But Rusty’s unease with Bloomberg turned into a gut-deep animus last year, when the self-confessed hillbilly—if you’re from this part of the world that’s a self-identifier, not an insult—sat down for his weekly, three-hour, Saturday morning news-reading session. That’s when he came across Bloomberg’s latest jab.

“You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code.”

There he was, this business mogul, preaching “compassion” for the miners watching their world collapse — while simultaneously saying they couldn’t be retrained to work in America’s hottest industry.

“Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great,” said Bloomberg. “I don’t know how to break it to you …. but no.”

It wasn’t just about coal politics this time — on that stuff, at least, Justice can agree to disagree. This? This was just patronizing.

“It touched every button of every stereotype you can put on us, that we’re not smart and can’t do things and are pitiful and all that,” Justice told me. “It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull’s face.”

Rusty Justice thought he might know miners a little better than some fancy tycoon in New York did. That’s why, at dawn one October morning last year, he trotted down his driveway towards a silver F-150 truck idling in the street and drove some 150 miles along the Mountain Parkway to Lexington.

It was time to go and prove Bloomberg wrong.

Rusty Justice at the wheel of his F-150.

They called them company towns for a reason. Coal is to Eastern Kentucky what tech is to Silicon Valley — the most copious, best-paid work that pushes every other lever in the economy. Each coal job supports three-and-a-half others, which means if you pull the plug on them, the economy goes out. There go the machinery vendors and mechanics. There go the train operators. The mine security guards. The bartenders. The cashiers at the family-run grocery store. There go 70 percent of Justice’s construction jobs. In Pike County, the only major non-coal factory churns out Pop-Tarts for Kellogg’s.

Justice never imagined the crash would be this sudden nor this bad, but things just keep piling on. EPA clean air regulations have power plants changing over to natural gas, there’s greater regulation of strip mining, and a series of cities, universities, and state pension plans are divesting themselves from coal.

Justice compares the disruption to the way Uber’s turning the cab industry inside out. With some coal company stocks crashing 95 percent in value over the last five years, I would say it’s way, way worse.