A Blue State refugee explains his exodus.
The short answer is I never wanted to live there. I was perfectly happy toddling around the Notre Dame campus, feeding the ducks, and watching the marching band rehearse. But Daddio couldn’t live the post-bach life forever, especially with a wife and four kids with one more on the way. So, PhD still pending (and it would pend until maybe a week before the statute of limitations ran out), he took a job at his alma mater, St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, and moved us all—Big Sis, me, twin sissies and Mom-with-bun-in-oven—to Bayonne, New Jersey.
I grew to love Bayonne, despite living for a time across from an oil refinery which seemed to catch fire every other Thursday. Bayonne was where I became a Cub Scout, altar boy, scholarship artist, Little Leaguer, Tenderfoot, and smart Alec. It’s where I almost fainted over Laura, hyperventilated over Linda, and nearly passed out when Pamela touched my arm. It remains today what I think of whenever anyone mentions hometowns. In sixth grade, I adapted to Jersey City, as our tribe moved out of our three-bedroom flat and into the ten-room house our family of eight required. Jersey City was not as tight a fit, and what I loved most was its proximity to New York City, where I went to high school, Mets games, Broadway shows, movies shown in actual movie palaces, Central Park, rock concerts and various Blarney Stones.
If I can make a crude analogy, which rubs against my Catholic morals, New Jersey was my dowdy wife, but New York was my sexy side-chick. Yet, when I was a struggling actor in my twenties, living in New York City was not economically feasible. Even though I was in The City virtually every day, working, going to acting and dance classes, and taking voice lessons, I opted for an onerous commute and free rent in Jersey, rather than convenience and indenture to a greedy landlord in NYC. Either way, I probably would have come to the same conclusion in late 1988: it was time to get out.
I was exhausted, and pre-Giuliani NYC was a cesspool. It was grimy, violent, and everywhere smelt like piss. Just to buy a newspaper, you had to do an Olympic triple jump over a trio of snoozing drug addicts. So, I went to California. San Francisco. In retrospect again, my entertainment career ambitions would have been better served in LA, but I couldn’t face another urban monster, and in those days, San Francisco was regarded as a very livable city, despite its high cost.
So, long story short, I spent 16 years in San Francisco before finally heading to LA, where I lived for five bi-polar years. They were the best of times and the worst of times, to steal a phrase. I never would have gone back to New Jersey, except that my Dad came down with prostate cancer. He made light of it, as was his way, but when I learned the true state of his health, there was no decision to be made. I jumped back across the continent, and together we fought the good fight for twenty-odd months. Then, as I was back in LA reacquainting myself with friends, he gave me the Irish goodbye, which I didn’t even know was a thing, until he pulled it. Alas, by that time—2012—I had a fulltime job in New Jersey, and there were no jobs in LA, so I stayed put, determined to bloom where I was planted.
But even as I opened an occasional blossom for the pollinators to tickle, I never felt like I was putting down roots. Nine years passed, and outside of a handful of friends, there was nothing keeping me in New Jersey. I needed a change. Then, the world changed, and I was in a place where I definitely did not belong.
The following is a short list of irreconcilable differences I had with the People’s Republic of New Jersey, which compelled the great divorce.
My Second Amendment rights.
Yeah, it’s always good to lead with a joke. But New Jersey and New York City were becoming ever more dangerous in the wake of the BLM riots of 2020, and I was getting too old to either run or fight. Still, I couldn’t get a concealed carry permit, because I was not highly connected within the Democrat Party. The corrupt usurpation of my God-given right to defend myself from dangerous criminals was galling.
New York’s descent into madness.
I rode the NYC subways every day to school in the late 1970s. I was working in NYC when Bernard Goetz went from bespectacled nerd to dead-eyed Bronson. “You seem to be doing alright, here’s another” was the new “Make my day.” I knew the morass to which NYC had descended, from which no chorus line of celebrities singing “I Love New York” would ever rescue it. Help came in the form of an ex-federal prosecutor who knew that a zero-tolerance policy towards small crimes was the only way to prevent bigger crimes. I left before Giuliani performed his miracle, but subsequent visits opened my mind to the possibility of returning one day.
