Welcome to the Free State of Florida: Americans are Moving South

 In the movie Doctor Zhivago, Yuri Zhivago and his beleaguered family hunker down in post-revolutionary Moscow, hoping to survive the winter.

Yevgraf, Yuri's half-brother, appears unexpectedly and urges Yuri to take his family and leave Moscow. If you stay in the city, Yevgrav warns, "you won't survive the winter."

Urban Americans, particularly those residing in Blue-State cities, are heading south. Unlike Doctor Zhivago's family, they are not fleeing starvation. Nevertheless, they have urgent reasons for leaving.

Urban crime, high taxes, poor schools, and corrupt municipal politicians are driving northern city dwellers to relocate to the south, where the weather is more pleasant and life is more serene.

I drove to St. Augustine, Florida, last week, the oldest town in the United States. As I crossed the state border east of Pensacola, I saw a sign that read, "Welcome to the Free State of Florida."

Over the next few days, I heard several stories about people who left northern cities for Florida. I got tired of shoveling snow, one New Yorker explained. A Chicago woman said her family moved to Florida to escape crime. Chicagoans had taken to coasting through stop signs, she confided,  to avoid being carjacked. 

Another family sold their multi-million-dollar Chicago home to settle in Wisconsin. Crime, outrageous property taxes, and a poor environment for raising children were some of the reasons for abandoning the Windy City. 

Die-hard urban dwellers say the crime problem is exaggerated. More than three million people ride the New York subways every day, they point out, so they must feel safe.  Yet a homeless woman was set afire while sleeping on a subway train last year, and a man was arrested a few months ago for sexually molesting a corpse on the R train in Manhattan.

How many instances of urban mayhem and murder does it take before people ask themselves whether there is a better place to live?

Millions of Americans are saying, "Enough is enough." New York, Illinois, and helter-skelter California are losing population as working families move to saner environments. Texas and Florida have been the largest beneficiaries, but other Southern states, such as North Carolina and Georgia, are also attracting people.

In the years to come, this mass migration of working families is expected to accelerate, and the cultural divide between Red states and Blue states will become more pronounced. For now, the Blue State politicians are taking a pugnacious stance. New York Governor Kathy Hochul went so far as to cheer her state's outflow of disaffected New Yorkers. "Get out of town," she jeered.

The day is coming, however, when even the Blue States' clueless politicians will want working Americans to return, along with their "youthful energy." After all, a society made up of shoplifters, homeless people, and wealthy progressives is not a happy place to be.

Moving the Nation's Capital Out of the District of Columbia. An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

People's Republic, Kurt Schlichter's post-apocalyptic novel, posits a breakdown of the American Republic as the Blue States collapse under the weight of woke politics and break off into a separate country.

 Schlichter labels the new nation-state the People's Republic of North America, which he envisions as being georaphically divided. The western segment is comprised of California, Oregon, and Washington. The eastern portion encompasses the East Coast states stretching from Maine to northern Virginia and the Rust Belt states of the upper Midwest.

Sandwiched between these breakaway regions, the old United States of America is now reduced to the Southern states, the Plains states, and the Rocky Mountains West. The new capital city is Dallas.

I thought about Schlichter's novel as I pondered President Trump's proposal to close the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and move the agents out into the real world, where they could revive the FBI's original mission of arresting the bad guys.

Why the hell not? It makes sense to separate our nation's premier law enforcement agency from the bureaucratic morass in the District of Columbia, where the FBI morphed itself from a crime-fighting agency into stormtroopers for the Democratic Party.

Nevertheless, the FBI will need a new headquarters. I suggest Dallas as the location of the new FBI central office. 

Dallas is a sober, common-sense city where citizens are discouraged from defecating on the sidewalks. Unlike Minneapolis, where disgruntled dwellers are free to burn the town down, or Los Angeles, where shoplifting has become a competitive sport with varsity and JV divisions, most Dallasites obey the law. Doesn't it make sense for the FBI headquarters to be in a law-abiding town?

Indeed, Trump should pursue a broader vision than simply relocating the FBI. Why not move the entire capital from the District of Columbia to a new location as yet unsullied by corruption, incompetence, and venality? 

Let's move all the federal bureaucrats to a new capital in Dallas, Omaha, Pocatello, Bakersfield, or perhaps Fargo, North Dakota. 

Such a move would force our bigoted and provincial coastal elites to stop referring to America's Heartland as Flyover Country. More importantly, it would give the denizens of the Deep State an opportunity to fumigate the pesthole on the Potomac where our nation's capital now resides.

Three women were stabbed in New York subways over the weekend: Flyover Country looks better and better

 Three women were stabbed in the New York subways over the weekend. All three were relatively young. A 19-year-old woman with stabbed in the leg while going up a stairway. A few moments later, the same assailant stabbed a 48-year-old woman on a subway platform. Shortly after that attack, he stabbed a 28-year-old woman on a subway train bound for Brooklyn.

These events were the latest in a string of subway assaults in New York City. Generally, the attacker is not apprehended. Twice in recent weeks, a subway passenger stepped in to neutralize an attacker and killed him. In both instances, the rescuer was charged with manslaughter.

