I’m not Jewish but I’m a liberal living in a blood red area. We used to get along with our neighbors very well, block parties, card night once a week, cook outs, that sort of thing. That all came to a screeching halt, the first blow was Covid which nobody knew what to do about so everybody was scrambling to save their ass, trying to comply with ever changing instructions from Fauci and company.
Second blow was when pretty much the whole area became Trump worshipers and decided it was all fake news, masks did no good and vaxes caused spoons to stick to your forehead and gave you a M$ 5G mind control plug-in.
We had neighbors, family members and friends proudly and defiantly die of Covid. We didn’t go to their plague spreading funerals but sent many condolence cards with checks.
Third blow by the insurrection. Folks around here were cheering on the Jan 6 event. Neighbor lady was posting non-stop FB prayers/rants hoping that the insurrection succeeded, while it was live on TV. At first I thought she was kidding, then realized she went bat-shiat crazy. She told me the protests were truly commanded by god, followed by really weird images of Trump contemplating life by some babbling brook and other such nonsense. Never went over there to play cards again.
I used to check out what I call the local “Red Neck and Hat” FB group, as a know thy enemy sort of thing. I don’t go there much anymore because of the weapons-grade stupid and low-grade threats. Nothing serious… but… how much would it take to escalate?
These people have weapons, lots of Bud Light and ammo. They are full of hate. They aren’t looking for me yet, but I fear they will be in the not so distant future.
I can’t help but think you’re exaggerating a wee bit. I live in a very rural part of Ohio. I have lots of guns & ammo & beer on hand. But I’m not right wing, am not a Trump supporter, and fully support vaccines. So am just curious what hellhole you live in.
Answering directly, the answer is probably not. As @Saint_Cad said, there doesn’t seem to be an effort to murder liberals (a small but very vocal minority of hideous people notwithstanding) - because it very much seems like they won’t have to.
And other cases before the SCOTUS seem bound and determined to enable minority rule and other un-democratic reform to perpetually disenfranchise voters will accomplish what they want without the messiness of a hot civil war. And I suspect they figure, perhaps correctly, that most people will go along to get along.
I still think we’re going to have increasing civil disobedience, small and possibly large scale if it gets to that, with a large number of states fundamentally going their own way. The biggest unknown will be if and when there’s a Republican commander in chief that decides the only way to fix the problem is by military force to force states to comply with undemocratic dictates, at which point all bets are off.
This is an important question, because even in the reddest areas usually 3 - 4 out of every 10 people defies the stereotype, and is actually a Democrat/liberal.
Not that the folks the OP is concerned about care a lot about “have to.” Plus, I kind of think that anything that gets either side riled up that much could potentially lead to (more) violence from the right.
No argument, we are already having quite a bit of targeted violence, although currently more along religious, ethnic, and gender preference lines of the Right’s ‘Culture Wars’. But the politically motivated and organized removal of rights, property and life? Not likely to be remotely the same.
Granted, it’s a difference of degree, but right now, IMHO (since it’s that forum) the right as a whole seems to want to run all those who disagree out of town as it were. Force them to live in other counties / cities / states, where they don’t have to see ‘those sorts’.
And since the entire ‘right’ is largely united by hate of the ‘other’, it would likely be in their best interests to KEEP that group alive and isolated, a perpetual target of blame for everything that is ‘wrong’ in the world, so they don’t ever have to fix anything themselves.
I mean, I’m fully invested in pointing out that even the bluest or reddest states have plenty of purple in them.
But once you start at, say, the county level of granularity, a lot of the purple places start to vanish, and your really get some very skewed partisan majorities one way or the other.
The New York Times has
a map showing county-by-county margins of returns of the 2020 presidential election. There are a lot of counties in the Trump +75 category - probably more than Biden counties, though the Biden counties tended to be more populous and thus their absolute majorities were significantly greater than their percentage majorities.
