The New York Times Op-Ed on HBO’s Task Highlights Our Two Americas. | The American Spectator

Once again, the blinding bubble surrounding the New York Times readership shows the rift between our two Americas. Alan Sepinwall, in his guest essay “This HBO Miniseries Gets Rural America Right,” the top “Reader Picks” in the comment section, does his best to mockingly depict Red State MAGA deplorables in shows like Task, Yellowstone, Tulsa King, and Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown as living lives of violent desperation in “geographically and politically disparate locales” in the miserable backwaters of rural America. Insert the obvious clichés of a shattered, drunken, fetid milieu where blue-collar rubes’ dreams and dignity have crumbled along with their factories, families, and churches. Thankfully, the Times readership seems to possess both the wisdom and moral high ground to comprehend the working man’s dilemmas — and save these dummies from themselves.

Sepinwall and the op-ed editors, though not as ham-fisted, might be secretly pleased with the smug responses it inspired. At the top of the list on the first click was: “It’s not a story of rural dignity rising; it’s a story of white dominance fading,” wrote one from Brooklyn. Another declared, “I’m tired of being preached at to ‘understand’ the people there… I’m done.” A Philadelphian said she’s “tired of being asked to understand people who see me … as the enemy.” Others were blunter: “Rural America is not the best of America, sorry … Urban areas are the future regardless of what reactionaries think of them.” Many of the Times’ readers have nothing but contempt for these shows’ characters and locales.

The writer and editors don’t help much, as the centerpiece of the essay and headline is Task, a seven-episode HBO miniseries set in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which follows Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), a garbage man who becomes Robin Hood by stealing from outlaw biker drug dealers to support his family and avenge his brother’s murder by the same gang. Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), a boozy middle-aged FBI agent and former Catholic priest, is tasked with capturing him. Written by Philly local Brad Ingelsby (Mare of Easttown), it’s a gritty portrayal of working-class life that explores moral compromise, community decay, and the difficult line between doing what’s right and what might be wrong. (The show is entertaining and well-acted, though it has a few moralistic and somewhat predictable elements that we won’t focus on here. Overall, it functions as dependable Sunday night entertainment.)

What the title and Sepinwall overlook from the jump is that Delco ain’t rural! It’s a dense Philadelphia suburb with 576,000 residents spread over 191 square miles, making it one of the most urbanized counties in the state — but that’s an obvious and pedantic oversight I won’t dwell on, but does work for the Times as its “rural” avatar.

What’s more disturbing is how readers want to fit their political narrative neatly into a collectivist worldview. It seems too easy for many of them to reduce complex human lives into sentimental categories of victimhood, desperately needing the Times’ readers’ guidance — or should we say, elite pandering? The subtext here is a classic example of repurposing Task to align with a left-leaning, Democratic-friendly framework that seeks to bring working-class Americans under its influence by portraying them as powerless victims. This narrative, of course, is useful for mobilizing independent minds — and hopefully their votes. (RELATED: Working-Class Whites Anxiously Losing Ground)

Sepinwall’s clunky essay argues that “it’s undeniable that larger societal forces in the region have worn these places, and their residents, down to a nub.” But Task, like Mare of Easttown before it, is not an overt sociological morality play; it’s a local story about culture, not a case study for the Columbia anthropology department. The gritty, dramatic tension and humanity of Robbie Prendergast come from his moral agency and foolish decisions. For the Times crowd, they’re political avatars — props for ideological gain. For this crowd, everything must be political; everything. (RELATED: Why Democrats Can’t — and Won’t — Replicate MAGA)

For Sepinwall, these shows “may not be offering escapism, but they provide a chance at empathy.” Empathy for what? Their human foibles and fumbling? Their foolish blindness? Or something more political — like late-stage capitalism — or their subconscious clinging, as many commenters suggested, to the fading of their white cultural primacy? (RELATED: MAGA and the Citizen Against Globalism)

This, of course, is a lazy and dangerous reading. Still, it does find a useful purpose among many on the left who want only to winnow these dramas into quick props by portraying Delco as a political allegory of what happens when “rural America” loses its cultural privileges.

What is lost in these interpretations is the deeper philosophical struggles that underpin a show like Task: the way nostalgia can distort reality and cause individuals to lose themselves.

Jean-Paul Sartre understood this and warned against living in “bad faith,” the denial of freedom by treating the past as fixed. Unmoored nostalgia is a form of bad faith: it imagines that something once satisfying can never be recaptured, leaving us as victims of decline. The result isn’t reflection but paralysis — civic and personal energy replaced by resignation. If one believes that their Delco Thanksgiving morning parish football games “peaked” in the late 1970s, no amount of Yuenglings will bring them back. The kids on the field become apparitions of a bygone era, and one’s identity begins to slip away. The warm blanket of nostalgia — mixed with eight too many Yuenglings and a few bumps — feels safe, but the kids lose. The freedom of what could be becomes overwhelming. These ideas, not identity politics, are the most interesting aspect of Task. But of course, that’s not helpful to Sepinwall or the Times’ subscribers’ agenda. It’s not what they want to get “right” about “rural America.”

So the decline explored in Task is not socio-economic — it’s moral. People collapse not when jobs vanish but when virtue and discipline disintegrate. That’s not a crisis the government can solve. It’s deeply personal and requires effort and honesty. Something new can always be made. That is what America was founded upon.

Sepinwall’s empathy — and that of the Times — may be sincere, but it’s deeply pandering. Many of their readers seem just plain vengeful. Pity is not understanding; it’s condescension. Working-class communities of any race don’t need to be pitied or mythologized by coastal elites. They need to be taken seriously — as individuals — and they certainly don’t need the Times editorial board and their readers to rescue “them.”

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