Why would anyone live in New York City? Economic opportunity? Yes, salaries are higher in New York City than in other parts of the country. But the cost of living is also higher, much higher. A person living in Baton Rouge and making $50,000 a year would need to make $117,000 in New York City just to maintain the same standard of living.

New York is an excellent city for millionaires, and New York has more millionaires than any other American city. However, even millionaires are fleeing the Big Apple.  Twelve percent of them moved elsewhere in the first half of 2022.

Of course, New York has more cultural attractions than any other American locale. Do you want to attend the opera, take in a Broadway play, or look at abstract art? You’ll find more of that stuff in New York than in Omaha, Tulsa, or Chattanooga.

Personally, I hate opera, and I detest abstract art. I'm a fan of Western American art, which I can see at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth or the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. More art museums appeal to my taste in Taos, NM than in Manhattan. And remember the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and it's easy to find a parking space.

Fine cuisine? Yes, New York has more five-star restaurants than any other American town. But you can't beat Praise Dah Lard in Woodville, Mississippi, for fresh cracklins. The world's best chicken fried steak can be found at the Hitching Post restaurant in Ozona, Texas, not Gallaghers in Manhattan, and you don't need reservations.

I love America’s cities. I spent some of the happiest years of my life in Houston, the nation's most culturally diverse city. Unfortunately, however, the nation’s metropolises are in decline. New Orleans is now America's murder capital. Homelessness, rampant shoplifting, and empty office towers have laid San Francisco low, and people are leaving Chicago and New York by the thousands.

Americans are fleeing the cities, and they are smart to do so. Of course, the folks living in Flyover Country don't have a view of the Manhattan skyline. Nevertheless, I can personally attest that the skyscrapers of New York are no more beautiful than a view of the bloodred sun going down over Lake Mary, Mississippi.

Things fall apart: American civilization is collapsing and it's time to start paying attention

“Things fall apart," William Butler Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming," perhaps his most famous poem."The center cannot hold.”

Like many prophecies, Yeats's prediction took a long time to be realized. Now, a little more than a century after Yeats penned those words, his prophecy is finally coming true.

America, the greatest civilization in the history of mankind, is falling apart. The nation that sent 9 million men to Europe and the South Pacific during World War II and sacrificed 300,000 is crumbling. The country that accepted to its bosom the refugees from the Irish potato famine and found homes for the Vietnamese who fled the war in Southeast Asia is about to collapse.

Who would’ve thought that the United States, which conquered the Nazis in World War II, would sneak out of Afghanistan in the dead of night without bothering to tell its allies? Who would’ve thought that a nation dedicated to law and justice would allow criminals, terrorists, human traffickers, and fentanyl to flow across our southern border unmolested?

Our cities have become playgrounds for crime. Citizens who defend themselves against robbers and murderers get arrested while thugs with long criminal records roam the streets. The flagship retail stores of San Francisco are closing because shoplifting has become so rampant that a business cannot survive in one of America's greatest and most beautiful cities.

College presidents once boasted that American higher education is the envy of the world. Young people from across the globe came to the United States to study at our elite universities. Now our colleges have become insane asylums where students and professors spew racist nonsense, and greet reasoned dialogue with catcalls and profanity.

Our secondary schools have forgotten how to teach students to read, write, master grammar, and behave in a civil manner. Suppose young people who graduate from our derelict high schools wish to attend college. In that case, they must borrow extravagant amounts of money to study at institutions where the professors know nothing and have nothing to say.

In our elementary schools, so-called education experts believe it is beneficial to introduce small children to sexual perversion. Parents, who only want the best for their children, are denounced by the teacher's unions as terrorists.

A dysfunctional civilization can last a long time but cannot last forever. A nation that renounces its duty to maintain a safe and orderly society will eventually fall apart.

Like jackals stalking a wounded wildebeest, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran wait to feast on the carrion of a rotting America.

The economy is on the verge of collapse in flyover country, where ordinary Americans strive to live decently and raise their families. If you drive through the rural heartland, the small towns look like the villages of East Africa.

Virtually every American politician is a corporate lackey. Our president is noncompos mentis--the whole world knows that. No one thinks our vice president is capable of assuming presidential duties.

Meanwhile, the financial titans on Wall Street, the media elites, and the grifters who run our universities are getting rich and gloating over their pension plans and their hedge fund profits.

The ultra-wealthy don’t care about what happens to their less fortunate fellow Americans. They abandoned their civic commitments when they banked their first million dollars. They’ve placed their riches in gold and other safe assets. Many have at least one elegant bug-out shelter, perhaps in Costa Rica or Montana.

Armed guards protect the super-rich in their private fortresses. The scamps who accumulated obscene wealth will sip fine California wine and sigh sympathetically about the people on Social Security who starve to death after the economy craters, which it soon will.

But perhaps no one will escape the apocalypse. Marie Antoinette believed she was secure at Versailles and then lost her head. The czar thought his family was well protected by an elite corps of soldiers who had sworn to protect his wife and children. And then the Bolsheviks showed up, and we know what happened.

Watch for the deluge, for the center cannot hold.

Be grateful if you live in a temperate climate where you can grow a vegetable garden both summer and winter. Be grateful if you have basic survival skills. Be thankful if you live near water.

Cling to your family if you have a family. When the apocalypse comes, all you will have are your personal resources and your loved ones.