VDH Interviews Roger Simon

At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, Connecting America is a place where everyone can gather and express their opinions with no disrespect.

And what better place than a Jersey diner to host this show?

Because where else but a diner can you find a buffet of opinions, ideas, and real connections?

Connecting America, a brand new national program that aims to truly connect everyday people and is dedicated to showcasing ideas and embracing civil conversation.

We'll also include amazing ways to improve your fitness, health, and nutrition, revive your spiritual self, and give your home a makeover.

Connecting America streams live every weekday from 7 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

Eastern Time.

Our program is led by a group of award-winning journalists, including me, Jim Rosenfield, plus Allison Camerata and Dave Briggs.

We'll also hear from America's psychologist Dr.

Jeff Gardier and former Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Amy Kellogg.

Join us wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our weekend episode and we have a visitor for the weekend episode, Roger Simons.

He is formerly the CEO of Pajamas Media and a member of the directors of the Writers Guild of America.

He is also the president of the West Coast Branch of Penn, which is the poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, novelist organization.

He has contributed to many newspapers and

journals, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Real Clear Politics, and City Journal.

Rogers' most recent novels are The Goat, which he published in 2019, and it was described as his best novel by The New Criterion, which is one of our favorite magazines.

And I always recommend The New Criterion, so they must be right about that novel.

And also his most recent novel, American Refugees, that is just published in 2024.

He is finally the editor-at-large of the Epic Times currently and another favorite among this podcast.

So we always recommend going to the Epoch Times, but we're so happy to welcome Roger Simon.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back after these messages.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian but if you're buying sheets it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft breathable durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my Bowl and Branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at Bulland Branch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bull and Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

And we'd like to thank Bolin Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

If you're running a business, you know that every time you miss a call, you're leaving money on the table.

When every customer conversation matters, you need a phone system that keeps up and helps you stay connected 24-7, and that's why you need OpenPhone.

OpenPhone is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications.

It works through an app on your phone or computer, so no more carrying two phones or using a landline.

With OpenPhone, your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts like a shared inbox.

That way, any teammate can pick up right where the last person left off, keeping response times faster than ever.

Plus, say goodbye to voicemail.

Their AI agent can be set up in minutes to handle calls after hours, answer questions, and capture leads so you never miss a customer.

So, whether you're a one-person operation drowning in calls and texts, or having a large team that needs better collaboration tools, OpenPhone is a no-brainer.

See why over 60,000 businesses trust OpenPhone.

OpenPhone is offering our listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com/slash Victor.

That's O-P-E-N, P-H-O-N-E, openphone.com/slash Victor.

And if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge.

OpenPhone, no missed calls, no missed customers.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to you so you can probably do a much better introduction of Roger since you and

we've been friends for a while.

Yeah.

Yeah, I've known Roger for 20 years.

He was the one that recruited me to

write for Pajamas Media War.

I think Roger, I did it for 12, 13 years at least with you under your directorship.

And today is the pub date of Roger's newest book.

And it's published by Encounter under the editorship of Roger Kimball.

And we on the Bradley Board Foundation

serve as the board of directors of Encounter.

So I've followed this great book through its manuscript to publication journey.

And it's called American Refugees.

The untold story of the mass migration from blue to red states.

So welcome, Roger.

And I'll just start off with a question.

Everybody's talking about this flight from

blue to red, but what is untold about it?

What do you mean by untold story?

What's the missing thing that we don't fully appreciate?

That's the key question of the book.

And there are

several untold stories.

I'll start with one.

One is

that as a connoisseur of

the conservative internet, you would know

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit,

some years ago

who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee,

noted that this migration was coming.

He said that

they should set up a welcome wagon to

not bring your California values with you.

And

I discovered and Glenn acknowledged, that he was wrong.

