Tuesday morning. Car inspection. The sacred Virginia ritual where you hand over keys and wait to be judged by a man with a flashlight.

The waiting room is the usual. Burnt coffee. A rack of ancient magazines. Fox News murmuring from a TV mounted too high, like it isn’ttrying hard to be heard.

But it is part of the conversation.

What surprises me is not that Fox is on. It is that every Bubba in the shop is watching it. And not nodding. Not cheering. Not repeating the talking points like call and response at a tent revival.

They are talking about Greenland.

Greenland.

One guy says it is beyond stupid. Not “politically unwise” or “bad optics.” Just stupid. Another says Greenland is NATO. Says they helped us fight Nazis back in WWII by letting us put a base there. Says you do not threaten people who literally let you park planes on their island while the world was on fire.

Someone else laughs and says at least 47 could make up a drug excuse to go after Venezuela, but everyone knows that would be about oil anyway. They are not buying the right wing media story of righteous deposits and noble intentions. Not even a little.

One of them says this will not go unnoticed by China and Russia. Says it like he is talking about a cracked engine block that is about to grenade on the highway. Then another voice, from behind a rack of tires, says what the hell does that old idiot think he is doing?

A different guy, not quiet and not subtle, says he got caught diddling kids and now he is trying to get people talking about anything else. Anything else at all.

Nobody challenges him. Nobody cheers either. It just lands in the room like a dropped wrench.

These are white guys. Blue collar. Mechanics. Between 35 and 65. The kind of guys the news always talks about like they are a single organism. I have no idea who they voted for. I am not going to ask. That would be weird. Also rude.

But I do know this. They do not sound like men waiting for marching orders. They do not sound like people eager to vote for anyone carrying his endorsement next time around. They sound tired. Practical. Annoyed. Like people who can spot a bad idea because they fix the consequences of bad ideas for a living.

Fox keeps talking. The inspection continues. Somewhere, a printer spits out paperwork.

And in this little waiting room in Virginia, the narrative cracks just enough to let in some air.

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