Nobody in Wilder, Idaho expected this. The tiny farming town of 1,725 people—where nine out of ten voters backed Donald Trump in 2024—is now scrambling to figure out what comes next after federal immigration agents swept through in mid-October and arrested more than 100 Hispanic workers at a local horse racetrack. So far, 75 people have been deported, and the farms that keep this place running are facing a labour shortage with no easy fix in sight.
This is the first step, the next one is buying those farms when the farmers default and then the final step is rich people gobbling up all of this property to turn it into factory farmland.
During the transition we’re going to see Americans starve. Some of us will die but that is a sacrifice they are willing to make for more profits.
They also plan on renting those people back to the farms.
Nah, we won’t starve, they’ll just start a new brand of food called soylent green.
Nobody in Wilder, Idaho expected this.
Underfunded, understaffed, undermined US public education
It doesn’t matter. They will vote red next time.
Weren’t those idiot rednecks supposed to breed like rabbits and have their kids tend to the fields?
Where did we go wrong?
Thing Conservatives were warned was going to happen, happens. Conservatives shocked: “who could have seen this coming?”
They might not have actually seen it coming. I grew up in a place like that and the echo chambers are real and debilitating. There is a reason most rural areas only have fox as their news broadcaster. Information deprivation and misinformation has been the plan for decades.
“Nobody could have seen this coming” said about an event that everyone else saw coming still doesn’t make me very sympathetic.
“I never thought the leopards would eat MY face!” Says woman who voted for the leopards eating faces party
As someone who used to live out in the farmland past Wilder — having to drive through Wilder to get to Boise — basically all the farm workers you see are Hispanic. Wilder itself is this tiny town surrounded by farmland. It boggles my mind that people presented with those facts day-in and day-out never put two and two together that removing or scaring away the demographic that makes up all your workers means your town becomes worthless.
Conservatism is built in reality denial and magical thinking. That’s literally the entire foundation of it. Anything that isn’t politically correct to the current party narrative is immediately dismissed or denied. The modern Republican party is a Maoist cult of personality.
Oh no, white people will have to harvest their own potatoes!
Well, they can’t sell them anyway cause the processing facilities are having labor shortages too. Wonder why…
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John Carter runs a security company that worked at the racetrack, and he’s a Trump supporter himself. But what he saw that day shook him up. He watched agents point automatic rifles at people and set off flash-bang grenades while arresting Ivan Tellez, who allegedly operated the track.
It wasn’t just Immigration and Customs Enforcement, either. Multiple agencies turned up—federal, state, local. The sheriff came through on horseback. A black military helicopter circled overhead. Adults, including parents holding toddlers, and plenty of teenagers got their hands zip-tied. Everyone at the track was rounded up and herded to one end.
Carter’s own 14-year-old daughter was there. She got zip-tied, too. He saw officers pointing guns at teenagers. The whole thing felt less like a law enforcement operation and more like a military raid.
Well, sounds like they had the day they voted for.
I would bet my next paycheck that he’s still a Trump supporter.
“look, there’s a lot I disagree with the president on, including pointing a gun at my daughter. But I’m really… But I really like what he’s doing with immigration.”
Can we call them nazis yet, or is that still an “exaggeration”?
“Nobody in Wilder, Idaho expected this.”
That just confirms how out-of-touch these folks are. It still boggles the mind, that so many people had no idea that Trump was actually going to do the things he kept saying he was going to do.
It’s actually even more mind-numbingly stupid, these people (read: racist rural Americans) have been calling for this for decades without considering just how much they directly benefit from illegally-cheap immigrant labor.
I mean, it gives me pause to think about how I benefit from cheap exploitative migrant labor.
I was talking with my mom recently, and we came to the conclusion that it’s not possible to buy something new in the US that does not have inhumane practices as part of the product at some point. Basically, the are no morally “good” things you can buy.
Hand made items from local merchants…and for example I don’t mean ordering gems/beads from China and stringing them, I mean like a person who makes wooden or ceramic beads and threads them. But then there is the cord, so you’d have to spinbyour own twine etc
Unless every part of it came out of that merchants back yard, then it probably had exploitation at some step. Roads are frequently cleaned and maintained using prison labor. Cars are partially assembled all over the world in order to find the cheapest labor and materials…
I literally can’t think of a single thing I’ve bought in my lifetime that didn’t have industrialized human misery as a component or result of it’s production.
