

Of course, life still threw things at me. I got in a car accident- I wasn't hurt, but my car would need expensive repairs- and then my phone broke. I emailed my boss at the pet sitting company to tell him I wouldn't be reachable while out walking dogs, and when I refreshed my inbox, there was an email from my boss at the outlet I was writing for: I had lost my status, and therefore my pay, as a beat writer. The company was restructuring and reprioritizing how they handled editorial content, and would no longer be paying beat writers as they had been.

I was crushed. I wasn't ready to stop writing about and photographing music, but if my writing and photography were no longer worth it to the outlet, were they worth anything at all? For years it was all I wanted and when I lost the first major opportunity I had, I questioned if it was worth it. I'd put so much time and energy into writing and photography, and formed so much of my identity around it, but suddenly the payoff was gone. I couldn't imagine doing anything outside of music, but all of a sudden I didn't know what my place was in it.

In a time where I felt lost and completely confused, music was what I needed most of all. I continued to run my blog and two weeks after I lost the beat writer position, I did an interview and photoshoot that reignited my passion, and reminded me why I cared about doing this in the first place. The artist was down-to-earth, incredibly open and willing to get deep in his answers. I started working retail around this time, which sucked, but I continued my writing and photography efforts in hopes of more interviews and photoshoots like that one.

In January of last year, I realized how much I missed being on tour. I reached out to a nonprofit I'd previously toured with and with less than two weeks notice, packed my bags and left for four months. I loved every second of it and halfway through the tour, got an email that I was hired to work for them on Warped Tour that summer.

Getting a job on Warped Tour had been a huge goal of mine for years, and I almost couldn't believe I was finally doing it. It wasn't until I got my laminate on the first day that it actually felt real. Over the summer I reached thousands of people about a cause that's very important to me; I learned a lot about myself, touring, and the music industry; I met some lifelong friends; and I even got to see my favorite band several times. My body hurt and I was always sweaty; at the end of the tour I was exhausted but immensely proud of myself for surviving- and thriving- on such a difficult tour. Warped Tour was the best thing I have ever done.

I had every intention of returning to Warped Tour this summer- I was even offered a promotion and a raise- but sometimes life doesn't care about our intentions. While traveling over the holidays my right knee started to hurt. I'd had three previous knee surgeries and when I went to see my orthopedist, I had assumed he'd tell me there was nothing to worry about, but from a quick examination, he was pretty sure I had torn my ACL again. He ordered an MRI to make sure, but told me I'd most likely need surgery and wouldn't be able to do Warped Tour.

For a month and a half, I didn't tell anyone about my knee. I wasn't sure what was wrong and I wasn't sure when and if I'd need surgery, so aside from some very close friends, I kept it to myself. When I found out I would for sure need surgery, I was devastated. I didn't want to go through months of physical therapy and I didn't want to- and couldn't afford to- take several weeks off work (I had two jobs: one in retail, and one in the office of a music video promo company).

I told my boss in the office that I would be out for a few weeks, and I called my bosses at the nonprofit to tell them I wouldn't be able to do Warped Tour. I felt like I was letting them down and I felt like I was letting myself down by not being able to return. They were completely understanding but talking to them made it feel real, and I cried the whole drive home. Warped Tour was such a major goal for me and to not be able to return was crushing. My entire work and financial situation was up in the air: I wasn't sure if I'd be able to work for the music video promo company from home, I certainly wouldn't be in shape to work retail for a month or more after surgery, and I wouldn't have the job on tour.

But then the very next day, I got a call from one of my bosses at the nonprofit, asking if I was interested in a temporary administrative job helping to organize volunteers and local reps at concerts around the country, and find new tours to partner with and sponsor. I would be working from home part-time, and wouldn't have to skip a beat after surgery. I immediately accepted, and quit my retail job.

Recovering from my fourth knee surgery hasn't been easy. I couldn't drive for three weeks so I was pretty much stuck at home. I'm a very extroverted person and when I wasn't able to socialize, I became very lonely. I was also in a lot of pain. Even when I could walk without crutches or a knee brace, it hurt to stand or walk for more than a few minutes. I couldn't go grocery shopping and I didn't have the energy to go photograph concerts. I was certainly in no place to be on tour.

