We Are Not Your Enemy

An Open Letter to Liberals from Leftist Appalachians on the Front Lines of Climate Crisis

Appalachians Are Not Your Enemy.

I get it. When we’re wrestling with fear and rage, it’s tempting to point the finger—to find someone to blame, someone to shame. Sometimes, it just feels good to externalize our pain somewhere.

Without fail, whenever I share or see posts about our ongoing recovery from Helene in Appalachia, I run into the same kind of comments—full of ire from self-proclaimed liberals and progressives:

“You get what you voted for.”

“This is what they wanted.”

“your orange king abandoned you didn’t he?”

The thing is, Appalachians are not the enemy. We’ve endured more than our share of suffering, extraction, and exploitation—both recently and throughout our history. More importantly, this trend of victim-blaming Appalachians after a climate catastrophe is reflective of larger problems with the liberal mindset—problems that facilitated the current descent into fascism for our country.

As a proud Appalachian leftist, I’ve been engaged in community organizing for my entire adulthood and this pattern has become all-too familiar to me. I’m one of many folks among these mountains that has been diligently combatting the rise of white nationalism in my community and nurturing a sense of shared struggle and class consciousnesses. The rhetoric against us, on the other hand, would have you believe that this area is a wasteland of backwoods bigotry that has no hope of being saved from our own moral bankruptcy.

Those caricatures couldn’t be farther from the truth of Appalachia. The truth is that me and others like me have knocked on thousands of doors to start conversations with our neighbors, mobilized hundreds of folks to engage in advocacy efforts that defend human rights, nurtured inclusive spaces to protect our most vulnerable community members, and confronted crooked politicians who profit from our suffering. We are resilient, and despite all the obstacles stacked against us, we continue to show up for each other any way we can.

When I read the things that the “Vote-Blue-No-Matter-Who” crew says in response to our suffering, I am filled with grief, rage, and resentment. I feel invisible. Alienated. Hopeless. Again and again, I’ve watched our radical history of multiracial, working-class organizing be erased—replaced with stories that paint us as a whitewashed land of conniving conservative villains. Stories used to justify suppression, extraction, and abandonment.

We’re blamed for our own struggles. We’re blamed for the country’s political outcomes. We’re blamed for the consequences of climate change. All of this blame and shame, even as we watch our homes be washed away. We’re portrayed as wielding immense political power and somehow also as pitiful, helpless hillbillies, too stupid to improve our own conditions or save ourselves from catastrophe.

These comments don’t come out of nowhere. They reflect something deeper—something woven into our political fabric and moral foundations. They reveal the healing that has to be done to unravel the mindset that has been inherited from White Supremacist Capitalism, found among conservatives and liberals alike: a tendency to assign worth based on perceived cultural alignment, political utility, or proximity to power.

This is an open letter to Liberals from Appalachian Leftists on the front lines of the climate crisis. This letter may have been catalyzed by derogatory and hateful comments, but it’s really about a whole political culture that loves to perform morality while treating people as disposable. This letter explores liberal complicity, conditional allyship, and the deep roots of white supremacy culture that have manifested in climate catastrophe and the authoritarianism we’re seeing rise in the U.S. today. From local deals with weapons manufacturers to billion-dollar pipelines cutting through sacred land, from smug mockery of the poor to outright dismissal of flood survivors—liberalism has betrayed its supposed values. And Appalachia has become a scapegoat, (again).

This article is about naming that betrayal. In the sections that follow, I’ll dig into three major failures of liberal politics that continue to fuel the rise of fascism: complicity in systems of destruction, conditional allyship, and the persistence of supremacy culture.

If we want to survive, if we want to see collective liberation, we have to speak truth to power — especially when it makes people uncomfortable.

Complicity with Systems of Extraction

“You get what you voted for.”

Even if every single person in Appalachia voted for Democrats—which often isn’t the case—our region still wouldn’t have been spared from the climate catastrophe we face today. Voting better won’t save us when both parties are complicit in the same extractive, profit-driven systems. Sure, Democrats talk a better game than Republicans these days about environmental degradation and the climate crisis. Even so, over the past 30 years, both Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly joined forces to sabotage climate action and sell out our communities to fossil fuel giants and war profiteers.

