There’s an important distinction to be made between rednecks and hillbillies. The south would like you toe believe that anything non-urban is redneck, this is not so.

Doremus Jessup recently.

How so?

The US has been trying its best to put a good face on for the rest of the world, but it’s been a clusterfuck of waring political factions since forever. Some of those factions happen to be very dangerous.

As someone born in 98, it’s been sad and frightening to have grown up watching so many of my peers fall down the alt-right pipeline and pop out as fully radicalized fighting-age fascists.

Last time they didn’t expect to win and their base wasn’t nearly as far down the fascism rabbithole. Now the mask is off, and the GOP knows that magats are more than willing to turn and eat them alive if they try to tap the brakes on the Trump Train. He who rides the tiger can never dismount.

We’re planning on lilypadding our way up through New England while we go through the citizenship process. These next few years are gonna suck major ass.

My fiance and I have been looking into moving to Canada. He’s a librarian in a small town and things are not looking so great.

I’m not blaming any one thing for the rise of fascism in America. There are a myriad of factors which have built up over the past 50 years to bring us to this point. MY point, was that ONE OF THESE FACTORS OUT OF MANY HAS BEEN AN INCREASING HOSTILITY BETWEEN GEOCULTURAL REGIONS OF THE UNITED STATES. This has helped, in addition to the aforementioned other factors, to reinforce a sense of political isolation, and political isolation mixed with economic desperation and preexisting prejudices breeds extremism.

The only people to blame for fascism are fascists and those who profit off of them. It just so happens that I chose to bitch about this one specific element in this specific comment thread because it is one that I feel is often overlooked, you absolute mollusk.

I’m talking about years of cultural division and social neglect which have helped construct a funnel on top of the populist to fascist pipeline, into which an entire generation of young midwestern men are being dumped.

I know these people, they are my family and friends. Many of them started out as promising future-socialists. Then they looked to people who were supposed to be their allies in coastal blue states, and were immediately met with ridicule and derision. This provided a chance for fascists to swoop in and say “fuck those assholes, come roll with us and we’ll change the system together”. A lot of young men naïvely took the bait, and were radicalized in short order.

Christian fascism relies on a persecution complex, and you(collectively) have been helping feed into it.

One of the most frustrating aspects of this whole situation is listening to the absolute braindead takes I hear from the left. There’s a lot of coastal elitism going around and it almost makes want to side with the magats just out of spite. I hear armchair socialists who have never done a day of physical labor in their lives making fun of farmers while stuffing their faces full of cheetos made from corn grown in Iowa. The few attempts I’ve seen to reach across the isle have been from the patronizing position of “we need to teach these hateful know-nothings in flyover country about their privilege and how to vote properly”, instead of trying to learn why they believe what they do and how best to reach them.

I know that they’re wrong. I know this because I was raised in a stable household by loving parents and was given a good education, but I get why they’re angry. To be honest, I’m angry too.

At least it’ll make living in this glorious shithole a little bit more bareable.

American culture was deeply scarred by the cold war in ways that I don’t think many people realize. Over the last 80 years, the pursuit of self-interest has come to dominate every aspect of life and in turn degrades any attempt at community or helping one another. It’s quite sad actually. The America that gave my grandparents the opportunity to drag themselves out of poverty has turned around and eaten itself alive.

While I appreciate where you’re coming from, I can assure you that, in this scenario, it was very much a case of homophobia. Unless everyone there grew new personalities at the same time that I came out.

Thanks, I didn’t realize it happened either until one day it happened to me. Then it happened again, and again. Not frequent, and not always as tangible as being denied pizza, but little things here and there in the way people look at me and treat me that only started happening after I came out. I have yet to experience any actual violence, but the general vibe is such that I don’t feel comfortable being out and am considering moving to a more friendly state.

This is anecdotal but I have seen this as a gay man living in Ohio. My whole family is from the sticks but I live just outside a major city now. There’s a pizza place back home that my fiance and I can’t go to because they won’t serve him (he is, admittedly, quite fabulous). I can go alone, because I blend in, but him they will just quietly ignore and occasionally glance over to check if he’s gotten the hint yet. No yelling, no epithets, but no service either.

Yet