I've been diligent with my physical therapy since day one and in May, I started feeling the slightest bit better. I felt strong enough to- with my doctor's permission, and while wearing a knee brace- return to the photo pit. It felt so good to be back, and while it may be a cliché, you certainly don't know what you have until it's gone.

I have two jobs that I love right now, as well as my blog and occasional freelance work, but I still don't feel like I have things all figured out. I used to look at people older and more established in the industry and assume that they had it all figured out, but I'm starting to realize that they don't either. And honestly? That's so reassuring. I used to feel so inadequate because I didn't have things all figured out, but now that I know no one else does either, I don't feel so bad about it. Life- and the music industry- hits us all in different ways. I've come to the realization that I'll never have things all figured out, but finally that's starting to feel okay.

Molly Hudelson is a career music journalist. She is the founder of Circles and Soundwaves, one of our absolutely favorite music blogs, and she constantly doing her best to encourage the next generation of music professionals to find their own course through this crazy industry. We highly recommend you follow her on Twitter.

[stopkingobama]

I’m a Lifelong Democrat. Here Are 3 Reasons I Pulled the Lever for Trump.

Photo: Gage Skidmore (cc by-sa 2.0)

Asking with a terseness normally associated with changing religions or declaring a new nationality, many people that know me have politely cornered me and demanded: “How could you—a lifelong, left-leaning, Obama-believing, Indy-Dem voter—vote for Donald Trump?”

My answer to them is simple: Our nation is in the middle of a crisis. We are stuck at the crossroad of hometown humiliation, job fabrication, and cultural mutation. Here’s what I mean by that.

Hometown Humiliation

My reasons for going Trump this election cycle weren’t a surprise to my hometown friends in Rust Belt Butler, Pennsylvania, home of the world’s first Jeep.

In Butler, we’ve seen the destruction of our middle class, the loss of our factories, and the pollution of our clean water (Butler is now also home to the nation’s second most polluted waterway, the Connoquenessing). At the same time, we’ve had record-high heroin use and juvenile jailing rates, and the population has shrunk nearly every year since the 1970s.

Butler is my hometown, and Butler is in trouble. My hometown friends and I understand this plain as day, but the nation hasn’t been listening to the decades-old problem of hometown humiliation.

Trump proved to be different, and unpredictably so. Fate would have it that the very last person I would have predicted to show love for the common man would be one of the world’s richest men. A businessman who seems to have been hurt the least by our nation’s outsourcing has become a champion of the working class.

While Hillary Clinton was hiding from press conferences and startling the world with her hard-left policy dash to catch her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders, Trump was out visiting Pittsburgh.

While he was out building bridges with working America on any given day, Clinton could be found ducking reporters, recovering from her husband’s latest gaffe about Black Lives Matter. This was but one of many “blunder-then-bunker” examples that came to define the Clinton campaign.

Did Trump blunder? Daily! But his ultimate atonement was that he showed love for the American people and is a patriot. It’s a lot easier to forgive a blundering candidate hugging the American flag in a room full of blue-collar Americans, than one hiding in the back of a 737 dodging press questions.

The trust between small-town America and her political representatives had been broken. As with all great relationships in turmoil, Trump knew he needed to put in quality time and a true love for the small-town cause in order to kick-start the healing process between Rust-Belt America and the national leadership.

Trump unapologetically did just that. His candidacy was the beginning of the healing process for humiliated hometown America, which had been desperate to find a champion.

Job Fabrication

Statistically, Trump was up against a hard economic game. On paper, President Barack Obama has created jobs every month for years and broken many “records” numerically. There’s just one problem—jobs are not just numbers.

In the wake of the promised tidal wave of more and more jobs, somehow fewer jobs appeared. Not fewer in number, necessarily, but in quality.

