I was talking a while back with a retired Oregon State Trooper who had literally had duty trying to guard the federal building in Portland from Antifa and took retirement sooner than planned in disgust. He had originally intended to move to Illinois to look after his parents post-retirement, but instead he moved them down to Knoxville, too. The assortment of bumper stickers on his large pickup truck made clear that he’s not bringing leftist politics with him. Given that his folks were from downstate, I doubt they are either.

That’s not what I had feared. When the Blue State Exodus started, I was afraid that the people coming here would bring bad habits with them, the way the Californians who moved to Colorado or Idaho have done. But those people were fleeing high taxes and congestion, rather than leftist attitudes. The people moving now are more like internal variants on Cuban or Venezuelan immigrants, eager to oppose what they fled their homes to escape.

[Well, so far, anyway. I’m not necessarily sure about the Californians relocating to Austin, but the Californians moving to my part of Central Texas seem similar to what Glenn describes. The latest efforts to impose gender ideology on parents of small children will likely prompt another wave of ‘refugees’ to red states, or at least states with more rational grips on liberty. — Ed]