I know. You’d have to have your own forest and farm land, raise sheep to make yarn, etc. Best we can do is as local and artisan as possible
Even then, I live on stolen land. I didn’t steal it myself, but at some layer I’m complicit, because I bought it from someone who bought it from someone else… Until you get to the guy that stole it in the first place, and he probably stole it because of the value it would have in the future. I don’t want to be here, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. Even my own backyard is rooted in human misery.
We have to move forward and make reparations where possible, and try to live a better consumer lifestyle. But until billionaires are brought into check this world is rife with exploitation.
Products made without exploitation exist. But if you’re among the people being exploited, you won’t be able to afford them.
I’d be curious to see one of those products.
I’m from the area. I’m not kidding when I tell you most of these people are too fucking stupid to draw the connection. Out-of-touch is such an under-exaggeration that its fairly depressing. The vast majority of people in that valley have no capability to correlate who they voted for to what is happening to them.
Trump is a horrible person, but as a politician he says the quiet part out loud. Anyone that is surprised by his actions is an idiot.
I guarantee you that a non-neglible percentage of these maroons knew exactly what Trump is and exactly what would happen to the migrant workers in their town, and happily voted for him anyway. A good chunk of them actually hate the browns (and trans, and students, etc.) that much.
I hope every Latino immigrant leaves or refuses to work the fields in these Republican towns, so they can figure out what their votes and immigration policy stances mean.
Most immigrants were there in the first place because they have people to feed. What do you suppose they should do as an alternative after they refuse to work in those fields?
Whatever the alternative, it’s better than dying in a prison cell.
If staying on a farm, something like a field in Vermont or in the PNW Cascades area. If something like construction, it’s in demand all over the place.
Work in another area that’s had many immigrants deported, but in an area and industry that doesn’t fellate Republicans.
Nobody in Wilder, Idaho expected this.
Yet most of them voted for exactly this to happen (to someone else…)
‘We rely on Hispanic labour,’ he told The New York Times this past Sunday. ‘Nobody thought something like this could happen here.’ Wilder felt far enough off the beaten path that residents assumed the aggressive immigration crackdowns they’d been hearing about were a big-city problem.
They actually said it. Incredible.
The only moral immigrant worker is my immigrant worker.
You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land—the common clay of the new West. You know… morons.
He is going to cause a famine, isnt he?
Don’t worry. Elon Musk will just build robots to do all that labor. Just wait. 5 years, tops.
It turns out robots are much more useful as an excuse to suppress workers rights and wages than they are at doing real work.
You said five years ten years ago!
People give the Soviet Union a lot of shit for their 5 year plans that never seem to fully pan out. But no one gives a fuck about Elon Musk’s predictions.
Similar to how the Ford Pinto is still a joke in the auto industry even though Teslas are much, MUCH more fire/explosion prone than a junk car from the 1970s and have killed far more people. The death rate of Pintos vs. other cars of the period was not as different as some people think, but the death rate of Teslas? That is higher.
Teslas are also a joke, especially in the industry, and Elmo’s bullshit is similarly panned.
We’re on mars now, just like he said we would be ten years ago when he said we would be there in ten years. Just like he’s converting his tesla factories to build AI robots that will totally be ready ten years from now.
No that’s climate change and hyper integrated global food supply chains you’re thinking of.
I mean, theybare pushing Coal again and shitting all over Wind and Solar.
So…
Fully agree!
But IMO regardless there is going to be major global food supply chain interruptions, as industries that take years to decades to mature disappear faster than they can be re-established.
In my region we have had entire fruit crops destroyed by cold snaps following an unseasonably warm winter. Meaning there was multiple year gaps in output from an entire region.
He’d still happily take credit for it
Not for leopards apparently though.
In some other country, maybe (assuming the USAID cuts haven’t done it already). Even poor people in the US are rich enough to outbid people in the developing world on food imports, if it were truly necessary, so if we did fuck up our own harvest enough to cause a real shortage we’d just buy somebody else’s.
so he’s going to cause famines in OTHER countries then? That isn’t much better. Just like this destruction of USAID (as you mentioned) had already killed hundreds of thousands of people.
No
