I Am the Outmigration

"The data keep reinforcing the patterns."

On January 5 this year, the Boston Globe ran a piece titled “Bye-bye, Bay State.” The opening paragraphs of this item by Jeff Jacoby cited the data, which unambiguously supported the subhead: “Year in, year out, tens of thousands of Massachusetts residents leave for good, and their numbers aren’t replenished by newcomers from other states.”

Jacoby had a third party elucidate the reasons.

Economist Mark Perry, who analyzes national domestic migration patterns, shows that on a range of economic and political measures, the Top 10 “inbound” states (currently Florida, Texas, Arizona, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada) differ significantly from the Top 10 “outbound” states (California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Louisiana, Maryland, Hawaii, Minnesota, and Michigan). By and large, inbound states have lower taxes, Republican governments, cheaper energy, greater fiscal stability, and a more pro-business environment. Outbound states are more likely to lean the other way….

Admittedly, these are only broad patterns…. But the data keep reinforcing the patterns. [Perry writes that] “The evidence suggests that Americans are moving from blue states that are more economically stagnant . . . to fiscally sound red states that are more economically vibrant.”

At the time of its publication, we had been looking at new places to land casually for a year, and seriously since a few weeks before, when the administration of Boston mayor Michelle Wu announced that it was going to force restaurants to check Covid vaccination status for admission to indoor dining. When I wrote about it for The Federalist in February, we were ready to make an offer. A week later, moderators at Nextdoor censored my article and refused to acknowledge messages asking why.

That in itself would have been an inadequate reason to leave town after a decade and a half. But it crystallized an impression that something about Boston had changed. When I arrived in the Aughts it was a vibrant, creative place where geniuses were working on interesting problems. By February 2022, the city had shut my gym down, twice, locked the gates to the tennis courts in our local park, ordered people to mask outdoors, closed the schools, and shrugged at the vandalism of the monuments to Abigail Adams and the 54th Regiment.

The geniuses decided that following the science meant following it into a ditch.

Masking, long known to be useless against respiratory infections outside of hospital settings, was ubiquitous. It was still required at the grocery store. One gallery demanded proof of administration of “one of the FDA-approved Covid vaccines” for admission, at a time when none of the available vaccines had FDA approval, only emergency use authorization.

Boston University had created a sinecure for a midwit millionaire with fascist tendencies to fight racial discrimination with racial discrimination. The Biden administration had appointed the city’s Soros-backed DA, whose office had a policy of not prosecuting larceny and who had threatened reporters, as U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

Anti-Semitic incidents had been proliferating all over eastern Massachusetts. A rabbi had been stabbed eight times.

Boston’s county of Suffolk had been found a few years prior to be the most politically intolerant county in the country.

My sweetheart was made a remote worker, then her employer stopped leasing the office to which she used to commute. I lost my studio and students. We had conversations about whether the increasing risks of living in Boston, as libertarians and Jews, were worth the diminishing rewards. As much as we adored our immediate neighbors, everything else about the city was trending downwards. And finally the mayor’s office conscripted the restaurants as her personal health police.

In March, we were ensconced in our new home in New Hampshire. In April the kitchen still wasn’t sufficiently unpacked to arrange a seder. Instead we privately celebrated our personal exodus from Boston, which for all its charms had become a land of Pharaoh.

In June we attended PorcFest, a libertarian festival produced annually by the Free State Project, only a couple of hours from our house. One highlight of many at this individually and intellectually diverse gathering was fellowship with a contingent of libertarian Jews, with whom we celebrated a Shabbat service graced with a professional cantorial soloist, followed by traditional Israeli dancing.

The leader of the dancing was the beautiful Jody Underwood, with whom I had a great conversation about how Jews, of all people, should have resisted the Biden Covidiocracy harder than anyone. Did they not know that the Nazi persecution of the Jews had a medical rationale? That synagogues were blown up for spurious reasons of hygiene? That the National Socialist administration had, like the Michelle Wu administration, forced private businesses to carry out their authoritarian edicts? I purchased a copy of a book by Jody’s husband, Ian Underwood, XIV: How the Fourteenth Amendment Ate the First Ten. I hadn’t felt that kind of camaraderie in many years.