Butler lost its factories when I was living there in my teens, and they never returned. Some of my most vivid family memories regarding work consist of suffering the humiliation of my uncle being flown to Mexico to train his factory “replacement,” with the threat of no severance pay if he objected.

When you take a man’s craft away from him, no numeric of fast food, retail, or administrative work positions can ever replace that feeling of seeing something of value that you created move down the line and into America’s homes. As we’ve heard it said a thousand times: “Not everything valuable is numeric, and not everything numeric is valuable.”

Our economy had sold us out, and not just in terms of income or the American dream. The corporate and elite classes of America took the craft away from the men and women who built the Jeeps of Butler County that beat Hitler in World War II. Their new “jobs” weren’t jobs at all; we were the victims of job fabrication.

When Trump descended from his golden tower in New York City, I expected a much different presidential announcement. Maybe something witty about how the other side doesn’t understand “real” economics, or perhaps a Ronald Reagan quote from a “gotcha” debate moment.

I was prepared for another in a long line of Republican gaffes about women’s anatomical health, another canned attempt at communicating political ideology, or at the very least something reminiscent of the dehydrated Florida politician that I had on YouTube repeat not so long ago.

In place of that, I was shocked to find a Trump openly criticizing the economic policies that have led to America’s economic decline. He spoke of jobs being lost to China and Mexico, and asked one of the most biting economic questions I’ve ever heard in my life: “When was the last time you saw a Chevy car in Tokyo?”

Somehow, up in a multimillion-dollar New York tower overlooking what seemed like the whole world, Trump heard that our jobs had been fabricated—and he sounded like the only one who had heard.

So we heard him out. And when he unloaded a mouthful of rage on his political opponents about the issue, it left many of them speechless. And it left many of his Rust Belt critics speechless, too.

I don’t know a soul back home who would stand 100 percent behind every single comment Trump has made—but I know many that still trust him despite his gaffes.

We’ve all had that mean-spirited co-worker or boss who had the sole saving grace of being amazingly skilled at their job. That is Trump. You may hate him for his thin skin and explosive “tweet-punches,” but I knew that from the vantage point of my hometown, considering the other candidates, we had no other choice.

With no other boxer to bet on in America’s most dislikable election, and as a last-ditch message of desperation to the political establishment that had sold us out for years, we simply had to believe that Trump could rise to the occasion for us.

A Cultural Mutation

Hypocrisy was as rank as always in this political cycle, but the sources of it were most surprising. Some in the media criticized Trump’s tendency to rate women numerically. This is quite easy to criticize, until we ask ourselves why over 7 million Americans watch women rated numerically every year in our very own swimsuit-laden Miss America pageants.

Should we really be outraged at one and OK with the other?

Ironically, it was not priests and holy men that were castigating Trump’s comments, but a hypocritical media that had done or reported on the exact same things they accused Trump of doing.

Rust Belt America had already been bruised from the last self-righteous political campaign victory in 2012, which played it neutral on moral issues, but ended up trying to legislate men into children’s bathrooms by 2016.

Hometown Americans understood this hypocrisy and, unlike the “tender” millennial generation, didn’t seem to mind a little rough talk. Upon reflection, the American people knew that they had said worse things, or viewed worse things, felt worse things, and even heard the same things from other political leaders (think President Richard Nixon).

The final straw for hometown Americans was Clinton herself—shiftlessly avoiding any hard commitment to a policy, and attempting to mount a cultural attack against a man who is enormously versed in pop culture.

Criticizing Trump’s use of celebrities turned out to be a catastrophic and costly move for Clinton. Her accusations of sexism against Trump followed by her complete, open-armed endorsement of Miley Cyrus and the hardly-PC Jay-Z revealed her selective moralism.

Those paying attention saw that Clinton’s posture of indignation was simply that: a posture.

In the end, my once go-to party had morphed into a party of unrecognizably veiled actors, much like the Hypokrinesthai—ancient actors wearing masks, from whom we derive the English word “hypocrite.” But whereas those once-famous masked actors would play one character, only to pull back the mask to reveal the real hero underneath, this Democratic “hero” was much different.

