I know your story is fiction and satire. It's highly amusing.

However, I lived in Missouri from the August of 1990 until February of 2007. Even that long ago, the state was barreling toward theocratic authoritarianism. How far down that road it had gone by 2007 is a big part of why we left.

Misery was where people made friends with me at work in Jefferson City. Then, they found out my husband is Middle Eastern and suddenly they didn't know me. It's where my husband, who speaks six languages and got a degree in computer hardware technology could not find a job outside the service sector.

It was in Misery where someone walked into our crowded café – in liberal college-town Columbia – in the days following 9/11, strode up to the counter, looked my husband in the face and said, "I won't do business with you people after what you did to the Towers." Then spat on the counter and left.

It's where, for months afterward, people repeatedly pissed on both front and back doors. There was even someone who would push the dumpster across our door in the alley for most of the following year until the city chained to a steel post installed for the purpose.

It's where our house was TPd with hateful messages.

The straw that broke the camel's back: It was in Misery where my then two-year old – who was literally "The Most Beautiful" in the Midwest children's pageant – drew the ire of two mothers lamenting that their children couldn't play in the public mall play place without have to do so around little "sand n**gers." And, that too was in liberal Columbia! That was in the autumn of 2006!

Misery is one of those states where people who wanted to get away from "the other" went to build their Christian-ish white identity enclaves. Misery's political scene skewed so far right because much of the population of state was already far down the MAGA road long before Tangerine Caligula gave them a name and handed them a bullhorn.