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All last week, something seemed…off. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something wasn’t right. Like there was a void.

Then it hit me!

As Texas Republicans were slaughtering each other in the statehouse, “red state Twitter” had gone silent! You know, those rightists who arrogantly boast, “Gyuck gyuck I dun lives in a RAYED STAYT, so let Califernya burn, AHM doin’ fine!”

But here were red state Republicans in red state Texas battling to take out a deep red AG. At the same time, in Foster County, North Dakota, Shannon Brandt, the man accused of murdering a teenager for being a “Republican extremist,” had his charges reduced from murder to manslaughter by the DA. Brandt could be out in five years.

Oh, how the rightist press howled. “An injustice! An outrage!” Left unmentioned: Foster County voted 77 percent for Trump in 2020. Can’t get much redder’n that (the Brandt case is murky, but of interest here is how the rightist press presented it).

Meanwhile, in Shoshone County, Idaho (70 percent for Trump; red red red!), a high school kid was banned from graduation for saying “boys are boys, girls are girls.”

Also, rightist superstar Tim Pool tried the “let them blue states burn” shtick by telling his viewers not to donate to NYC hero Daniel Penny’s defense fund because Penny got what he deserved by being in a blue state (I don’t know if Pool was a fetal alcohol baby, but if not, his face does a spot-on impression). Pool was hit with such blowback, he donated $20,000 of his own dough to Penny before apologizing and slinking away, unable to understand (due to cognitive impairment from his mom’s mojitos) why the “ahm a red stater” routine had resulted in excoriation not celebration.

Meanwhile, MAGAs spent the week (as they’ll be spending all year) claiming that newly minted red state Florida is actually a hellhole thanks to DESATAN! Yep, Florida’s worse than New York!

Those things combined—the Texas GOP civil war, the Brandt decision, the Idaho kid, Pool’s backlash, DeSantis denounced as worse than Cuomo—sure as hell silenced Twitter’s red state braggadocios.

I had to call John Nolte, the impresario of “if yer in a red state, yer fine!” tardation, and beg him to give me just one “gyuck.”

Me: “Please, Johnny?”

Nolte: “No! How’d you get my number?”

Me: “C’mon, buddy. I’ll get you started: Lookit them dang Dukes!”

Nolte: “Go away!”

Me: “Them Duke boys, they’s a-carryin’ ’shine! Git ’em! Git them Dukes!”

Nolte: “Dang…dang…dang…DANG DUKES! GYUCK A’GYOOK-GYOOK A’GYUCK! [Pauses] Damn you, Cole! I’m getting a restraining order.”

As regular readers know, I’ve of late been obsessed with the topic of pessimism (specifically, how I’m regularly accused of it). And it puzzles me that rightists don’t seem to understand that “flee to a red state” is by far the most pessimistic attitude of all. Way more pessimistic than anything I’ve ever said.

“Flee to a red state” means “We can’t fix this, we have no answers, so run away!”

Let’s say a terrible blight is consuming the crops of a nation. And the best solution your greatest minds come up with is, “Let’s retreat to the remaining parts of the country with unaffected crops and hold out till the blight gets there.”

Would you consider that a satisfying solution? I mean, it’s fine for middle-aged unmarried childless misanthropes like me; I’ve no interest in the state of affairs of the world after I’m dead. But is fleeing the blight instead of trying to understand it and, if not end it, at least manage it, really the best response for those of you who have kids and grandkids?

“Flee to a red state” is pure defeatism. It’s the worst type of pessimism because it cedes that the blight can’t be fought, only avoided.

My question to “flee to red staters” is, what’s your plan to keep the blight from infecting the place to which you’ve fled? Your “plan” seems to be based on a belief that the whites in your safe haven are somehow smarter than, say, the Scandinavian-stock sweethearts who let Minneapolis become a hellscape.

You think that’s true? The biggest red states have blue cities that are either absorbing Third World immigrants or absorbing blacks who are fleeing the Southwest after being displaced by immigrants. And when the denizens of these blue cities in red states start to encroach upon the red cities in red states, you think your neighbors will, somehow, “fight them off”?

How?

I mean, number one, “fighting them off” would be illegal. But number two, it seems like you’ve fallen for the SPLC line that red state whites are Klansmen. They’re not; they’re actually very decent people. They’ll welcome LaVonté and DeQuarisha and their twenty kids from different daddies with open arms. They’ll have a potluck for Miguel and Rosarita and their twenty kids, half of whom are growth-stunted adult cartel members.

You might have a few years until that happens, but quit bragging that you have a solution. You don’t; you have a postponement.

Sure, you can go “ultra red state” and move to a cabin in the mountains of a deep red county. You’ll be totally safe there! Randy Weaver did that and it’s not like a GOP administration massacred his family or anything.

