Most Red states have become oligarchic white supremacist medieval-like fiefdoms with obscene levels of often multigenerational wealth at the top, extreme poverty at the bottom, and working people, women, and minorities kept in subordinate roles through explicit government and corporate policy.
Fewer than 2000 families — six-tenths of one percent of the Southern population — owned more than 50 enslaved people and ruled the oligarchy that we call the Confederacy with an iron fist. The 75 percent of white people in the South during that era who did not own any enslaved persons generally lived in deep poverty.
Women had no rights, queer people were routinely tortured and murdered, education for both enslaved Africans and poor whites was generally outlawed, religious attendance was often mandated, and hunger and disease stalked all but those in the families of the two thousand morbidly rich planter dynasties.
Modern-day Red states are doing their best to recreate that old Confederacy, right down to state Senator Kathy Chism’s new effort to return the Confederate battle flag to Mississippi’s state flag. Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence have both emphasized their presidential pledges to restore the names of murderous Civil War traitors to American military bases, celebrating their armed defense of the “values” of the Old South.
As the Associated Press summarized in an article titled AP FACT CHECK: Blue high-tax states fund red low-tax states:
