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.
Your heart is in the right place, I think, but FOIA is useless here. FOIA is cool if you want to know what an agency has on file about you (which is usually nothing) or learning the “truth” about JFK, EBEs, and UAPs.
Sarcasm aside, the most important thing to note about FOIA is that agencies handle their own FOIA requests; each agency has a staff (sometimes even a staff of one) for processing FOIA requests. FOIA is also a “devil’s in the details” type of law: you won’t have much luck with vague, open-ended, or ambiguously scoped requests.
Some information and data are exempt FOIA requests, including information about law enforcement activities or investigations, the personnel files or personal details of staff, and anything considered relevant to “national security.”
Even if the information requested is cleared for release, agencies know how to stall. FOIA requests are legally required to be responded to in 20 days or less… unless “the information needs to be closely reviewed and redacted before release,” “we’ve received too many requests for the same information to answer them in a timely manner,” or “our staff are experiencing difficulty locating the specific files that would satisfy the request.” Flooding an agency with FOIA requests for the same document or topic typically makes things worse until the amount requests becomes so high that that agency just dumps them online somewhere.
The last thing I’ll say is that a lot of FOIA requests only get satisfied after a lawsuit.