And

what it is, is it turns out that by and large, and of course, this is a generalization as all such things are,

that most of the people coming from California, New York, and Chicago, et cetera,

to places like Tennessee, were motivated by ideological reasons, even more than financial reasons, and turned out to be, in many, many cases, much more constitutionalist than the people living here.

Than they're living here.

So it's your argument that

we in California that leave, we not only don't disrupt the red state status of our new homes if we were to move, but we make them redder?

Is that what you're saying?

That's what I'm saying.

And also,

in fact, I refer to those people often, some of them, not all, but many, as the cavalry come to save the red states from themselves.

Wow.

Is that true of every?

I mean, there are people that leave, say, just to take one example to Colorado.

Is that a separate case because it's a purple state?

Are the people leaving there, are they different than you?

Yeah, I'm, yes.

I am dealing primarily in this book with Tennessee, Georgia.

uh Florida and Texas.

Is Nevada and Arizona qualify or Wyoming, Montana?

They They do qualify, but I do talk about Arizona a little bit.

I'm not a researcher.

I'm an experiential writer.

I'm a novelist writer.

And

I write unimpassionedly from that point of view.

I want to make it a good read.

I want to make it, you know, something

that takes people on an emotional rather than

entirely an intellectual experience.

Well, on that

in that gate, in that case, I want going to ask you directly, do you have any regrets emotionally?

I mean, we all have regrets about everything, but by and large, when you move to Tennessee, do you look back on it as a wise move that you're happy with?

Much greater advantages than

the missing of the climate or the, I don't know, the natural beauty of California?

I

do not have enough regrets to really regret it.

In other words, yeah, some days I've missed some things, but

by and large, and I'll tell you the reason that

the in-depth reason that was, something very extraordinarily happened to me on this move.

And it took a while to really sink in, but it did.

And that is when I first arrived,

I looked around and I said, what's going on with all these steeples?

There are steeples on every corner.

meaning churches, of course.

And, you know, if you live in LA most of your life, as I did, yes, there are big churches and synagogues in Los Angeles, but

the major buildings of the city, the things that you think of are,

you know, the beach, the mountains, the

movie studios, in my case, very prominently, but they for a lot of people,

and all secular things, even the Getty Museum is secular.

Whereas here, it was different.

And it started to get into me and to the extent that I personally became much more religious.

Really?

Yes.

I was talking to

Dennis Prager about this.

And here's an interesting thing.

He said,

he brought out an old quotation from Germany, which said that

as the Christians become more religious, the Jews become more religious.

Not vice versa.

Yeah.

I see.

Not oppositionally, he wasn't.

He was talking about devotionally.

and it's

it happened to me and it changed my writing in a certain sense but and the way it changed it is that when i first journeyed from yellow drama school to hollywood it was you know primarily to become rich and famous not just that i love i love books and movies and wanted to entertain people clearly and i had lots of left-wing political ideas but now I write to save the country.

When I get up in the morning, that's all I'm thinking about.

I'm not thinking about how clever I am or, you know,

who's going to say I'm great and all the rest of that stuff.

But I have a question for you.

In the depths of writers.

So

what I'm worried about, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that

As we have this huge migration in the many millions, and I think we've lost 280,000 in the last 18 months alone in California.

So the places where they're leaving become bluer and the places that they're going,

with maybe an exception or two, become redder.

So the country is more distinct, more binary.

But what does that do

to,

let's say, there's 40 million people in California and there's 15 million conservatives, and we lost all of you guys that traditionally had voted, let's say, the majority, if you're right, that they make red states more conservatives because they're mostly themselves conservative refugees.

So they gave us Reagan, they gave us George Duke Mason, they gave us Pete Wilson, even gave us Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And now that's, we haven't had a statewide Republican office holder, I think,

not since Schwarzenegger, not one, not the Attorney General, not this Lieutenant

Governor, nothing.

We have a supermajority of left-wingers, not Democrats, but hard left in the legislature, both the Assembly and the Senate.

We only have 11, I think, of 53 seats are Republicans.

