We have a President that now has his shallow identity tied to the notion of "Promises made, promises kept", which means he's really taking red vs blue paintball teams quite seriously. It is literally paintball, we visit each others states and go to each other's universities.
In the case of a rural-coastal tension in the US it is pretty well founded. They have observably different cultures and there doesn't seem to be a lot of tolerance for letting different states act independently which is the easy option to keep most people happy.
"rural vs. urban" is a proxy for "religion vs secularism" which itself is a proxy for "white supremacy versus multiculturalism." There's even a bit of old fashioned antisemitism intersecting with the evocation of "New York liberals" and "cultural Marxists."
If you think it's literally nothing more than "paintball" you don't understand American culture at all. You're confusing the tone for the message.
dreamcompiler•1d ago