I’ll admit I’ve not stayed in the UP for very long, just driven through it a few times, the last time when Obama was still President. But I have spent a fair bit of time in Northern Minnesota and it seems like a different vibe. It’s my understanding that the UP has like an Idaho or Oregon thing going on where a lot of the militant reactionaries go there to live out their trad survivalist fantasies of what they’ll do when the colored hordes burst out of the cities and into the countryside after the cities all collapse because of immigrants or welfare or whatever. A hotbed for fash militias. Though, I’m not sure where I learned that, it’s just something I know, so could be bullshit. Also, like, where isn’t a hotbed for fash militias these days?
I dunno, I suppose my impression of the UP was flawed, but I’ve driven over fair swaths of this country and nowhere else have I seen literally dozens of billboards calling Obama a gay Kenyan Muslim terrorist, next to dozens of billboards about how cool Jesus is, next to dozens of billboards about how bad abortion is, with some guns and other chud signifiers thrown into the mix. I’ve seen billboards like that in other places of course, individually, but never in that sheer concentration.
As I said, I just naively extrapolated it as an extension of rural northern Wisconsin, but I could see its isolation leading to it being more easily radicalized and alienated. I am in a weird spot were all of my contacts in the great lakes regions are admittedly not universal, but like my extended family where my grandparents generation are New Deal/Farmer-Labor types and my parents generation are the conservative Trumpers, and that does color some of my analysis. I also moved to the Great Plains in late 2010s and so my views are also colored by experiencing some social conservatism in the Great Lakes region, but then being blown away at having anti-Choice billboards every 5 miles in the Dakotas. Which may have colored my view of the regions.