So

what do we do?

Is the theory that you want to save the country?

So you're trying to save what can be saved, but then the blue states will just get so bad that

we'll come to our senses.

Is that the idea?

And we'll have to do something?

Well, you know,

I think about that particular question quite a bit because

I even refer to it.

I talk about it in the book, too, because, you know, there's a level of guilt implied in all this.

I bogged out on you.

On the other hand, I think what you also said in there,

that I think that California, particularly in New York, to a great degree as well, because I'm basically a New Yorker and go there all the time for work.

You know, they have to hit bottom in order to get back off.

As a historian, you know the argument very well.

But

I think that they were so far gone and continue to be so far gone that the only, that the solution is absolute climate.

Whereas we can preserve things in these other states and then maybe join together.

I don't know.

I mean, looking at the, taking the long view of history in this is complicated because,

you know,

as Yogi Berra told us, and I just watched that terrific documentary about it, you know,

predictions are difficult, particularly about the future.

And

part of the reason I left and all these people are leaving is to live better lives with our families.

Have your family moved to Tennessee?

My wife and daughter were moving.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

have you let me ask you something.

I have two families because I have I have a from previous marriage, I have a family with two sons that are in their 50s and these men, now men, are of course very much aligned with the nation of woke

because their family was a lefty when when they were little kids.

My daughter, who is 25,

their father was much more conservative and she is too.

I mean, that's one of the interesting problems we're all facing because families are riveted in our culture.

I don't know, I'm sure most of you listeners know that, many experience it.

And

I think part of the impetus to move, you see new communities.

One of the, there are whole areas just south of Nashville, the suburbs, really, Franklin, Tennessee, and so forth, that are filled with

what might be called Californios of a new type,

almost all of whom are right-wing to one degree or another, and

are forming

a cadre that is saving Tennessee in a lot of ways.

When you walk down Nashville, or you go to the store, or you deal with the government, whatever your social intercourse, do you meet many people, say, in a week that you say,

wow, you left California.

Does that happen a lot?

Is there a lot of them in Nashville to the point where you bump into them?

Oh, it depends on where you are.

As I say, I'm just referring to Franklin, which is just south of Nashville and is in Williamson County, and which is probably

sort of like Norman Walkwell meets sushi bars.

It's like

it's the richest Republican county in the country, some city.

There, you're just

everywhere.

In Nashville center, no, but there are millions of tourists, so it's very hard to tell with Nashville because the country music scene draws so many people that

they're from all over the world

going into the hockey talk.

So it's a very different experience.

Speaking of which we didn't realize when we moved here,

the extent of the city of Nashville itself was deep blue.

We had assumed that it was,

you know, purple

that way.

The actual city

because of Vanderbilt, which is no different, much, not much different from Harvard and in its political views,

mixed with

the downtrodden who have been brainwashed,

you go to the Metro Council, which is their city council, and you think you're in a woke version of the Police Bureau.

So it's sort of like, is Nashville downtown more like Austin than, say, Dallas?

Yes.

Wow.

Yes.

But just outside of Nashville, it's more red than Texas.

So it's odd.

One of the reasons I wrote the book is try to

break down that sociology by traveling around here.

Georgia has the most corrupt government, and

that's a very difficult place to move to, I think.

One of the hidden uses of my book is as a consumer guide for those planning on moving.

One thing I noticed in that, though, because I interviewed a lot of people about it, old friends I would call in New York and LA and other places, and they would ask me, well, what school?

What if Franklin has a good school system?

What's this, blah, blah, blah, all these kinds of questions you ask in preparation to move, and you realize that there's a certain personality that moves and a certain personality that doesn't.

And

it harkens back to the old days of who are the Italians that came here and who are the Italians that stayed in Italy.

And I'm glad some stayed in Italy because I like to visit Italy.

Wow, I know.

I have that feeling as someone who's very dissatisfied with what California has become.