Example #1 — 1990s: When They Bailed on Bill Clinton

In the final decade of the 20th century, the fossil fuel industry launched their coordinated efforts to undermine the public understanding of climate change. Before that, even Republicans saw the climate problem as something worth addressing. In 1988, scientist James Hansen testified before Congress and said, “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.” It was then that the oil-and-gas executives began to consider the issue’s potential to hurt their profits, rolling out their propaganda campaign shortly afterwards. By 1993, cowardice and collusion had infiltrated political leadership, propelling Senate Democrats and Republicans to work together to defeat Bill Clinton’s attempt to reduce emissions via his energy tax proposal. That moment marked the beginning of a bipartisan trend: bowing to oil-and-gas lobbyists rather than protecting people.

Example #2 — 2010s: When They Took Dirty Pipeline Money

Around 20 years after Clinton’s energy tax was sabotaged, the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) was introduced—a project that Appalachians have now been resisting for over a decade. From the earliest days of the pipeline’s proposal, communities along the mountain range stood against the project and the consequences that they knew it would come with: razed trees, disturbed landscapes, water running brown from the tap, a horrifying risk of leaks and explosions, and—of course—the 90 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that would come from producing, transporting, and burning methane over the 40-50 years of the pipeline’s operational lifespan.

For years, activists and organizers held the line against the MVP and prevented the pipeline’s completion by leveraging environmental lawsuits, direct action, and grassroots advocacy. In 2022, the project became a central talking point during congressional discussions surrounding the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), when Democratic pundits and mainstream media linked the fates of the pipeline and the economic bill together. Greenlighting the MVP, the narrative insisted, was a necessary trade to secure Joe Manchin’s vote to pass the IRA.

Although he is a member of the Democratic party, Manchin’s support of the MVP was a made out as some kind of deviation from the commitment the party otherwise held to environmental stewardship. Meanwhile, the Democratic darling of the moment, Senator Chuck Schumer, was the top recipient of donations from NextEra that year—one of the pipeline’s biggest backers. Blaming Joe Manchin was politically necessary; without him to scapegoat, it would be too obvious that the entire party had been bought out. As it turns out, the majority (61%) of NextEra contributions in 2022 flowed to Democrats, confirming that the party’s platform on climate had become little more than lip service.

In exchange for selling out Appalachia to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the company’s PAC gave over $200,000 each to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Example #3 — 2020s: When They Became Bedfellows with Raytheon

Let’s bring this conversation home to Helene’s impact zone in North Carolina. Asheville, the county seat of Buncombe County, is a city that is often described as one of the most liberal places in the state. The city tends to pride itself on being a “blue dot within a red sea.” It was in this so-called “blue dot,” in 2020, that the five Democrats that were elected to sit on the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners hid behind closed doors while they negotiated a deal with Raytheon.

Yes, the same Raytheon that is known as “the notorious weapons company that sits atop the military-industrial complex like a bloated tick.”

Those elected officials handed Raytheon millions of dollars in incentives to construct a new manufacturing facility on a previously undeveloped piece of land, bordered by the French Broad River in one direction and the Blue Ridge Parkway in another. The construction of this new facility, as the Department of Transportation would report, was predicted to constrict the river such that it would increase the water surface elevation upstream of causeways, expanding the flood plane along those areas of the French Broad.

Yes, the same French Broad River that broke its own historic flooding records during Helene.

If it were true that “voting better” could have saved us from climate catastrophe, then why didn’t the Democrats that were elected to local office heed the environmental concerns related to to the construction of the Raytheon facility, instead of pouring millions of our LOCAL tax payer dollars into it? There’s always an excuse for complicity. In the instance of the Raytheon facility, it was ‘good jobs.’ Next time, it’ll be something else. The justifications are endless—but the consequences are always the same.

