Buck Tick Quotes

When I thought of them together, I saw my sister perched behind Philbert on a bucking Brahma bull. She wasn’t grasping her boyfriend around the waist but kept her seat by clenching her knees. Somewhere in the picture Philbert was tossed to the ground, but Evelyn clung to the animal’s back like a wood tick, dug in, ignoring Philert’s waving arms and shouts for her to let go. The scene was so vivid in my mind I asked Evelyn once if she’d ever ridden a bull. “I thought about,” she admitted. “But I’m only crazy for a second.

It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.