And then I remember stories from my Swedish grandfather about all the hardworking Swedes that farmed rocks and were

desperate to have an outlet for their talents or their energy went to America.

And the ones that were complacent stayed.

And I've always wondered if that's that applies to us in California.

Well, I've named the book American Refugees Deliberately, and it's to harken back to

those mentalities.

Now, I recognize, like, for example, you, who I've known, as you said, for maybe two decades,

and I've been to

your farm

outside Fresno there.

I understand why you're a man of the land.

Yeah, I can't move.

Yeah, you can't move and nor should you.

No, I'm not saying, oh, come on, Victor, sell the farm and move.

No, it's silly.

But, you know, it's 13%.

I guess why you moved is

for a variety of reasons, but one of them was 13 top rate, 13.3, fifth highest sales tax, highest gasoline taxes, some of the highest assessed evaluations on property tax, even though the rate is not the highest.

And then what do we get?

We get number 43rd or something in school test scores.

We have the highest property crime rate per cap in the nation in San Francisco.

We don't get a lot.

And we have one-third of all of the

welfare recipients are in California.

It should be one-sixth by our population.

Then we have almost half the homeless.

We have half those who came illegally.

We haven't assimilated, you know, 27% of the population wasn't born.

And it's just, I guess what I'm saying is when every time I turn around

and I go to deal with a power company or the gas company or I go to a store or a government agency,

there's chaos.

And I'm starting to

explain that chaos by the people who used to run things have left.

And I realize now that.

Maybe over the last 40 years, it can be as high from some of the things I've read from eight to nine million people.

And they were the people who made PG ⁇ E work or Southern California Edison work or the state college system work.

And they haven't, people of that experience and talent haven't been replaced or groomed.

And I'm worried that, and I think that's part of your book, as I remember, is that, and one of your arguments that you've made is that this doom loop,

we won't change until we hit bottom, right?

Because

then people, people are people, and they'll just say, it doesn't work, the paradigm doesn't work, we've got to try something new.

Is that kind of what you're saying, isn't it?

Absolutely what I'm saying.

But, you know,

but you know, you make me reflect on, you know, there are two approaches to it.

There's the approach of staying as you are, but you, but in your case, it's special because of your form.

But

in my case, it was like,

do I want to have a decent life with my family now or wait for California to repair itself?

Well, frankly, I'm too old.

I know it would never happen within my, even though I'm in good shape for my age.

I knew it would never happen.

Well, also,

I know that the argument that it's got to bottom in order to come back.

It's an extraordinary thing to think now because I can't imagine 30 or 40 years ago thinking that about California.

California, I moved to California at a time when

of the beach boys and everybody wants to be in California.

It was like,

I mean, history does move rather fast.

To me, California was the dream.

It was.

It seemed to me that

as I get older, everybody older

is nostalgia for the past, but when I look back at what life was like when I was a little boy boy in the late 50s or early 60s, it was paradise.

We're going to take a quick break.

We're with Roger L.

Simon.

There's a lot of Roger Simons, but this is the important Roger L.

Simon, and he's written a new book that comes out today, January 9th, from Encounter Books: American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States.

And we'll be right back.

Cooler temperatures are rolling in, and as always, Quince is where I turn for false staples that actually last.

From cashmere to denim to boots.

The quality holds up, and the price still blows me away.

Quince has the kind of false staples you'll wear non-stop, like Super Soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60.

Their denim is durable and fits right, and their real leather jackets bring that clean classic edge without the elevated price tag.

What makes Quints different?

They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen.

So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands.

When the weather cools down, my Quint sweaters are a go-to.

My cashmere short sleeve that works under any jacket, formal or casual, or my thick, long-sleeve, go-everywhere, do-everything sweater that pairs with any pant or jogger.

Quince products are my favorites, which is why I went to Quince to buy my recent very beautiful purse that leaves the house every time I do.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's quince.com slash victor for free shipping and 365 day returns.

