RE: Is rural America becoming a new Confederacy?

That article was a good summary of a whingy (whiny + cringey) blog post. Best takeaway:

The point isn't that the American countryside increasingly wants to avenge the honor of Southern slaveowners for their loss in a war that ended over a century and a half ago. Rather, the people who live in these areas share with the historic South an intense distrust of the federal government, veneration of local law enforcement, resentment of city folk, suspicion of minorities and foreigners, hostility to technologically driven change, and a keen sensitivity to cultural slights.

I think it's true, and I'm happy about it. It's been really great to be able to "dogwhistle" in a room full of rural folk and find confederacy from wall-to-wall. Trump made that possible, and I'll always admire him for that.

Even more interesting is how many right-wing Americans seem to be questioning the received narrative about WWII, and even self-identifying with the German Nazis. Realizing what the Nazis really stood for and discovering a parallel between their political ideals and my own was a world-shattering paradigm shift when it happened to me in 2006; required months of trauma, contemplation, and study before it occurred; and was totally alienating - I felt for a long while like I was the only person in the country who had ever experienced it. I never expected to see Rightwing populists all over the internet start to equivocate about any and every subject regarding the Nazis, but Trump (or, rather, the mainstream media's response to Trump) woke people up en masse to the effects of propaganda and gaslighting on the public mind.

Seriously, 2016 forward has been amazing as far as right-wing radicalization goes. Makes me hopeful I'm going to see a judenfrei White Ethnostate in my lifetime.