Sarcastic 'best'?

The 'locals' are extremely unfriendly, actively try to sabotage new businesses, bring in foreign workers and lock them into work/living arrangements to take advantage of them, heck (attempt to) take advantage of all workers, etc...

But they claim to not be whatever 'ism' isn't politically popular.

I feel like the parent wasn't referring to specifically your situation, but rather centre-left people rather than very-left people

Ah. Fair enough. These people are more along the lines of: "I'm not racist, I have black employees". "I'm not a homophobe, we have a rainbow sidewalk". Meanwhile they exploit and are shitty to everyone not in their group. And all the "locals" are conveniently white while the visible minority transplants never have "local" status.

People in that position tend to try and protect that position through whatever means are available to them, and it wouldn't surprise me that there would be a racial disparity intentional or not. The more isolated and historically homogeneous you get, the more this probably occurs. You probably don't get too many racist people growing up in more heterogeneous communities. I get creepy vibes from most smaller towns anyway, and this is just another facet of that I'd imagine.

How on earth anyone would consider 'Woke' or even trying to be such to be a positive attribute in 2021 is shocking to me. Wokism and Trumpism are both ridiculous cults, where members refuse to concede basic realities in favour of some giant utopian delusion of an ideal.

They're giant diversions I think that distort our ability to just see things for what they are.

It's pretty interesting how people can be many things at the same time, so these kinds of triggering labels - and the narratives that support them in the press don't help one bit.

The recent articles by various media outlets outlining the results of the Virginia election were about 80% playing into narratives of 'each side' further ignoring the 20% of simple truths that I think were the real underlying issues. Those 'truths' just don't line up nicely with the narratives.

This problem has metastasized in the US (and rolled over into Canada) in the last 5 years, which is why 0 'aspirational locations' from the US are on my list, at least for another 5 years as things hopefully calm down.