It’s a Hicklibs World
We’re just living in it
The “hicklib” refers to a person who moves from the sticks to the big city and suddenly adopts cosmopolitan political opinions. A hicklib is someone who virtue-signals the trendiest liberal beliefs to assure their peers that these values are in their DNA. The guy with the Kamala/Walz, BLM, or Antifa t-shirt has anti-racism in his blood. All of this signaling is over-compensation for the profound shame he feels over his family back home in bumfuck Wisconsin, backwoods Arkansas, or The Hills Have Eyes rural Arizona. Whether their father is a corn-eating bootstrap - but ultimately very boring - Reagan Republican with standard Christian values, or a hunchbacked, toothless moonshiner who says nigger and talks about killing faggots, nothing would horrify the hicklib more than being associated with these values.
More often than not with these people, if you meet them in an expensive city like New York, their close relatives are the boring conservative and their extended family includes some uncle Quasimodos with horrifying incorrect language. What you’ll get is someone who wants to deeply identify with and advocate for the inner-city back ghetto-dwelling drug dealer or welfare queen (whose often in the employ of the drug dealer) but vociferously denounce the racist white Trump voter from Gods country.
This over compensation is partially responsible for some of the most insane policies I’ve ever seen in my life, such as bussing illegal immigrants around the country, housing mentally ill drug addicts in Manhattan hotels in some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country, and the worst of all policies: bail reform. While hicklibs are not solely responsible for these ruinous policies, they do a lot of the footwork, community organizing, grandstanding in favor of them as a way to make up for the perceived sins of their relatives. After all, if they didn’t come from a family of hetero-normative patriarchal imperialist fascists, the socio-economic factors that make blacks and immigrants poor criminals would never be in place to begin with.
The hicklibs though, are just the dupes, the foot soldier, the useful idiots in a war against America. Who are they signaling to? Well, you’d think it’s the “marginalized” people they want to enfranchise, but you’d be wrong. It’s other libs. And not just their peers, but those who are above them in the hierarchy of liberal values, the gender fluid woman who always seems to either be a disgusting goblin or an impossibly beautiful Galadriel, who not only always seems to be out ahead of the next new correct opinion on gays and trannies and the new lingo, but also really is from here, who really did grow up in LA or Brooklyn. Who really did grow up rubbing shoulders with inner city blacks and Boomer queers who were there at Stonewall. These are the queens, these are the rulers of the roost, these are the women on the council of wokeness who actually get to hang out with a highly educated black PhD in black liberation gender studies and be very-publicly seen yucking it up with them.
If the hicklib only signals harder, adopts more lingo, and keeps more felons out of prison, maybe everyone will believe that he or she really is from here too, and someday a black anti-racist scholar will say “Yas Queen” or “slay” to her when she exposes someone for letting their inherent colonial mindset slip by lapsing out of their millennial snot and back into the way they used to talk back home.
Listen to this episode with my friend
wherin we go though his essay and talk about the hicklib and the walking failed-abortion offspring they produced: the Yellowstone liberal boomer.
🔥Nice. You nailed the core driver in this type: they are strivers. They are trying to move to higher “cuuulllture”, and want to be accepted in the set. They still are never going to live around poor people or in a real black “commūnity”, but are very eager to befriend the mixed race and international immigrant lib (a parallel type that needs a coining…). This striver dynamic is well elucidated in the book Class by Paul Fussell.
I grew up in Madison Wisconsin and we had the same strivers coming from the sticks to the liberal oasis of Madison and then the Madison strivers do the same to NYC or SF or LA. Then they arrive and find the local cool kids smoking cigs and listening to red scare 😹
This is also why the Hicklibs are so enamored of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton is the Hicklib Apotheosis. Every hicklib dreams of being Wild Bill Clinton or the most Hilldog of Hilldogs. Never mind the obvious signs that Bill Clinton is a bastard child of Rockefeller or that Hilldog's family also has elite ties, that breaks their immersion.