Quince.com slash victor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

And we're back now with Roger and American Refugees, the author of American Refugees.

I have another question for you, Roger.

As people self-select, are you worried that we're adding a geographical force multiplier to political differences in a way that maybe we did in the 1840s and 50s, south or north of the Mason-Dixon line?

I mean, if we keep self-selecting, are we going to get states and neighboring, because they tend to be adjacent to each other in many cases, Oregon, Washington,

et cetera, and then maybe Georgia or Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee?

I don't know what Kentucky is a little different.

But my point is, are we going to get so self-selected that we're going to be incompatible?

When you go to a blue state, you feel that you're in outer space these days?

A little bit, but here's the thing.

That's something that I dealt with in the book a lot in discussions with a guy I called Rocky Top, or he calls himself Rocky Top in the book.

He's actually one of the most interesting political insiders I ever met who I can't identify him exactly because that's the code, but he was

the advisor to presidents and also the advisor to Tennessee governors.

And,

you know, has been a political pro forever, but he is very much,

I would say, in the camp that the two of us are, but remarkably observic fellow.

And so we would have lunches while I was writing the book and I would describe it to him,

you know,

and always discussing what the future of America is,

whether it was indeed too big a country.

I mean, maybe it is too big a country.

Maybe there should be two countries.

I mean,

there's an argument for that.

I mean, the common defense, of course, is a big problem with China sitting out there, et cetera.

But, you know, it's not a simple thing to

do.

I know it.

I worry about it, too, because historically,

if I go back and read some of the authors who wrote commentaries on the constitutional process,

One of the things, and then even in the 19th century, people like William Tecumseh Sherman, in reference to the Civil War, they were always saying what made America work

was we had the same continental mass as Europe and area, but we didn't have all these little nations.

We had states and on the federal system, their squabbling was contained or absorbed by the Union, but they didn't have that in Europe.

So therefore, they had all these seven years' war, 30 years' war, Napoleonic wars.

And we were exempt from that.

And that was a good thing that we had found a system that would allow for state individuality, but not to the point of succession, I suppose, or inner warring.

But the other thing I'm worried about is that historically,

when large nations break up, the former Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, you look at Ukraine,

it's not amicable.

And so

they tend to be not just neutral, but they become more hostile

than they would with other nations.

So it seems to me that I was just in Florida not too long ago.

And by the way, as soon as I got to Florida and I talked to people and I saw the freeways compared to 101 or the 99 and I went and everything seemed to work.

It was kind of like there was no stress compared to what southern San Joaquin Valley can be like.

But the thing that got me about it was, or not got me, but worried me a little bit, was it was just antithetical to California.

And then when I watched the DeSantis-Newsom debate, it was even more so.

And I mean, Newsom couldn't even defend what he wanted to, his dream.

He admitted, he had to kind of falsify the record because he couldn't defend what he'd created or helped create.

But I guess what I'm saying is

we're rapidly at warp speed creating, don't you think, two cultures almost.

no question.

That's what we're living in.

And the question is how it resolves itself.

You know, I wish I knew.

I don't know.

But, you know, that's why I wrote the book, maybe to explore it.

You try, when you write a book, I don't know whether this is true for you, but I'm trying to teach myself while writing the book.

That even applies to fiction because you sort of teach yourself the story.

But it's,

we are at a time.

I've never been in a time.

I remember, I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam period very well, and I participated in the early civil rights movement.

I was a civil rights worker in 1966 in South Carolina, and

it was a very optimistic thing, really, because we knew we were on the right side.

If we had dreamed even then,

I mean, I couldn't conceive of what became of

the Al Sharptons of the world and the Black Lives Matter stuff then.

I mean, we were trying to have segregate, we were looking for integration.

I mean, it was

everything took, what went wrong?

Everything took a wrong term in this country.

There was a time about them, even the Vietnam War.

