Ask Lemmy

Like someone else said, the stuff made to make someone look militaristic, or more like a strong/scary dude, at least in their eyes.

Gun rights themed stickers on their phone, thin blue line patches or hats, way too much camo, having a massive, overly expensive truck with blacked out windows, and honestly at least in my community, just having anything with an American flag prominently visible on it tends to mean you're a person that's... not that nice to be around. Also sometimes common with people that've got way too much Christianity themed items, though that's more of a higher likelihood than a strong certainty.

To give you some examples of what people with any of that have said/displayed to me:

• "I want to be a prison guard so I can boss around the inmates and make them clean the floors while I watch. I might get to taze them too!"
• "I wish those people (homeless woman and her children) outside would stop begging and get a job, I don't like being asked for money..."
• Deliberately misgendering my coworkers (after being directly verbally corrected by them)
• Preaching so much to me and my coworkers (about specifically hyper-conservative christian values. She goes to a church where women aren't allowed to be pastors or preach at all) that one of my Christian coworkers who had a cross necklace had to hide it because the woman got so excited from seeing it on him that her nonstop preaching made him have a panic attack
• A cop telling me I'm doing my job wrong, after I showed him the state law saying I was allowed to do that (he proceeded to do nothing about what he was called there for, and leave after chatting with the security guard for 10 minutes, on the clock)
• Sexually assaulted one of my coworkers

I've never had any experiences even remotely close to that from people who just... didn't feel the need to compensate for their masculinity with guns and big trucks, or justify their actions with Jesus and "patriotism." Sure there's always some general rudeness or people just being ignorant or inconsiderate, but nothing on that scale.