Then those morons elected a Communist mayor and all the hard-won progress of the 1990s and the stability of three subsequent Bloomberg terms were tossed into the dumpster and lit on fire. In the summer of 2020, BLM burned several neighborhoods, cops were assassinated, statues torn down and defaced, and lunatics were permitted to defecate on the sidewalk. All signs of progress from the progressive De Blasio administration. The BLM frauds ratcheted up the cop hate, and officers left the force in droves. Not only did this open the door for purse-snatchers and muggers; it couldn’t help but compromise NYPD’s antiterrorist work. The Big Apple was now a big palooka, punch-drunk, who’d dropped his hands, exposing his glass jaw. How long before the knockout blow?
Then Covid hit, and the Communist mayor was in his glory. He shut down the city that never sleeps, because that’s what moral and intellectual weaklings, drunk on power, do. And that city, the one Humphrey Bogart famously advised Nazis against invading, for their own sake, the one famous for toughness and resilience and moxy and grit, totally caved. De Blasio even shut down Broadway, and the actors’ union, which is supposed to protect the working rights of performers, totally collaborated. Because Communism is thicker than members’ livelihoods. “You vill do as the Party says, or you vill never work again!”
But, in fairness to the union hacks, the theatre rank and file was already slitting its own throat with woke nonsense and “equity” demands that would put race, gender, sexual orientation and gender delusion issues above any dramatic considerations, thereby ensuring that the only plays to be produced would be ones that absolutely no audience wanted to see.
As I watched NYC circle the drain, it occurred to me that this was, at best, a 20-year cycle. The city that I’d loved in my teens, had grown exhausted with in my 20s, and rediscovered in my 50s, would not be livable again in my lifetime. Why stick around?
Governor Phil Murphy.
Throughout the United States there were many awful governors. The sneering, entitled Abortion Barbie North in Michigan, the hideous and abusive Luv Guv of New York, the unctuous Getty dynasty darling in California, and the soft-on-crime-and-around-the-waistline Hyatt heir in Illinois. But when it comes to gleefully abusing decent, taxpaying citizens, no one comes close to New Jersey’s own Houndtooth Murphy.
Despite being very stupid, totally inarticulate, uncharismatic, not the least bit personable, and very hard to look at, Houndtooth somehow got himself elected governor, probably because he fit the vision for the Democratic machine: a corporatist determined to crush the middle class, thus clearing the field for oligarchs bent on monopolizing the economy, whose political power would be propped up perennially by teeming masses of the impoverished, desperately dependent on government handouts. In other words, a rich Communist who is too stupid to even know he’s a Communist.
Early in his tenure, it became clear that Houndtooth was also a despicable, sexist tightwad. The New York Post reported that a professional women’s soccer team co-owned by Murphy could not sign draft picks because of “deplorable housing and training facility conditions” imposed on the team. These allegedly included “showerless locker rooms, run-down lodging and pervy landlords.” Murphy’s team was later implicated in a visa fraud scandal, because, y’know, we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t do. Like put up with Phil Murphy.
Then came Covid, which objectively was a threat to aged, obese, immune-compromised and Vitamin D deficient people, and a big yawn for almost everyone else. But the ruling class needed it to be more than that. They needed it to be an existential threat that would convince the objectively unthreatened to surrender their civil rights. To build a habit of surrendering civil rights that would pave the way for total statism. Plus, they needed to make a buck or hundred billion off of it.
