As someone from the rural south, I actually don’t mind evil Republican Californian transplants. It’s kind of funny to witness them crash out after realizing there are no sidewalks and the nearest hospital is an hour and a half away. Maybe if enough of them vacate the state, the cost of living will go down and I can move there.
I used to live in an area that was somewhat scenic and had an undercurrent of tourism but was still extremely rural and poor. It was so funny to see transplants in the regional Facebook group making posts like “Does anyone know any good jogging paths in the area?” only to be met with a unanimous “No.”
There was someone who was like “I’m thinking of retiring to [AREA]. How quickly could the ambulance reach [AREA] in an emergency?” and everyone was like “It would take an hour or more. Do not retire here if you plan on ever getting sick.”
The funniest part was that the locals were not being dicks, there was a huge culture shock from these people who had lived in wealthy urban/suburban areas and were now trying to survive in the middle of nowhere. If you wanted resources and things to do and a decent quality of life, you should have stayed where you were. We’re living the libertarian unpaved road no emergency services dream over here.
“Does anybody know of any good restaurants in the area?” “There are two. Two restaurants in a 50 mile radius. One is pretty good but it is only open on Wednesdays and Fridays. The other is fucking disgusting but it is cheap and always open. Hope this helps.”
Or they move here but they don’t want to live without those amenities and bothered asking their real estate agent about it, so they do move to the city, or just outside the city, and are horrified and disgusted to learn that the cities are fucking blue, and full of immigrants and nonwhite people and you sometimes hear languages that aren’t English.
Idjits. You don’t like it? You can go back where you came from. Around here a lot of the time it’s technically that the border crossed my neighbors, rather than vice versa.
My ex moved down to Texas from Massachussetts. In Mass, she’d considered herself somewhat moderate. She agreed with some conservstive positions.
Then she got down here. And encountered Texas conservatives. And just… veered HARD left. Just “Oh, no, fuck these assholes.”
I really hate that we let the fucking tea party alt-right neofash get away with calling themselves conservatives, because the old coalition of “Texas conservatives” aren’t into 98% of what this administration’s up to, and could be a useful component of a resistance coalition, but a lot of them don’t know it because part of the conservative identity is hating politics and wanting to have as little to do with it as possible, especially when anyone they don’t like is in power (which might surprise people but includes TFG.) In other words they act a lot like liberals. They’re not reliable, but they’re useful.
Texas went for this regime at a rate 10% less than the national average, and driving a wedge between conservatism and this - big government overreach, even tyranny - would be enough to split the GOP here. But we’d get further if we stopped lumping them together from the left.