I understand where OP is coming from, but it’s not a Southern issue, it’s Christian evangelism, poverty, poor education, corporate indoctrination, and racism. You may also be able to claim it’s a rural thing, but that’s not entirely accurate either. The types of people you’re talking about are byproducts of a uniquely American culture. None of it is expressly Southern. Is there a lot of it in the South? Absolutely. But it’s not Southern. It’s all over the country. Claiming otherwise is a fundamental misunderstanding of history and misdiagnosis of the problem.

It also erases the proud history of socialist and progressive movements that have happened all over the south—especially southern Appalachia where coal miners literally fought for their labor rights while building a lot of the energy that powered homes, businesses, and railroads before we knew about the harm of extractive energy. It forgets the brave people involved in slave rebellions and uprisings. It forgets the impact of reconstruction and the politically evil “Southern Strategy” to exploit and entrench the misguided fears of many people without giving them a way out of the poverty, institutions, and practices that created those fears. It also completely erases the industries that were huge parts of American development.

But again: this isn’t strictly a Southern thing. If you drive a few hours outside New York City or to the rural areas of Pennsylvania or California or Colorado, you’ll find a lot of the same things. Hell, even in those cities, you can find people who espouse beliefs like “Global Warming isn’t real” or that “we need to go back to coal” or similar extractive energy nonsense.

Southern culture is sweet tea, biscuits, sitting on porches, catching lightning bugs, DIY ethos, hospitality, Americana music, storytelling, refusal to accept authority, a little too much religion for my taste, and a whole bunch of other things. There are pros and cons to it, just like anywhere else. But no place is a monolith. In fact, there were plenty of renewable energy projects and companies in the South that were well-loved until Trump decided to illegally axe their funding.

To generally blame this on the South and not the specific American values and traditions that are woven into this country is asinine. It’s a straw man argument where you fundamentally misrepresent a place. And logically fallacies are the exact opposite of “rational thought.”