I can only speak for myself but I'll never live in a red state again. Not even Texas, it's not worth it. Even where I grew up (the purple midwest) is too socially conservative for me after living in California.
It's like how for most of my life I barely understood the mitigating measures women take in many situations where I don't even notice the situation.
And another was in sales in industrial manufacturing and there was a lot of misogyny and low-grade racism there.
They're in WA now so and much happier.
¹ the "isn't happening to me" thing is sort of analogous to "works on my machine". Because of the range of stuff, things usually do "work on my machine".
It's fine to prefer living in one culture over another, which is exactly what both your friend and the people they complained about are doing.
And to be clear, I did not mean illegal immigration. I meant legal immigration.
Many immigrants are even more religious and/or convervative than "White and American".
Just of a different culture.
I was born in the US but my ethnicity is visually ambiguous and people assume I'm Mexican, Filipino, or Indian (in that order) based on the type of brown person they grew up with. In CA, no one particularly cares what type of brown person I am. But when I lived in Ohio, I was told that I should "go back home where [I] came from", that I'm one of the good ones and should bring more of my family over, or that I'm "stealing jobs from honest Americans," based on whether the redneck in question thought I was Mexican, Filipino, or Indian. My cousin and his wife, in Indiana, used to experience the same harassment regularly until they started wearing their scrubs everywhere so people would know that they're doctors.
I turned down a very well-paying job in Ohio (and came back to CA) because the people there were so vile.
This was on top of another layer of class conflict between the middle class teachers/administration and lower class/trailer park kids, who mostly dropped out at 16 which was fine with the admin. Lots of additional pressure on other students who didn't conform for various race/gender/etc. reasons. And then completely bizarre stuff like, though the official reason for not having a soccer team was that it would detract from the sacrosanct football program, many of the teachers were clear that believed soccer to be a Communist sport (this was in the 90s when the cold war was long over).
Many of the perpetrators here are very nice people and fine neighbors, but if you aren't an evangelical Christian it can be a challenge. Especially if you're not white: the KKK is still a well known presence just down the road in Harrison, AR, so it's not just woke fearmongering.
It's one thing to live in these environments as an adult and be able to blow a lot of it off, but it's another thing completely to have kids there, which really detracts from the 'leave California to raise kids' motivation.
And it would be better at a larger city like St. Louis or Indianapolis but some fraction of the population of those places are from towns like mine and don't find these beliefs and practices to be particularly problematic.
Intolerable is an ironic word because my personal choices cut right to the paradox of tolerance.
Things have a way of flipping during times of significance. California's entertainment industry was formed by a bunch of young, driven people who wanted to escape paying IP royalties to the Edison company. Now, they're doing everything in their legal power to pursue their own IP infringement cases, taking on the form and function of their reason for leaving NY in the first place.
That NIMBY thing has been boiling over for decades now. There will be new stakeholders in that battle attaching themselves to conservative and far-right movements. Get ready!