War profiteering is climate violence, and actions speak louder than party lines or campaign slogans. What do the actions of elected officials tell us? That neither of the two parties will divest from the fossil fuel industry, from the military industrial complex, from racial capitalism, from extraction of labor and natural resources, or from human suffering. Regardless of which party they are affiliated with, the ruling class consistently undermines climate legislation, accepts campaign contributions from extractive industries, and sells off our communities to the highest bidder.

Liberals must hold the Democratic party accountable for their complicity, instead of ignoring their role in extraction and climate destruction. We can’t afford to keep selling the idea of the Democratic Party’s innocence. No one’s buying it anymore—least of all the people you’re asking to show up at the polls. Instead of leaning into the divisive rhetoric around the two-party system, we need to look to each other for solutions to these devastating problems.

We are all we have. We are all we need.

Conditional, Performative Allyship

“your orange king abandoned you didn’t he?”

Too often, when disaster strikes in Appalachia, the first response from outside observers isn’t compassion—it’s cruelty dressed up as moral clarity, justified by the belief that the people here are the enemy of progress. I used to travel for workshops related to community organizing and social justice, and I would run into this assumption all the time. Folks would learn that I was an organizer based out of the rural hollers and they’d inevitably respond with shock and pity. Everything about me exists in contrast to the mainstream narrative that has been perpetuated about Appalachians.

The dominant narrative paints Appalachians as poor, backward, white, and morally inferior. So when disaster strikes—whether political, like Trump’s cuts to public programs, or environmental, like Helene—it’s seen as the deserved suffering of people who stand in the way of progress. The painful irony is that this assumption erases the existence of Black, Indigenous, Latine, Queer, and Trans folks, and folks of other oppressed backgrounds across Appalachia.

Here’s the thing: white folks are called to move beyond performative allyship and into the deeper work of healing from colonial violence and white supremacy culture. Writing off entire groups of people and swaths of the population based on where they live is literally replicating colonial violence. There is a cost to buying into the whitewashed stories surrounding rural communities, and the folks who pay the price are the exact same ones that self-proclaimed “allies” claim to care about.

As with all consequences of white supremacist capitalism, we already know that the impacts of climate change disproportionately fall on groups of people that have been historically oppressed. Helene was no exception: she stole homes, livelihoods, and loved ones from Queer and Trans folks, from Black, Indigenous, Latine, and other folks of Color. These weren’t abstract ‘others’ or cautionary tales. They were real people.

Those whose lives were reduced to wreckage weren’t some faceless, red-hat-wearing mob. They were elders who had lived in their homes for generations. They were Queer youth without anywhere else to go. They were Black mothers organizing mutual aid networks. They were undocumented families afraid to ask for help from the state. They were working people—poor, overextended, and just trying to survive, like millions across this country.

Erasure doesn’t happen by accident—it reveals who was never truly an ally. It is neither liberatory nor neutral. It is a choice that protects white supremacy and lets institutions off the hook. When we frame disaster as the deserved consequence of political failure, we shift attention away from the real culprits: the extractive systems that are designed to abandon us. It’s easier to blame individuals than to confront the full weight of structural violence. Real allyship requires us to lean into vulnerability that is uncomfortable, and to extend solidarity to the same communities that we’ve been taught are irredeemable. Conditional allyship preserves the same logic that underpins fascism—the idea that some lives are worthy of care, and others are disposable.

If we want to resist fascism, we must reject the idea that anyone is disposable. We must move beyond conditional allyship, to practice true solidarity.

Supremacy Culture & Disposable Humanity

When white liberals mock or dismiss the suffering of Appalachians during climate disasters, they reveal more than just fake allyship and a lack of empathy—they’re actively weaponizing the tools of supremacy culture.

White Supremacist Capitalism doesn’t stand on its own—it rests on a foundation of patriarchy, ableism, classism, and other hierarchies that work in tandem to determine who is considered ‘worthy’ of dignity, respect, and basic human rights. A person becomes “worthy” of care only if they meet the right standards based on their skin color, their age, their physical or intellectual abilities, their financial status, their gender or sexuality, etc. The cultural playbook of supremacy has been used for centuries to justify everything from genocide to land theft to chattel slavery.

