Most of the charges leveled against “Try That...” are centered on MV producers’ choice to include images of an obscure courthouse in a Southern community where lynchings and race-inspired riots occurred back in Reconstruction and Jim Crow days. Leftists charge that those particular images are supposed to be “dog whistles” to White racists, inspiring them to resurrect those bygone days and make them live again in their own particular neighborhoods.

The problem is that no community anywhere is without some type of historical episode that folks nowadays would shudder at recreating. People can review, understand, criticize, learn from the past without necessarily seeking to recreate it. Even here in Butte, Montana, if Aldean’s MV producers had selected our county courthouse for inclusion, nitpickers and minutia historians could have dug up some horrific historical events that our citizens would say have no place in current life.

For example, try on the 1917 lynching of labor organizer Frank Little and the anti-strike, Anaconda Mining Company police who fired on strikers threatening violence to scab workers. Would choosing the Silver Bow County courthouse be a “dog whistle” to alleged antiunionists among us? My guess is that it would only become a dog whistle if the minutia diggers told them that it was and paraded it as such through the streets of social media. The average MV viewer would just take it as a small-town courthouse—and not necessarily associate it with anti-labor atrocities.

The leftist, collectivist approach is to hunt down, denounce a few malformed trees (probably dead or decaying) and then set an entire forest ablaze. For this reason, I’m happy to see Jason Aldean get all this attention and recognition he deserves for striking a blow for small communities (wherever, however they may be) seeking means to isolate themselves from hate crimes (perpetrated by any members of any race/religion against others of any race/religion), gangsterism, and unpunished criminality now plaguing leftist-controlled big American cities.

Minutia diggers, plowing through history books to cast past evils into current/future life, would find their time better spent attacking the political/media machine that has converted major portions of big cities into welfare ghettos where drugs are the only escape from failed platitudes, promises, demagoguery repeatedly delivered at taxpayer expense with abysmal, counterproductive results.