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I moved from California to Texas but only stayed 4 months. Texas isn't much cheaper, and everyone was politics-obsessed.
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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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YEP. My experience having grown up here was that Texas was cheap and pretty laid-back politically. Then something changed and the state shifted into being expensive and politically obsessed.
Edit: that's what I used to like about Texas: everyone minded their own business. They wanted the government to fuck off and let them do whatever. Now there are a lot of people who want to know what's in your child's pants.
The Republicans went from christo-conservative to christo-facist. Like an American Taliban.
When did this change happen?
The last gasp of the 'mind your own business' conservatives in Texas was either the 2016 election or the one after that. There was a period of time where you had the Lt Governor trying to pass culture war bills (like anti-trans bathroom bills) in the senate and then they would die in the house when the speaker wouldn't put them up for a vote due to it being bad for attracting businesses. Once the MAGA Republicans got voted in, it's been full steam ahead for them.
It's not like things were great before then, but it wasn't this race to the bottom like it is now.
It really got rolling when Bush Jr got elected governor. It had been festering for a while.
The southern strategy merged with big oil money, and utilized the conservative Baptist churches to try to shame people into getting on board.
That's when it started, but for a long time everyone was still in that "fuck off, I'll live my life and you live yours" after that. I remember being taught if you don't like what someone is doing and it doesn't affect anyone except the person who is doing it, you don't have to watch them do it. I think the exact phrase was more succinct. That was in the 80s and 90s.
Even when I left the state and came back in the mid to late 00s it was a lot of "mind your own fucking business" as individuals. No one really started saying shit out loud until the mid 2010s that I remember, but suddenly it was everywhere.
Now we still have shit turnout but a lot of really loud morons who were telling everyone to mind their own fucking business 2 decades ago now yelling about trans women and abortion.
I guess it depends on exactly what part. I remember Longview being run by their kind of culty church, but I grew up not far from there and was taught just not to fuck with others for how they live their life.
On the other hand, looking back I realize I also knew a bunch of proto-SovCits and absolute nutjobs growing up so I might have missed shit and gotten lucky with the people who were actually the ones teaching me. Not just my parents, but grandparents and friend's parents as well. They all wanted to be left alone and to leave others alone. The nutjobs just happened to be nearby and I was just told not to listen to their nonsense.
Anecdotally, there was this old guy named Wizard who used to be into all the crystal clutching bullshit and had somehow reconciled it with his Jesus bullshit. I remember my grandfather telling me that he was insane but not hurting anyone so just leave him be.
Sometime around 2015~2016. Mighta been a few years earlier. I think everyone really started losing their shit after Obergefell vs Hodges. It seemed like people had a "you do you" mindset, but after that case everyone lost their minds and went rabid.
Some people older than me probably have saw it sooner but I’d say definitely when Rick Perry took over in 2000, but it probably started with GWB in 1995. Don’t forget Texas ised to have a democratic governor in the early 90s
DOOM!
Exactly the trajectory Florida is on. I grew up here, we had low wages, cheap housing, very cheap groceries, ugly sprawl, beautiful beaches, so many queer people, circus folk, immigrants from everywhere and environmentalists. Rednecks in the country but cities so blue. So far south we were not the South.
It shifted right some over the years but COVID-19 brought all these racist northerners to our cities, with a lot of money, now we have cost of living average for anywhere but wages still lower than all those anywhere places. Cities still diverse but state politics ridiculous and very Southern.