By rednecks I mean those Art Bell, Alex Jones, David Icke, and Fox News lovers who prefer simple race-based myths and even cartoonish conspiracy theories over empirically verifiable economic explanations. For example:

White workers are poor and stressed because the ruling class has access to UFO technology, or is working with extraterrestrials.

This presents a problem. Republican ideologues employ race hatred to distract rednecks from the fact that their respective class interests are diametrically opposed. But how could rich whites not look out for poor whites? For simple folk who are easily trained by Republican myth-makers, race is the fundamental social antagonism (because it is a difference you can simply see) and it ought to explain class domination. Therefore, white capitalists cannot really be whites; in fact, they might not be human at all. Which leads us to …

Ruling class whites are unethical because they are actually reptiles.

This is actually an excellent simplifying allegorical explanation, executed best by John Carpenter in They Live!. Capital is, in fact, neither human nor humane. It is abstract wealth whose essence (to grow) precedes its existence, which it does by extracting surplus value from unfree and underpaid human life energy. In most sensible didactic fables, a force that impoverishes humans would be represented by something other than human. Recent redneck-oriented myth makers have “discovered” that the ruling class is composed of reptiles disguised as humans. This is not a bad choice, for multiple reasons:

1. The inhumane cannot be human. In the human sphere, the desire to immiserate others is an official pathology (sociopathy). But in other species, such as the reptiles, being selfish with no regard for others’ welfare is the natural attitude. Certain insects also fit this description. (While certain other insects, those in the Hymenoptera order, are the most pro-social of all animals.) Arachnids, protozoans, bacteria, and viruses would also be described as sociopathic.
2. Class is obscure, race is manifest. Difference in economic class is not visibly manifest, not something that people wear on their skin. To make this different manifest, you can allegorize it by saying that it is a biological difference, only hidden. So Republican ideologues assigned to handle voters with little or no eduction have spread the rumor that some of the ruling class (the ones that want to prevent workers from being trampled) are actually reptiles, either covered with fake skin, genetically modified, or interbred.

Working whites are poor because Democrats are funneling tax dollars to darkies, in order to get their votes, and because Jews have tricked them into doing so.

The ruling class sets the policies that precipitate as real misery. The force behind Republican tax policies that move money from poor to rich is the flow of capital to lawmakers. Once again, the visibility of racial difference (and audibility of ethnic difference) comes to the rescue. So rednecks are told that “all the money” is being sponged up by non-whites.

Intellectuals are tricksters paid by the elite to legitimize them.

People with higher education tend to be more pro-social, and support policies that benefit workers. It benefits everyone in society when there is less suffering. As I used to tell my students, “Even Republicans have to sometimes drive through black neighborhoods.” Crime, for example, is obviously correlated with poverty. Republicans have found the the best basis for attacking intelligence is intelligence itself. In fact, Trump has managed to change the meaning of the word elite from “economic elite” to “educational elite.”