I spent a lot of formative years in an extremely rural area. People would take a lot of their time running down the local area, mocking the state of the school we went to, how there was nothing to do, and so on.

But, I noticed two things - first of all, if anyone talked about moving somewhere else in the country, or to a big city, these same people would express shock and outrage and say overtly racist things like “but that’s where all the nKLANGers are!”. Also, few of them had actually went anywhere else - some of them had never left the county, few left the state, and very rare was it that someone had left the country.

Secondly, if the topic of the greatness of this country came up, it was the bestest evar, at everything, than any other! I sometimes would ask these people how they would even know, since, in some cases, they’ve seen almost none of this country and they have never been to any other, and they thought the area they lived in was kind of a shithole?