A few thoughts on Jason Aldean:

Even if you take him at face value that he was just trying to write a song that commemorates communities who band together in difficult times and rise above the difficulties and support each other and collectively stand up for deep-seated values, kind of like what happened after 9/11, the actual real world examples we got of that in the aftermath of 9/11 were in big huge cities (NYC and DC) swarming not just with minorities but with types of people that would gladly show up at a black lives matter protest and happily tell JA to fuck off for saying all lives matter or some similar bullshit.

Brandon Flowers wrote an entire album dedicated to the charm and the dignity and the pain and the community values and the care and the tight-knit solidarity and the suffering and the humanity and the beauty of small towns. He did it during the era of "peak wokeness" and he did it without incurring the wrath or mockery of half of the country because he actually paid homage to and honored all of those things rather than writing a song literally about the ugly side of small towns, a song intended to be politically and racially provocative, and pretending like he was honoring those values in the process. BF actually cares about the people in the communities he is singing about. JA thinks the people he's singing about are actually low-key racist assholes that he can make money off of.

Jason Aldean looks like a libertarian bro in a fedora fucked a cartoon Sasquatch.

There is a long history of country music ACTUALLY extolling the virtues that JA claimed to be extolling in his song, about downtrodden communities holding each other up and protecting themselves and standing up to people that mean their communities genuine harm. These songs aren't about enemies to small town life being visiting protesters or anti cop mobs or illegals. These songs were literally about cops. About cops and big companies and bosses and politicians coming in to turn them against each other. If JA got to walk into a room full of country music hall of famers, Johnny Cash would hold him down while Woody Guthrie thrash his fake-pop-Nashville ass with his own stupid $1,500 pretty boy boots.

The longstanding historical tension between urban and rural life, which includes abstracted versions of big cities versus small towns, is older than our country. And it has always, always been political. There is no non-political version of this. And for more than a century after the country was founded it had extremely strong and totally explicit, unambiguous slavery / anti-slavery overtones. In America this divide has ALWAYS been racialized. In many contexts the word Urban literally means Black or non-white. Elite white people in big cities have been telling poor white people in small towns and rural settings for centuries that Elites® in big cities are corrupted by multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism and trying to force their corrupted values on Real Americans®.

Looking at the past decade of American political and social life, it's hard to imagine something that better encapsulates the totality of it than a mid-talent, attention-whoring, narcissistic opportunist saying something deeply and willfully and intentionally politically and racially provocative, using primarily subtext and dog whistles, it provoking exactly the reaction it intended (totally justified, righteous indignation mixed with overreaction), and riding the wave of controversy to popular success.

Fuck Donald Trump, fuck his supporters and enablers, fuck his media muppets and his pop culture groupies, and fuck Jason Aldean for addressing, nurturing, and profiting off of the the most vile and base impulses of America. He is not extolling what we are at our best. He is trying and succeeding at summoning the worst in us to the surface so that he can take advantage of it. He is every bit as much of a scumbag as Donald Trump, and it is fitting that this particularly despicable episode of white racial grievance-hustling is what history will most remember him for.