[orange, proud]
I’m willing to pay more for products MADE IN THE USA because I’m a based patriot who wants to SUPPORT REAL AMERICANS
[green, accusatory]
OK then how about supporting american workers by paying them a living wage?
[orange, dismissively shaking their hands while having a look of absolute disgust on their face]
NO
[the comic is squished into a funneling triangle shape for some reason]
This is a dumb strawman.
There’s basically two consumers, plus a bunch of lies told by the Epstein class.
Consumer 1: Wants a good product produced in a way they feel good about at a fair price. This typically includes preferring both locally made and fair wage pricing, as well as not-killing-the-planet.(Non-sociopaths who are currently not afraid about their finances tomorrow, tend to fall in this category.)
Consumer 2: Just needs the lowest price possible to survive another day. (People may drift btween these two modes, based on life events.)
Cosumer 3: Epstein class rapist. Wants you to believe their crimes are somehow your neighbor’s fault.
Edit: This maybe flew over my head. Is Orange man Epstein class?
Lol.
I am guessing they’re orange to hint that they’re MAGA.
And now, then, I think this may shock you, but there is a fourth consumer class, and they’re a bigger class than you might think. They don’t think about whether a product makes them feel good. They don’t think about whether a specific product is at a low price. Even if they’re poor, they don’t think about budgets, and they tend to be heavily in credit card debt. These people’s defining characteristic is that they don’t think much about anything. They simply choose some authority figure to tell them how to live and then they do whatever they’re told to do. They may occasionally spout out a bit of propaganda out of nowhere, but importantly, they have never once deeply thought about it themselves. They lack even the basic mental tools to think about it.
When challenged, they’ll just say some other bit of propaganda, or they’ll get angry, but they’ll obstinately refuse to think even the tiniest bit for themselves. They have what is called an authoritarian personality, “characterized by a disposition to treat the voice of authority figures with unquestioning obedience and respect.” If you look at the Wikipedia article, you’ll see there is a high correlation between having an authoritarian personality and being poorly educated or being religious (especially being an Evangelical Protestant).
Now, then back to the question about the comic. It is impossible to tell whether the orange man is Epstein class or whether he’s simply a mindless MAGA drone with an authoritarian personality, because they say the exact same things. One says it because they’re evil, and one says it because they refuse to question anything that the evil people say.
I mean I’d have to say, it is a sizable portion of americans. IE the whole selling point of tarrifs is to encourage manufacturing and jobs to move over here. There certainly is a significant amount of overlap between people that want more manufacturing in america that also widely want minimum wage to stay the same or even go down.
Now obviously this ven diagram isn’t a circle, there’s plenty of people that do actually want products to be made by people making enough to live on, both not screwing over labor in the global south etc… or in the US.
What you’re missing is that actual “Made In America” products, the ones that don’t just get a nice label based on a technicality, usually are made by workers paid a living-wage, so long as those products aren’t burgers.
Sucks for the burger-flippers, but without those other products, there are fewer living-wage jobs available to them to escape the minimum-wage trap.
Fewer well-paid workers results in fewer well-educated children. Resulting in more of the cognitave-dissonance-but-accidentally-maybe-doing-one-thing-right voters OOP has a problem with.
… but by all means, attacking certain “buy-local” people for only understanding the part of the message where one speaks with their wallet, and using the wrong, “patriotic”-and-not-en-vogue phrasing … yeah, its super-important work being done in these three low-effort panels without nuance or elaboration, yo.