The Democratic Party did not yield a heroic protagonist this election cycle, but a cultural mutation, constantly in flux and fearful of definition. To many lifelong Democratic voters, Clinton was morally unrecognizable. In political terms, she was the epitome of lukewarm—which, if anything, meant she would not stand up for hometown America.

Given all these factors, many like myself from small-town, Rust Belt America could no longer afford to take the establishment’s candidate by faith. Trump saw the true state of our hometowns, our fake jobs, and the hypocritical elite, and was willing to break every political norm in the book to address these critical issues.

So we voted for Trump. And he won—big league.

Commentary by Michael Reeb, the Daily Signal

[americanlibertypac]

I’m a Lifelong Democrat. Here Are 3 Reasons I Pulled the Lever for Trump.

Photo: Gage Skidmore (cc by-sa 2.0)

Asking with a terseness normally associated with changing religions or declaring a new nationality, many people that know me have politely cornered me and demanded: “How could you—a lifelong, left-leaning, Obama-believing, Indy-Dem voter—vote for Donald Trump?”

My answer to them is simple: Our nation is in the middle of a crisis. We are stuck at the crossroad of hometown humiliation, job fabrication, and cultural mutation. Here’s what I mean by that.

Hometown Humiliation

My reasons for going Trump this election cycle weren’t a surprise to my hometown friends in Rust Belt Butler, Pennsylvania, home of the world’s first Jeep.

In Butler, we’ve seen the destruction of our middle class, the loss of our factories, and the pollution of our clean water (Butler is now also home to the nation’s second most polluted waterway, the Connoquenessing). At the same time, we’ve had record-high heroin use and juvenile jailing rates, and the population has shrunk nearly every year since the 1970s.

Butler is my hometown, and Butler is in trouble. My hometown friends and I understand this plain as day, but the nation hasn’t been listening to the decades-old problem of hometown humiliation.

Trump proved to be different, and unpredictably so. Fate would have it that the very last person I would have predicted to show love for the common man would be one of the world’s richest men. A businessman who seems to have been hurt the least by our nation’s outsourcing has become a champion of the working class.

While Hillary Clinton was hiding from press conferences and startling the world with her hard-left policy dash to catch her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders, Trump was out visiting Pittsburgh.

While he was out building bridges with working America on any given day, Clinton could be found ducking reporters, recovering from her husband’s latest gaffe about Black Lives Matter. This was but one of many “blunder-then-bunker” examples that came to define the Clinton campaign.

Did Trump blunder? Daily! But his ultimate atonement was that he showed love for the American people and is a patriot. It’s a lot easier to forgive a blundering candidate hugging the American flag in a room full of blue-collar Americans, than one hiding in the back of a 737 dodging press questions.

The trust between small-town America and her political representatives had been broken. As with all great relationships in turmoil, Trump knew he needed to put in quality time and a true love for the small-town cause in order to kick-start the healing process between Rust-Belt America and the national leadership.

Trump unapologetically did just that. His candidacy was the beginning of the healing process for humiliated hometown America, which had been desperate to find a champion.

Job Fabrication

Statistically, Trump was up against a hard economic game. On paper, President Barack Obama has created jobs every month for years and broken many “records” numerically. There’s just one problem—jobs are not just numbers.

In the wake of the promised tidal wave of more and more jobs, somehow fewer jobs appeared. Not fewer in number, necessarily, but in quality.

Butler lost its factories when I was living there in my teens, and they never returned. Some of my most vivid family memories regarding work consist of suffering the humiliation of my uncle being flown to Mexico to train his factory “replacement,” with the threat of no severance pay if he objected.

When you take a man’s craft away from him, no numeric of fast food, retail, or administrative work positions can ever replace that feeling of seeing something of value that you created move down the line and into America’s homes. As we’ve heard it said a thousand times: “Not everything valuable is numeric, and not everything numeric is valuable.”

Our economy had sold us out, and not just in terms of income or the American dream. The corporate and elite classes of America took the craft away from the men and women who built the Jeeps of Butler County that beat Hitler in World War II. Their new “jobs” weren’t jobs at all; we were the victims of job fabrication.

