In Defense of Quiet Tenacity

The Delirious Absurdity of Abandoning Blue States

Obscurity and remoteness are, so far as I was ever concerned, perhaps the highest luxuries that a man could ever obtain or enjoy. Society’s wealthiest seem to know it well: I defy anyone to find an outrageously rich family who does not possess at least a little real estate in some truly inaccessible wilderness. Even in their abodes that skirt the edges of civilization a bit closer, their homes are contained within generous set-backs, behind hedgerows, fences, and armed security guards. But for a poor boy in the Adirondack foothills all the same luxuries were afforded by virtue of mere happenstance — I could easily obtain, more or less at will, a hidden position in a place teeming with all of the beauty of a National Park. But unlike the Grand Canyon or Grand Teton National Park I could do so without being subjected to the busloads of tourists usually present at the big parks.

Hell, I suspect some of my own haunts as a teenager consisted of forested land on which few men may have walked in over a generation. Strange hollows and little islands on forgotten tributaries, walled in by private holdings, accesible only to a teenager or a hermit with few druthers regarding trespassing laws. But even out closer to civilization and the valleys which it occupies, hundreds of square miles of black tilth and hardwood forest lay out before the traveler, visible to all who pass through their little dirt roads and lesser-known highways. Their beauty is such that I can rarely return home without getting a bit misty-eyed, for these lands feel to be my own family, and my loyalty to them is unmatched in this life.

My home hills are occupied by simple folk; yeomen with a penchant for self-reliance and a sturdy old-time mentality. They speak slow, if at all, and when they do speak they’re often talking about heat. Wood, pellets, oil, coal — what are you heating with these days? They’re a beautiful people the likes of which I’ve always thought should be preserved. If we can preserve a wild forest, we ought to be able to preserve a people, I have always reasoned. But these days, such talk may get you fired from your job and put under surveillance.

In all, New York State’s northern hinterlands constitute one of the finest expressions of American land and culture that you can still find. When I traveled through the 48 contiguous states, visited every one and traveling slow, I found myself constantly thinking back to old Upstate, and year by year it struck me more and more intensely just how lucky I really am to be from there. And yet — no state has lost a greater percentage of its population in the last 20 years than New York. Truly, Albany doesn’t make it easy for the loyal sons and daughters of the Empire State.

Our hills are almost entirely conservative and white, and just as truly as they may prove to be a shining scrap of an old-time America, they are conversely some of the most disgruntled people in the United States. Their gripes are legitimate. Plutocrats in the state Capitol run the state rife with scandals and corruption, idiotic gun laws, punishing property taxes, and regulations which bleed small towns dry. Their focus is on the Big Apple — a town that is further from my childhood home than Ottawa. Our television is often Canadian, our radio Quebecois, we drink Molson and Labatt and order poutine when hockey’s on. Upstate’s North Country is, as I have always called it — Canada with more guns and fewer teeth.

Walking into any small-town tavern Upstate you’re liable to run into a great many people who are either actively attempting to move to Florida or have a cousin that already did it. For a certain type of Upstater — one who has succumbed to the insidious and quiet cultural attack on rural America to deracinate and globalize all of our good old yeomen — Florida is a flavor of Shangri-La, a place with good weather and low taxes where you can carry your favorite pistol without a hassle. The beaches are nice, the women are hot, and the sinister towers of Albany are far away. In a certain sense, one couldn’t blame the red-blooded Upstate migrant to the likes of Tampa or Jacksonville — but in another, it strikes me as one of the weakest qualities of our people today.

To be on the right in America is presently to be cornered by Godlike moneyed interests and a feverish cult of inbecility which is pumped out with impressive speed and thoroughness by the schools, the media, and various online outfits. Cornered, gaslit, and legislated into one losing battle after another, blue state conservatives are rightfully enraged — and a little confused.

I would, after all, consider it to be a pillar of the old American tradition to never back down. At any American Legion in an Upstate town, ask any Marine whether Marines ever quit — “hell fuckin’ no” will be the resounding answer. And the same men will, hours later, pack their things into a U-Haul and shove off to Panama City. That American citizens are free to relocate is a feature of our republic, one I would generally not question or impugn, but in this case, I am forced to wonder how this bizarre and silent incongruence of principles came to be. When a man understands his own history, knows the land and its unbound potential, and has a certain pride in his position there, he would never leave. Particularly in the case of ceding his beloved turf to his own enemies.

Ernst Van Zyl, a white South African, writes forcefully on a similar phenomenon in his native South Africa in an article titled A Time to Dig Trenches. He argues — correctly — that en masse abandonment of the territory of Western Civilization may be one of the greatest existential threats to our values. As its enemies encroach and begin to unfurl their schemes to render your homeland into a rainbow favela, the last thing to do is to indulge any instinct to retreat. His reasoning is simple: If everyone retreats to ‘higher ground’, eventually there will be nowhere left to run. Granting the indescribable fortunes of beauty, history, culture, and divine isolation of our hinterlands here in America is no different. When the third world and its self-flagellating Western handmaidens reach into your pocket, you don’t change your pants — you keep them on and fight where you stand. After all, your great-grandfathers won those pants after a thousand hard battles, both at war and in the everyday battle to maintain a homestead, colony, fort, or outpost.

Moreover, even in raw statistics the numbers confirm this reality: Had disaffected New York conservatives not fled in torrents from their home states, Lee Zeldin would be governor today. While I am no Republican, it should be noted that the margin by which Zeldin lost to Hochul — about 7% — is more or less congruent with the number of republican voters the state has hemmorhaged in the last twenty years. Congregating in the likes of Florida, New Hampshire, and Carolina may improve your own lot in terms of your tax bills and what you can and can’t do — but our deciding to do this both sells out our neighbors who wouldn’t leave and gives as a war bounty the vast resources and living histories of fantastic American states.

I, for one, am staying.