One transgender woman, Sheena, left Florida to move to Minnesota. Florida has recently passed extremely harsh legislation targeting the transgender community, and Sheena cited this legislation in her decision to move with her partner, stating that she “had to leave Florida within one month [of the transgender medical ban on adults] to avoid having my care halted.”
That was the goal. We don’t vote for fascists, so we need to be removed. Forcing us to flee is the first step, and when that fails to eliminate us completely they’ll start implementing further measures to make it impossible for us to vote or live in red states.
Interestingly, that also forces us to live and vote in the states we flee to, making them less red as we’ll obviously never miss another election after becoming political refugees.
Balkanization.
Definitely gives rise to conditions for conflict and civil war, when areas have been depopulated of anyone who disagrees. Unfortunately for many of these red states, they’re landlocked and low GDP so it’s a losing proposition either way. They wanted the South to rise again, but apparently didn’t learn any lessons since last time, content to be kings of a failing depressed hateful anthill.
As long as Texas and Florida can prop these states up they could maybe make something work, though climate change might make that impossible.
There’s plenty of military, industrial, and oil stuff in the South but much like Russia it’d be anathema for other countries to support a bigoted breakaway unless they just wanted to stick it to Washington or fracture the country or really depended on specific crops/resources/etc.
No wonder Russia, Trump, and Republicans get along so well.
The civil war was similar in that way, they were landlocked with low population and poor access to resources back then too. A losing proposition from the start.
It’s interesting how “minor” conditions can have huge effects on conflicts. Apparently the South thought they could leverage their cotton (“cotton is king”) and use it to convince England/Europe to back them, but not only did Confederate diplomacy suck but other countries did the math and decided they didn’t need Southern cotton bad enough to piss off the Union.
It seems these guys and their spiritual descendents have a long proud history of overestimating their importance and worth while antagonizing everyone else and behaving like idiots.
From what I’ve seen the whole thing in florida is in defense of the kingdom. They didn’t want disney bringing tens of thousands of workers to what is now mostly red districts. They figured passing unpalatable bills will drive out progressives. They want the worst of us to be the only people still willing to live in Florida that way the GOP can continue being in charge. It doesn’t matter what might be best for their voters.