There’s relief and comfort found in pointing to someone else—somewhere else—as the origin of the problems our country is facing. If the problem is there then it isn’t here; if they are bad then I am good. This is an example of the kind of binary, either/or dichotomy that supremacy culture depends on, painting a picture of good versus evil. But the truth lives in the tension of duality—in the messy, complicated space of both/and, not the false clarity of either/or. The problem is both there and here.

If supremacy is the dirt covering America’s floor, then Appalachia is the rug it gets swept under—convenient, forgotten, and blamed for the mess. Without Appalachia and the South to serve as the scapegoat for bigotry, liberals would be forced to turn inward and confront the ways that the culture lives inside of them. “Othering” rural communities as the “bad guys,” allows white liberals to maintain a comfortable distance from the problems we collectively face. That false sense of comfort is also driven by white supremacy culture, and only lasts long enough to roll the red carpet out for fascism, which then strips the illusion away.

Solidarity beyond superficial allyship requires us to unlearn the ways that we have been taught to harm one another and dispose of one another. Comments like “they’re too stupid to vote in their own interests” are rooted in the same tactic of othering that was used to deny Black folks equal access to the democratic process. Comments like “maybe they should have thought about this when they voted for Trump,” as federal emergency services are dismantled, are rooted in the same tactic of othering that is used to justify cruelty and violence towards immigrants. Without unraveling the culture from the ways that we relate to each other, the violence of supremacy just gets redirected towards a new group of people, a constantly-moving target of acceptable disposability.

Folks who consider themselves progressive have a responsibility to ask ourselves: “what is the ideal outcome that we are working towards?” If our goal is to change hearts and minds, build collective power, or create inclusive communities, then the current approach isn’t working. Shame and blame are tools of oppression—they feed into our epigenetic fears of being discarded by the same supremacy culture we claim to oppose. As our Black Appalachian ancestor, bell hooks, wrote in her book All About Love, ‘Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.’ Deeming others morally irredeemable removes all opportunity for vulnerability, connection, or growth.

---

The Path Toward Collective Liberation

We are already living in the early stages of climate collapse and fascism. It’s not a threat on the distant horizon—it’s the air we breathe, the floods that wash away our homes, the normalization of political violence and state abandonment. And for many of oppressed communities and many folks in places like Appalachia, it’s not new. It’s simply the continuation of the same systems that have always deemed us expendable. Instead of writing us off and seeing us as the enemy, what if liberals learned from us?

Appalachia has always known how to survive in the ruins.

Not because of state intervention, but in spite of it. Our elders were forming mutual aid networks long before the term was popularized. Throughout our history, Appalachians have organized community gardens and food shares, the largest labor uprising in the country’s history, and practiced solidarity across divides, because our survival depended on it. The stories of our past offer a blueprint for the future.

In the wake of Helene, it wasn’t federal aid that showed up first—it was neighbors. It was historically Black community centers and Queer DIY collectives. It was local abolitionists who already knew how to navigate crisis, because we’ve been living in one for generations. Relationships are the ultimate tool for liberation. Nurturing relationships is the most radical work that we can engage in.

This is what real solidarity looks like: not pity, not performance, but presence. Mutual aid, solidarity, and autonomous community defense are the only paths that hold any promise—for surviving what’s coming, but also for building something better.

If we want to survive, and ultimately thrive, we have to let go of the supremacy culture that taught us to dispose of each other and to value domination over cooperation. We must divest from the capitalist logic that convinces us that in order for us to swim, someone else has to sink.

Because the truth is this: it’s all of us or none of us.

So the challenge is to ask yourself:

• Where have I been complicit? Who are the people that I have treated as disposable?

• How can I show up in the world with more compassionate curiosity, grace, and vulnerability?

• What does my immediate community need to be more resilient, more connected, and more aligned—and how can I contribute?

Because if the horrors of this moment have taught us anything, it’s this: the state won’t save us. But we can save each other.

And we must.

From the holler to the sea, I got you and you got me.

xoxo,

Chels