It's the one-two punch of poor education and the propaganda of our media environment.

"Home delivered freshly made"

"Directly from the producer"

The jokes on that one just write themselves.

Did he leave a phone number or Etsy link? The lawn sign guy...

Their racism is ancillary and it’s not that simple. MAGA exploits several rotten elements in rural American society; racism is just one of them

I think the simplest explanation is that they have been conditioned to hate and fear first and do not consider any person innately equal until that person has proven themselves to be worthy of value. To enter the American south, you walk into a minefield of social faux pas and a mire of shibboleths. You fucked up just by driving in with “Yankee” license plates. Hell, you can fuck up by having the wrong county on your plates (which is a thing in the south). For a group of people who hate anything “woke” or involving critical theory, they are a textbook example of intersectionality; their identity is complex and why they don’t like you is even more complicated.

They have been conditioned to distrust anything they don’t immediately understand, dwell peacefully in contradiction, be selectively empathic, and ignore their own self-interests whenever it does not exclusively benefit them. This is the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” and “my true reward awaits in heaven” crowd. You can’t reason with them because they answer to a higher power and it’s all part of god’s plan. And if you make the mistake of quoting scripture at them, they write you off as a know-it-all who has read the Bible but hasn’t read it with your heart.

They are generationally impoverished, both financially and intellectually. The south suffers from massive brain drain and financially successful people are just those that God has blessed. There’s no charity for those outside of their immediate social circle. There’s no such thing as southern hospitality, just public manners. Bless your heart, they’re talking shit before you walk out the door.

Southern society craves authoritarianism and aristocracy because blind respect for authority and power are deeply rooted in their culture and religion (and that’s exactly what the antebellum south was; that’s their “heritage”). Trump promises to make it all great and lift them back into their rightful place because they all think they will be the plantation master.

Hammer a sign that says thatninto the ground next to it. Or, maybe write that on it with a sharpie?

That ^

and

Sunk cost: They've invested 40-60 years of their life programming their worldview with the propaganda.

Scapegoating: It's not them and their bad choices, it's the immigrants/democrats/poor siphoning off their resources

The state runs the media. The media informs the masses which people are the enemy/stupid, the masses join together to feel good that they're not stupid. They put more money into campaign funds to buy signs from the government that's holding them down, all while feeling self-righteous.