That’s quite appropriate. Alberta is a sort of honorary US southern state, just colder, but with the same brain-addling properties as Texas, arising presumably out of either oil fumes in the air or the mandatory wearing of cowboy hats that are much too tight and impede the circulation to the brain. This causes the afflicted patient to develop a hatred for liberals and all forms of government, and to employ expressions such as “Yeee-haw!”. Eventually, the patient is motivated to install the horns of a deceased bull on the hood of his pickup as a sign that the insanity has now fully set in.
Still, the cold appears to have a mitigating effect on the brain damage. Sam is at least more literate than most wingnuts – his lunatic RW ravings are at least grammatical. When Sam wishes to reference, say, the perils of evil anti-business climate-change-believing socialist government, his grammar and orthography are impeccable. In this way he can be distinguished from Texans and other American RW lunatics.
I submit the south is no longer synonymous with backwoods racism and ignorance, given the right wing lunacy running amok in northern states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Idaho, and Montana, which are all a stone’s throw from Canada. They’re making the KKK look quaint and passé by comparison.
Indeed. As someone pointed out, Southern Governors had been bragging about how their tax incentives were “stealing” corporate jobs out of the North East, but didn’t realize these “Yankee” companies were also bringing their values and their employees with them.
Do I really need to dig up recent news stories about Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, or Alabama, just as a f’rinstance? Sure, some things are changing, but many others are just the same. If anything, as previously noted, there’s a case to be made that some of the lunacy is migrating northward.
Why do you think they’re stepping up the voter suppression? It’s a little less obvious on the state level, but you can really see it on the local level. A lot of the suburbs are getting bluer. My town, for instance, literally just voted out nearly the entire Board of Aldermen and restructured the town charter to keep the “Good Ol’ Boy” network out of power. If you look at the neighborhood Facebook pages you will see a lot of variants of “You moved here because you didn’t like it there1, why are you trying to make here like there?2” bullshit.
1- Uhh, no. I moved here because my job moved me here, and I like eating.
2 - Uhh, no. I just want to be able to buy a beer after ten o’clock and get a decent pizza.
What have they done lately? The current antics of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters are stomping the KKK into obscurity. Aggressive racists and science deniers aren’t confined to below the Mason-Dixon line. The stereotype is eroding away, and not for a good reason.
This conversation is starting to veer toward the implication that the KKK is strictly a southern thing. It is not. I had two grandfathers (both in-laws) in the KKK, one who honest to goodness lynched people, right here in Michigan. I also grew up in a town where a black family was burned out of their home, and where my black friend was threatened with lynching at the age of 13 in 1999.
We’re also home to the crazy militia folks who have strong overlap with the KKK as do law enforcement. One of the aforementioned grandfathers was the Sherrif of a small town that made the papers a few years back for its students hurling racial slurs during a basketball game. Virulent racism in the north is not some new thing.
Indiana was a major state for the KKK.
Southern NJ and all the way up to Wall Township in Central Jersey had a lot of KKK activity at different times. I know they were active in the more rural parts of Pennsy and Ohio.
I’m not sure I read much on NY and the KKK, probably pretty minimal.
No, my Mom’s (ex) husband’s parents. He had a biological father and an adopted father and both were in the KKK. I wasn’t sure how else to describe them. (Step-grandparents?) At any rate they are no longer in my life.
Rather infamously, the St. Louis chapter of the KKK tried to do the charitable roadside clean-up “adopt a highway” thing in the early 1990s. The state DOT approved it and the standard the signs went up: “The section of Interstate XX kept clean and pretty by [insert your group here] = [the local chapter of Ku Klux Klan”].
The controversy was swift, loud, and two-sided. How dare the state approve such a thing? How dare the state not approve such a thing; that’d be picking on those poor misunderstood patriotic guys with the pointy hoods.
In the end, so much trash was deliberately deposited on their section of highway that MoDOT realized they’d created a monster. So after a few months fruitlessly hoping the problem would go away quietly, they found some excuse in the statutes to rescind the KKK’s sponsorship. The signs had long since been stolen so many times MoDOT had given up on replacing them. It’s unclear whether the signs were more stolen by anti-KKK forces registering a protest or pro-KKK forces relishing a souvenir of their official approval.
Knowing the politics of where the state DOT HQ is located, I imagine not a single person in the bureaucracy up through the Governor himself thought there was anything wrong with supporting those misunderstood patriotic guys in the pointy hoods.
That the uppity city folks of all colors went apeshit was a total surprise in their monochromatic monoculture.
Well, once the government decides it’s going to let private organizations buy state advertising, I’m not sure how much legal room they really have to deny specific groups. It seems like that becomes a First Amendment issue. The government doesn’t get to decide what’s a “civic group” and what’s a “hate group”. Apparently, they eventually found some grounds to revoke the KKK’s sponsorship, but that doesn’t mean the original decision to approve it was due to oblivious racism. The bureaucrats originally involved may simply not have seen any legal grounds to deny the sponsorship application. The Nazis had a First Amendment right to march in Skokie, after all.
Things are going to get really awkward, maybe even violent, when the highway learns it was adopted.
It’s bad enough to explain The Odd Fellows Club of Wyalusing to a turnpike, but when an interstate gets belligerent and demands to know about… The Klan?