Houndtooth was absolutely ecstatic! Imagine a Stalin-wannabe handed the perfect excuse to implement his five-year plan and crush his political opponents in the process! Houndtooth was giddy, as he shoved Covid patients into nursing homes—seizing the opportunity to kill off those useless drains on healthcare resources—and shut down every small business that generated revenue for the independent middle class. Houndtooth even shut down state parks. Of course, here he was just following the science, right? Because sunshine and exercise would certainly deplete the public’s immune systems and put them in greater danger of serious infection.
Throughout Covid, Houndtooth insisted he was doing what was necessary to keep the public safe. Y’know, like Stalin in 1932 kept those starving Ukrainians safe from all that grain in the storage bins. His intention was clear. Houndtooth wanted to destroy New Jersey small businesses so his corporate cronies could sweep in. His vision of New Jersey is one where all commerce goes through Amazon, every pub is a Buffalo Wild Wings, and every pizza parlor is a Little Caesar’s. Corporate oligarchs and their elected stooges rule the leaden-eyed masses, whose quality of life is finally equal, if only in misery.
One casualty of Houndtooth’s vindictiveness struck close to my heart. For nine years I belonged to a dance studio in Westfield. In fact, I was their first Prom King! When Covid struck, Houndtooth shut them down, and kept them shut despite mounting evidence the virus did not live long on surfaces or pass from asymptomatic carriers. Houndtooth was doing the bidding of the vaccine manufacturers who stood to make billions. They needed their cronies in government to add coercion on top of the already pervasive fear to persuade the credulous masses to accept an experimental serum, which was really truly totally safe, even though animal testing for it had been cancelled when all the subjects died. Thus, Houndtooth kept his boot on the throat of New Jersey businesses, y’know, ‘cause he cares, and as he told Tucker Carlson, even thinking about the U.S. Constitution was above his pay grade.
Who knows how many small businesses went bankrupt as a result? How many hung up signs saying, “Killed by Covid,” when they should have written, “Killed by Murphy’s Egomaniacal Lust for Power”? I know that the Westfield Ballroom no longer exists. Its proprietors are living in North Carolina and teaching private lessons virtually. But the watering hole that brought dozens of people from different backgrounds and age groups together for an hour or three a few times a week is gone. One less opportunity for friendly interaction with your neighbors, one less thread in the tapestry of community.
You can call it collateral damage, but it’s a necessary step towards totalitarian control, which is what Houndtooth and his ilk desire. I studied Hannah Arendt in high school, and remember her chilling description of the “atomization of the masses” in totalitarian society. People compressed one on top of another, but still feeling desperately alone. This is the end Houndtooth et al. are seeking, when they destroy those charming, distinctive small businesses that form the hubs of your communities. Clearly it was intentional; it was the cornerstone of his reelection campaign.
In his TV spots, Houndtooth recited his supposed successes and brazenly declared, “We’re not going back.” He was promising to kill more small businesses, to eradicate any remaining civil liberties, to stamp out any unique and inspiriting aspect of life that had not been vetted in a corporate boardroom. “You seem to be doing alright, here’s another.” And he promised to fund Planned Parenthood to the hilt. No surprise, because if his plan is to reduce half the state to abject poverty, he’d rather kill their kids than pay welfare to support them.
When the machine reelected this soulless tool of all things evil, I knew I only had a few months to get out. I was not going to enter 2022 paying taxes to my oppressors. At least not on the state level. And I wasn’t going to put my tax dollars into Houndtooth’s baby-killing war chest.
Now, they say buying a house online in a city and state you’ve never been to is a risky proposition. But they also say that fortune favors the bold. I decided to leave a place held captive by an evil regime, and I haven’t regretted it for a nanosecond. Yes, I miss my friends. But I was missing them already, because Houndtooth and De Blasio had destroyed the businesses that had bonded us in community. My choice was to keep being miserable as a captive of a Communist state or take the chance that something better might lie elsewhere.
Today I am elsewhere, and feel reasonably free.
Kevin Rush is the author of three Catholic novels, The Wedding Routine, The Lance and the Veil, and Earthquake Weather.
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