Shortly after our return from PorcFest we received an urgent message from a friend we made there. He had recently moved to the area to take a residential position at a boarding school for at-risk youth. Everything had been going fine until he was subjected to the mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training. When the trainer characterized America as a culture of white supremacy, he defended it as a culture of freedom. When she demanded that he reckon with his white privilege, he pointed out that she was making three times as much money as him. Two days later they found a pretext to fire him, making him jobless and homeless all at once. Did we have a place for him to crash? We put him up for several days. He is now working for a local gun manufacturer.

Later that July, my family and several friends sent an item from the New York Times, gleefully picked up by the Boston Globe, “One Small Step for Democracy in a ‘Live Free or Die’ Town: A cautionary tale from Croydon, N.H., where one man tried to foist a change so drastic it jolted a community out of political indifference.”

That man was Ian Underwood. The drastic change was reducing the local school budget. The article was careful to frame Ian as a crank and enemy of democracy. It ran this photograph of Jody.

Photograph courtesy of the jackals at the New York Times. Used without permission, go pound your heads on a thumbtack.

Have you known the Times of recent years ever to have endorsed American patriotism or Christian faith? Nevertheless, here they are depicting the melancholy light of dusk waning on the Church and Old Glory as if either meant something to them. Standing in the foreground is Jody caught with an unflattering expression in a photograph chosen out of many to make clear who the reporter thinks are the bad guys. Democracy was not under attack when Biden issued an executive order to force mRNA injections into 200 million Americans on pain of losing their jobs. It was under attack when a board voted to cut the Croydon, NH school budget.

Five days later the author of that article ran a follow-up, “What Is the Free State Project?” It found a professor at New England College in Henniker, NH who opined that…

…the Free State Project — which, like New Hampshire, is overwhelmingly white — “appeals to disaffected white folks who may not want to deal with the complexities of race relations.”

He emphasized that he saw no links whatsoever to white supremacist ideology. Rather, there is “a pining for a time when life was much simpler,” he said. “A time when people were left alone.”

It re-ran the photo of Jody.

It also characterized our conception of liberty as “emphasizing individual rights over the common good.” That gave the progressive game away at the Times. Individual rights serve the common good, as was known to Adam Smith. Erik W. Matson, commenting thoughtfully upon Smith, asks,

A desire to further the good of our country, of humankind, is laudable. But do we have the knowledge to benefit humankind by departing from the liberal plan of allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way?

Events of the last two years answer the question in the negative. The common good is flourishing as befits every individual. It can only be accomplished by the humility of, or failing that, restraint upon the sovereign. The common good is not the sovereign shutting down an outdoor tennis court to fight the spread of Covid. It is not the sovereign demanding ever more money for a public education system that cannot, as Ian points out, show any educational gains for the greater expenditure. It is not the sovereign thinking that leaving people alone and their dealing with “the complexities of race relations” are incompatible. (You know who really does “not want to deal with the complexities of race relations”? That aforementioned midwit at Boston University and his acolyte at the boarding school that fired our friend.) It is not the sovereign requiring her citizens to produce health passports for permission to eat at a local restaurant. What American sovereigns for the last two years have called selfishness is in fact the public good, and what they have called the public good is in fact selfishness.

If my idea of the public good is your idea of selfishness and vice-versa, then we are implicitly living in different countries and we should consider making that explicit. I designed the logo for the newly formed New Hampshire Independence PAC, which advocates for peaceful secession. I have been following recent exhortations to a National Divorce with skeptical interest. I have been encouraging anyone inclined to leave Massachusetts to do so as soon as they can, or at least get out of Boston. The country looks ready to rot from the blue cities outward. The blue cities are where much of the art gets made, but I have to find another way, and it may turn out that so does everyone else.

So yes, “lower taxes, Republican governments, cheaper energy, greater fiscal stability, and a more pro-business environment.” But all that is nothing compared to the knowledge of how profoundly the progressive regime hates us and endangers us and wants our compliance.

The Times framed Ian’s effort, not unfairly, as an overreach that sparked a backlash on the part of the Democrats, and an object lesson to the progressives of what could happen if they don’t get involved politically. But what Ian did was nothing compared to the backlash motivated by progressive overreach of the last two years, during which time its agents harmed hundreds of thousands and threatened hundreds of millions. Here in New Hampshire I am privy to conversations that most Bostonians would find horrifying, but to me sound like sensible preparations for the future that progressives will get in reality as they scheme for something more idyllic, at least for them.

Should that future come to pass, we, the outmigration, will be among the first to know. Readers of the Globe and the Times will be the last.