Article without paywall: https://archive.is/2025.09.08-113402/https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/09/08/mississippi-republican-states-police-cities/
Other red states have made similar moves in blue cities even as crime in those cities has decreased sharply from pandemic-era highs. And now President Donald Trump is borrowing from the playbook, sending federal agents and National Guard troops to patrol the nation’s capital and threatening to do the same elsewhere.
“It’s part of the narrative that these cities are incapable of administering public safety even though crime is on a downswing since the pandemic,” said Jorge Camacho, an associate research scholar in law at Yale Law School. “You still need a foil to blame for problems that are real and imagined. I expect to see that wielded for the foreseeable future.”
Idk, I grew up in a rural society. I’m definitely not the most cultured individual, but I also don’t really consider myself to be that much of a backwards moron.
I do think there are way more people in the U.S. who have just never had the kind of opportunities or resources to travel anywhere else and experience different things that people in places like Europe get to do, and it tends to keep people in rural areas from being as open to things that seem unfamiliar to them.
Like I’ve met a lot of just regular working class people from Europe that did student exchange programs in high school, and ended up spending part of a school year in places like rural Arkansas or Tennessee. I can’t say I’ve met many Americans from a working class family that left their rural town in Arkansas or TN and spent a summer somewhere in Europe though. It seems like the kind of thing that only really happens during a war or deployment.
I think assholes are just kind of universal, but unfortunately they’re also usually the loudest and most pushy. You don’t always get to hear the voices of the individuals that might feel like they’re not represented by the group they’re automatically lumped into.