Bikes don’t work well in rural or suburban communities

It can work to an extent in some of those places too, it's just the infrastructure and sprawl has gotten so bad. Small towns in Europe often have quite good cycling infrastructure and public transport, for example.

But I agree with your overall point that the culture and politics of surburban/exurban/rural areas are a big part of it (along with the history that drove people from the cities to these areas in the first place).

Your second and third paragraph neatly provide one of the best explanations I’ve seen for what people mean when we call the modern right wing fascists. They see people violating the order as they’ve decided it is and are encouraged to respond with vehicular homicide

How long did it take for the “everything I don’t like is communist/socialist” crowd to be publicly ridiculed

They must be getting the last laugh because they are still around that's why we [as in US] can't have good health insurance.

Okay I am going to play a devil's advocate here. So of you are not wrong. Many of these people are lashing out at charge unnecessarily, though I do think it is important to look at why. First the politicians and talking head that are driving this are just trying to make hay out of non issues for their own personal agendas. Fuck them they are toxic, but why are there so many common people so willing to buy in. Simply because they are scared of losing their way of life and ability to support themselves. I don't mean losing the "right" to drive giant trucks, but losing what their parents and grandparents had. These people have seen it with the loss of good quality blue collar work. The work their parents and grandparents had, which one person could support a family and buy a house with. They have seen how the loss of manufacturing, steel, lumber, etc. jobs have affected others and they are scared that they are next.

They have the exact same existential dread of the future that the rest of have and or more or less the same reasons, they are just reacting in a different way. Just like how some people react to the loss of a family member with sadness and some with anger.

Hard right politicians have found that they can swing some of these people to their extreme views by capitalizing on this fear and offering a solution. Obviously isolationism and hate are not good longer term solutions, but they sadly do work well in the short term. I firmly believe many people that are just kind of going along with the hard right are only there because see no other solution being offered to their problems. Remember many Germans were not Nazis but they let the Nazis take power not because they agreed with them, but because no one offered anything else. Yes it is a lie but it is very important to remember why the lie exists. Sadly ignoring or dismissing it will not make things better.

I genuinely wish I had a solution, but I don't maybe smarter people than me do.

The “everything I don’t like is communist/socialist” crowd has never been ridiculed, what the hell are you thinking?

It is LITERALLY the American hegemonic ideal.

How long did it take for the "everything I don't like is communist/socialist" crowd to be publicly ridiculed for having such juvenile worldviews?

well, looking at McCarthyism... too long

You’re overthinking this. I mean, you’re right in general, but I have a hard time believing all this is going through their heads when they see a cyclist.

I think it’s just different. Conservatives dn’ t like seeing change or difference. Clearly only cars should be on the road, and everything else is change, different, an affront to the “rules”

Exactly, and it should be noted they also never consider the other reasons to bike. Health and environment are part of why I want my city bikable, but mostly it’s because I enjoy biking more than any other mode of getting around. It makes me happy to be on my bicycle and getting to use it to get groceries turns a chore into a delight. Even if I had a perfectly clean and safe automobile and perfect health I’d still choose to bike to the grocery store when I can because fun.

Yes, a friend clued me in years ago that the key to understanding the conservative mindset is their deep shame and self-hatred. A lot of people say it's fear, but that's only partly true. Everybody is motivated by fear; liberals just fear other things.

But for conservatives, it's fear that they're worthless and inferior. That's why so much of their ideology concerns groups that they denigrate and oppress in order to feel superior. This is why they have bicyclists in their crosshairs recently.

And not just bicyclists. It's not enough just to have a car. Oh no! They have to have a truck. And not just a truck, but a grotesquely enormous truck, with a grill that juts 6 feet straight into the air, perhaps with a lift kit, too. That way, they can roll coal on and intimidate drivers of smaller, weaker vehicles, like Prius drivers.

It's a performative doubling-down on the behavior that they subconsciously feel others are judging them for, in order to redirect the shame and self-hatred outward as anger at others.

The same argument is used to attack veganism, even though the diet aspect of it is cheaper (as long as most meat imitations are avoided, although those will get cheap too in the long run).

Making it seem like it's predominately something done by middle-class men, or even rich people, helps to undermine public support for it because of the image people have of a stereotypical male cyclist, ie a well-off person riding a $1400 bike with a bunch of lycra clothes and tech gear pretending they're training for the Tour de France while they go through their midlife crisis. It's much less relatable an image for many people, who might say "Well, why do they need to ride on all the roads? They can just go on the paths in the park, or if they have so much money, they can go to a purpose-built facility."

If you frame it as though it's just going to benefit a bunch of people perceived to be living it up, you can drum up opposition from poor people, who don't want their taxes going to fund some BS project that only benefits people who are already doing alright. Your aunt that's busting her back trying to make ends meet and is trying to get back and forth to work and the shops on a bike one step up from a Wal-mart special can be much more relatable for many people who are struggling to keep up, can't really afford their car payment and might even use a bike if there were dedicated bike lanes. So people looking to discourage building out bike infrastructure will naturally prefer that everyone thinks the only ones who would benefit from these developments would be some middle-manager who owns his home, rides a bike that costs more than your rent and that has gone on more vacations in the last year than you have in the last two decades.