Nobody who’s screaming “national divorce” has any kind of a plan for what to do with the deep blue metros that already exist in red states, and the continuing population increase in those metros, and the resulting sprawl.

You been following what’s happening in Florida regarding zoning? You should. Last summer, Gainesville outlawed single-family zoning. Gainesville is 22 percent black (for perspective, L.A.’s only 7 percent), and Gainesville’s population is exploding dramatically. City leaders decided that more low-income Section 8 tenements were needed, so goodbye nice neighborhoods that price out the lowlifes. Voters revolted; in November, new commissioners were elected, and single-family zoning was restored. But only by a 4–3 vote. Meanwhile, the state legislature—GOP-controlled—passed its own zoning reforms, which sorta increase housing density but not as dramatically as what Gainesville tried to do last summer (DeSantis, who’d vocally opposed Gainesville’s single-family abrogation, signed the zoning bill into law).

The people of Gainesville were able to stave off the slums, but by just one vote. If their city’s black population continues to increase—and it will—the single-family zoning ban will eventually return. Meanwhile state GOPs, red as they may be, nevertheless desire population growth, so they’re trying to walk a tightrope between increasing housing density while avoiding the appearance of radicalism that angered voters in Gainesville.

Jacksonville, Florida—31 percent black—has adopted the exact same measures passed in California to increase density on single-family lots. Council members now have their sights set on eliminating single-family zoning altogether.

These dynamics are occurring in blue cities in red states all over the country, though especially in red states in the Deep South, the most popular destination for displaced blacks. Low-income population growth leads to quality-of-life-worsening pro-density legislation which leads to more density which leads to lower quality of life which leads to outward expansion as whites flee a rot that inevitably follows them because all parasitical organisms need hosts.

So again I ask, what’s the long-term plan of the “flee to a red state” defeatists for staving off the blight? Didn’t you guys hear Ken Paxton in 2021 admit that if Harris County (20 percent black, 44 percent Hispanic) had been able to use mail-in ballots, Trump would’ve lost Texas? Most of the fastest-growing minority-heavy crime-ridden cities in the U.S. are in red states. That’s why we get that tiresome red/blue crime debate on Twitter (leftists point out that most of the highest-crime American cities are in GOP-led states, while rightists counter yeah, but Dem-run cities).

Red staters can, as explained over at FiveThirtyEight, rely on GOP-led statehouses to override blue cities on issues like zoning and “housing justice.” But that’ll only work until the populations of those booming blue metros reach a level where their votes change the statehouse. And as we see in Florida, even if you have a reliably GOP statehouse, legislators still have to deal with matters of density—you can’t ignore population growth, and well-heeled developers are more than happy to pay legislators to address it with pro-density measures.

So the next time you see some Nolte-type fapping about national divorce or how the answer to everything is “get thee to a red state,” ask them to address the issues I’ve raised. Ask them their solution to the metastasizing blue cities in red states.

Guaranteed, that’ll silence the gyucks.

It was refreshing to see Tim Pool get his ass handed to him (or was it his face? I can’t tell the difference) when he tried to fap along via “Dan Penny got what he deserved for being white in NYC.” That kind of defeatism, which essentially concedes that whites have no right to venture into minority-majority cities no matter how economically vital those cities may be (and as The Atlantic points out, blue metros are often the most economically important areas in red states, so Pool’s grand plan is to shut whites out of the economic heart of their own states), was too much even for Timcast’s pothead listeners, so Glass-Eyed McGee reversed course.

For, like, a minute. Because only six days after Pool’s humiliation, his “editor-in-chief” Cassandra Fairbanks/MacDonald did the exact same thing, tweeting how she has zero sympathy for the pregnant white nurse harassed and humiliated in NYC by welfare-sponging bottom-dwelling blacks over a bike, because that’s what she gets for living in a blue city.

And a day later, after a similar drubbing, Fairbanks/MacDonald deleted her tweet. As if she didn’t know this would happen based on the reaction Pool got just six days earlier.

But sure, pot doesn’t destroy basic cognitive functions like memory.

The point being, Pool and Fairbanks/MacDonald inadvertently revealed that at the core of “flee to red states” lies a belief that whites “get what they deserve” simply by being white around minorities in blue cities in blue states. Once you’ve ceded that ground, once you’re okay with saying “whites get what they deserve if they go into blue areas,” you’ll end up applying that to blue cities in red states, then to blue city sprawl that reaches red areas in red states. That’s what’s at the heart of “red state retreat”: Whites are required to flee. And to continue fleeing as the rot pursues.

And you see that as a solution? Buying a little time while confining yourself to areas that’ll eventually attract the blight once the blight requires new lebensraum?

Oh, but I’m the pessimist!

Last week I promised a look at the L.A. mayoral race and the lessons that can be gleaned from it for the rest of the country. And believe it or not, this week’s column pertains to that. Consider it the preamble.

Next week, Part II.