When Trump descended from his golden tower in New York City, I expected a much different presidential announcement. Maybe something witty about how the other side doesn’t understand “real” economics, or perhaps a Ronald Reagan quote from a “gotcha” debate moment.

I was prepared for another in a long line of Republican gaffes about women’s anatomical health, another canned attempt at communicating political ideology, or at the very least something reminiscent of the dehydrated Florida politician that I had on YouTube repeat not so long ago.

In place of that, I was shocked to find a Trump openly criticizing the economic policies that have led to America’s economic decline. He spoke of jobs being lost to China and Mexico, and asked one of the most biting economic questions I’ve ever heard in my life: “When was the last time you saw a Chevy car in Tokyo?”

Somehow, up in a multimillion-dollar New York tower overlooking what seemed like the whole world, Trump heard that our jobs had been fabricated—and he sounded like the only one who had heard.

So we heard him out. And when he unloaded a mouthful of rage on his political opponents about the issue, it left many of them speechless. And it left many of his Rust Belt critics speechless, too.

I don’t know a soul back home who would stand 100 percent behind every single comment Trump has made—but I know many that still trust him despite his gaffes.

We’ve all had that mean-spirited co-worker or boss who had the sole saving grace of being amazingly skilled at their job. That is Trump. You may hate him for his thin skin and explosive “tweet-punches,” but I knew that from the vantage point of my hometown, considering the other candidates, we had no other choice.

With no other boxer to bet on in America’s most dislikable election, and as a last-ditch message of desperation to the political establishment that had sold us out for years, we simply had to believe that Trump could rise to the occasion for us.

A Cultural Mutation

Hypocrisy was as rank as always in this political cycle, but the sources of it were most surprising. Some in the media criticized Trump’s tendency to rate women numerically. This is quite easy to criticize, until we ask ourselves why over 7 million Americans watch women rated numerically every year in our very own swimsuit-laden Miss America pageants.

Should we really be outraged at one and OK with the other?

Ironically, it was not priests and holy men that were castigating Trump’s comments, but a hypocritical media that had done or reported on the exact same things they accused Trump of doing.

Rust Belt America had already been bruised from the last self-righteous political campaign victory in 2012, which played it neutral on moral issues, but ended up trying to legislate men into children’s bathrooms by 2016.

Hometown Americans understood this hypocrisy and, unlike the “tender” millennial generation, didn’t seem to mind a little rough talk. Upon reflection, the American people knew that they had said worse things, or viewed worse things, felt worse things, and even heard the same things from other political leaders (think President Richard Nixon).

The final straw for hometown Americans was Clinton herself—shiftlessly avoiding any hard commitment to a policy, and attempting to mount a cultural attack against a man who is enormously versed in pop culture.

Criticizing Trump’s use of celebrities turned out to be a catastrophic and costly move for Clinton. Her accusations of sexism against Trump followed by her complete, open-armed endorsement of Miley Cyrus and the hardly-PC Jay-Z revealed her selective moralism.

Those paying attention saw that Clinton’s posture of indignation was simply that: a posture.

In the end, my once go-to party had morphed into a party of unrecognizably veiled actors, much like the Hypokrinesthai—ancient actors wearing masks, from whom we derive the English word “hypocrite.” But whereas those once-famous masked actors would play one character, only to pull back the mask to reveal the real hero underneath, this Democratic “hero” was much different.

The Democratic Party did not yield a heroic protagonist this election cycle, but a cultural mutation, constantly in flux and fearful of definition. To many lifelong Democratic voters, Clinton was morally unrecognizable. In political terms, she was the epitome of lukewarm—which, if anything, meant she would not stand up for hometown America.

Given all these factors, many like myself from small-town, Rust Belt America could no longer afford to take the establishment’s candidate by faith. Trump saw the true state of our hometowns, our fake jobs, and the hypocritical elite, and was willing to break every political norm in the book to address these critical issues.

So we voted for Trump. And he won—big league.

Commentary by Michael Reeb, the Daily Signal