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The media and cultural elites really revealed their hatred of poor rural white people during the Trump administration imo. I don't think most people realized what was happening during his presidency but now that it's over, it really feels like TDS was directed toward white people and especially poor white people with little to no cultural power or relevance. Before 2018 I was relatively happy or at least complacent to conform to the fashions and opinions of democratic elites, in the hopes that I could reap the benefits of being part of the ascendant class, but after experiencing the hatred this class of people spewed toward poor white people I really can't stand to associate with democrats anymore.
Circling back to your post, the point I'm trying to make is that I have much more sympathy for middle American white people after the past 6 years than I had before and I feel like white people have actually earned a huge right to feel like the underdogs at this point. I think a ton of people in the creative industry are feeling this as well FWIW, so many of us are sick of working for democrat tastemakers who constantly censor our work and ignore artists creating anything that could threaten their credibility or power. As artists/creatives we're used to rooting for the underdogs and when the legacy art media is constantly screaming at us that only BIPOC voices matter, and that poor white trash people will ruin their careers if they're associated with them, then the poor white trash people are, obviously, the underdogs.
At the end of the day, when you pick on losers, it makes you look like a bigger loser, and it grows support for the people you're picking on. The more the mass media and pop culture and everyone you meet piles on poor white people, the more it reveals how pathetic they are for doing so.
I see pop culture as actually having a fascination with poor or working class white people, just as long as they are quirky somehow. Or criminal. Tiger King. The hatchet-wielding hitchhiker. Former mobsters moving to Oklahoma (Tulsa King).
The media's attitude toward Tiger King was actually kind of a huge thing that turned me against them around 2020. I watched Tiger King and my takeaway was, honestly, that they look like they're having significantly more fun in their lives than me or anyone who was poo-pooing the show was having. It really made me realize that I don't want to live my life confined by the tastes of people who can make fun of Joe Exotic while their own lifestyle is probably a really depressing routine of uber eats and gray buildings.
Additionally, I think the time before 2016 was way friendlier to quirky white working class people. For example, indie films like Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, as well as indie folk music like Sufjan and Fleet Foxes were beloved by the NPR set until the entire indie folk quirk scene mysteriously vanished from the media's landscape in favor of queer/bipoc voices throughout the late 2010s
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These are minstrel shows.
"Minstel show" implies that it's an act, that the ones in blackface are nothing like what they are acting as (or alternatively, that the black people on display are made to act in a less dignified way than they realistically are). I don't think Kai (the hitchhiker with the hatchet) specifically is playing things up or pretending, he seems like the genuine article.
I believe to steelman gilmore606's point, it would be that they are minstrel shows in the sense that the blue team viewers like to watch this media to laugh at the antics of poor white people. So this mimics the spectacle of white people watching entertainment that makes them feel superior and to be able to point and laugh at an inferior class of people (long ago it was blacks, today it's poor whites.) We have replaced acting with reality TV, so we don't need to have rich whites pretending to be poor whites (though there are plenty of examples of exactly that happening in Hollywood today.)
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