Throughout the American South, there are lots of "nice" conservatives. They'll invite you to church and be friendly towards you and maybe invite you over for dinner...and then talk about how "those people" – a group that includes you – are "destroying America" and shouldn't be here.
The problem is "nice". "Nice" is very different from kind, caring, or even empathetic.
I will say that in the Trump era, a lot of these folks no longer feel like they "have to" be "nice", and so increasingly they're just not anymore. It means that the area is more openly mean, but it's because there's no longer the fake veneer of "nice" to hide how cruel they really are.