Anecdotally, I have some family in rural Alabama. They keep their Democratic loyalties very close to their vest, as they don’t know of any other people of similar politics within twenty miles of them. That’s not to say there are none, but they don’t know of them. (Their county is not on the map, but they are not far geographically or demographically from Haralson County, Georgia - Trump +74 by that map.)
Shawano County WI. Doesn’t get any redder than this. I can understand you think that I’m exaggerating a wee bit. But I don’t tempt fate. I don’t go to the bars/restaurants I used to go to. When the place goes silent and everybody stares when you walk in… good time to leave.
I’ve looked at the voting records for my township/county. Depending on which race you look at and what year, voting around here goes about 70% Republican, so you were right on Moriarity. But I know for fact that my nearest neighbors, the ones I deal with regularly, are NOT in that 30% of Democrats. They are 100% stark raving Qanon, given my interactions with them IRL and social media.
Three neighbors willingly and proudly offed themselves because they were anti-vaxers. And to think I used to hang out with them, went to their kid’s birthday, graduation parties and weddings.
I don’t like confrontation, I’m not good at it so I avoid it whenever possible. I don’t really live “in fear” as the rednecks like to say I do. I do live with a sense of self-preservation and try to avoid these assholes.
MIssed the edit window. Neighbor is retired WI State Patrol Officer and his son is in training to be in WI State Patrol.
They spend nearly every Sunday shooting machine guns in their back yard after church. It’s like clockwork, they do breakfast after church, then they go shooting. They invited me to join in once. I guess I should have sucked it up and pretended I was into that sort of thing. Breakfast would have been okay. Had I done breakfast and emitted a rousing “Yee HAW” with each round I’d probably be golden right now. Prolly could have gotten a few free Bud Lights out of it too
Same guy, WI Patrol Officer, shot out his patio door while “cleaning” his gun. He thought that was “funny”.
You tell me, do I have to be afraid of the neighbors?
Before anybody gets in my face, I will admit I don’t know much about guns. The neighbors may not have “machine guns” as I originally said. But they are capable of firing rounds as long as the trigger is held and the magazine isn’t empty. They are used for “deer hunting”.
Frankly, with that second piece of information I’d be afraid of them as a matter of their approach to gun safety, never mind ideological threat. I’d be worried about the next “funny accident” happening in the direction of my property.
Uh yeah. High power rifle bullets have a way of going through multiple walls before wounding someone. That thought crossed my mind.
The current mode of operation is to be cordial to them. Might go over there for a beer if they offer. If we talk it will be about hunting/weather/whatever new power toy they bought.
That’s exactly what it is, coexistence. I’m mourning our previous relationship while dreading the way things are going. Neighbor wife has even banned her family from watching the Packers. In WI that’s a REALLY BIG DEAL to boycott the Packers (their present field status not withstanding).
The Packers apparently gave some money to Planned Parenthood 2-3 years ago. That was enough for the wife to ban her family from any Packer game watching.
Hubby still watches surreptitiously in the garage. Kinda surprising since he’s the guy “who wears the pants around here”. But then he’s got the guns so what he sez has some weight with her. He’s smart enough to not get into it with her.
It sounds as though the OP’s concerns would be exaggerated if you were his next-door neighbor.
Since you’re not, and since there are in fact a lot of rural Republican gun-owning beer-drinking right-wing anti-vaxx Trump supporters, I don’t see why you jump to the conclusion that the OP’s concern about the people who actually are his next-door neighbors, who are not you, is overblown.
I have seen Trump flags, one F**k Joe Biden flag. Shawano County was always historically R. But there’s plenty of places far more skewed.
Shawano County has had a total of 161 Covid deaths. My mother lives in a memory care facility there, and during the height of Covid they were indeed masking and doing temperature checks. Her church, a conservative one, did go to remote services broadcast over the Internet and radio station during Covid. I think if there were massive public protests I probably would have found out about it.
Has anything been done to you personally? Like blacks have been treated in the history of the USA? Like Jews in Russia and many other countries that weren’t Nazi Germany? Like gays and other people considered deviant pretty much anywhere? Can we talk about things that have actually happened?
