It never ceases to amaze me how members of the left-wing chattering class have no idea why regular folks despise them. Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently illustrated the type of condescending attitude towards a wide swath of Americans that is typical of progressive elites who remain insulated in their comfy echo chambers.

During a Tuesday appearance on “Morning Joe,” he chimed in on the anger displayed by rural Americans towards members of the media and liberal establishment, claiming that dealing with these individuals was somehow akin to fighting terrorists.

Matthews began his comments by pointing out that “people that didn’t go to college have a pretty good rage on their hands,” and noted that those living in rural America “are so angry at the liberal establishment, the coastal elite.”

The former MSNBC host went on to describe how rural folks feel about “those people on Saturday Night Live.”

“And the regular guy in the country goes, there they are snarling and making fun of us again. And every time we make fun of Trump, we're making fun of them. That's the weird... It's a weird thing, but in a way, it's like fighting terrorism. We think we just put the army in or Israel just puts the IDF and they're going to solve the problem. It never solves the problem because you enrage people. And we did it with Afghanistan and we did it with Iraq. We enraged the enemy to the point where they were more fiery than ever and they hate us more than ever."

Chris Matthews chimes in on the anger rural voters have toward the establishment, says dealing with them is "like fighting terrorism." pic.twitter.com/Nv2gCpCYQq

— Jeff Charles, An Awful Pundit🏴 (@jeffcharlesjr) December 27, 2023

So, in essence, Matthews, from his ivory tower, believes it is weird that many Americans identify with former President Donald Trump to the point that they take attacks against him as attacks against his supporters. But he knows better. He knows his ilk doesn’t only have a problem with the Orange Man What Is Bad™. Their enmity is also directed at those who support him. Indeed, these people have looked down on rural folks for ages.

On Monday Ned Resinkoff, a senior editor for the progressive ThinkProgress, wrote in detail about how rattled he was that his plumber, “a middle-aged white guy with a southern accent,” may have voted for Donald Trump.

The idea that his plumber may have different political beliefs left Resnikoff so rattled he “couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger.”

Two days earlier Melinda Byerley, founder of a Silicon Valley-based tech startup that does “free-range, artisanal, organic, customized marketing” with “Birkenstocks-on-the-ground expertise,” tweeted her expert opinion on Middle America’s jobs-`attraction problem.

It wasn’t very nice.

First she said Middle America needs to realize “no educated person wants to live in a s- -t-hole with stupid people,” which is why she said more big corporations don’t move to the Heartland: “Those towns have nothing going for them,” with “no infrastructure, just a few bars and a terrible school system.”

Educated people such as herself wouldn’t live in rural areas because they won’t sacrifice their superior tolerance and diversity to do so. Nor do her highly educated friends want to live in states where the majority of residents “don’t want brown people to thrive.”

The only “weird” thing about this issue is that people like Chris Matthews can display utter contempt for rural folks whose politics don’t align with theirs and then turn around and wonder why these people dislike the liberal elites.

The notion that folks living in rural America are somehow akin to violent terrorists is the exact type of language that alienates them in the first place. Yet Matthews, like most of his contemporaries, believes they can somehow shame these folks into embracing their way of thinking. Either that, or they simply don’t care about offending them and are only playing to their audience, many of whom may very well share their beliefs about flyover country.