You know,

I was a Vietnam War protester.

I look back at it, was it all right?

I don't even know.

But

I never took seriously at that time the country was falling apart.

No, I didn't either.

And I think a lot of it is,

I mean, when you mentioned Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, yeah, they were race mongers, but compared to Nicole Hanna-Jones, who has written things like the white race is criminal and is responsible for all the evils of the world, or Tonahese Coates, who said that he had no empathy for the first responders on 9-11.

Or you look at Kendi, what he said, he's written in the past when he was a student, that

this horrible, almost eliminationist rhetoric.

And then, when you see October 7th and that fusion with DEI, we're well beyond,

I think we're well beyond the Black Panthers and that radical fringe or Jesse Jackson's and all that stuff.

Oh, I mean, he talked about

it.

We're in that a little bit.

I mean, I can remember when I was in the civil rights movement, I went down to Atlanta to the SNCC headquarters.

And

I remember because I was teaching then at a school for young black kids in South Carolina, Sumter.

And

I remember they weren't that happy to see me back then.

It was a very odd moment.

And I asked this very handsome guy,

a black guy who was going off to

Leaflet, a neighborhood later.

because he was running for the assembly, whether I could join him.

And he said, no, no, thank you.

And his name, it turns out, was Juliet Bond.

Yeah.

And so I had a couple of other, because I did read the book because I get every book, but I wanted to especially see how it turned out really well from Encounter.

And a couple of other things I think were important.

Is there

when you,

and I think this, When you go to Florida or you go to Arizona or you go to any of Georgia,

is a sense that

these states are conglomerating into sort of a red state antithesis?

You feel more at home in Florida than you do in Oregon or Washington or California?

You see what I mean?

Are we creating almost not just

refugees from California that are going to a particular state,

but we're kind of creating an alternate reality, which I think is the majority of the country, even though it doesn't control any of the institutions, like the media or academia or corporate boardroom or entertainment but you get the sense that there's something being born with these red states and the the immigration that's almost

what is it what is it it's an alternate america or is it the real america well it's the real america i hope but you know you get it particularly with the people

uh you don't get it so much with the leaders

So it's, you know, occasionally, but but mostly you get it among the people.

And there's a divide in this country all over between the people and the leadership, I think.

And, you know, your heart goes to the people, of course, because it's we, the people.

But,

you know,

when I'm crossing the border between Tennessee, and I've gone down to Alabama quite a bit, too.

And, you know, the people are much the same.

They all have different leaders.

And,

you know,

that just goes back to Lord Acton, I guess.

It's not big a surprise.

But the question is whether these people who are forming this country of their own,

that's the greatest hope.

I think it's the greatest hope.

I think it goes to the eastern part of California, too.

I mean,

California is

like a country, I don't have to tell you.

And if you go to

the eastern side of it, it feels very different from the coastal.

It does.

California geographically is 75%

conservative and demographically it's 75% left-wing.

So

it's disturbing.

I guess

everybody we're talking about Roger Simon's new book on this mass exodus of refugees from blue states in general, in particular his own experience, kind of a memoir approach, what he felt leaving California and then going to the red state of Tennessee.

And it's a very optimistic message.

I want to emphasize that, that Californians are not to be feared, that they

reinvigorate already conservative states in a positive way.

And then in a very different way, their absence from some of these blue states accentuates

something that's not sustainable.

And that will be self-corrective, although it'll go go through a kind of a dangerous process of rebirth or rejuvenation.

But

another question I had, and it came up when I first looked at the manuscript as well,

when you see

your book is about leaving and what you found in Tennessee, but also what you left behind, what do you think,

what was it, at what critical point do you think that we went from in California, Pat Brown,

Jerry's dad as governor, kind of a liberal, but still Hubert Humphrey Democrat that was reasonable?

My parents were, I think you'd call them Harry Truman or Hubert Humphrey, maybe Pat Brown Democrats, until this transitional Jerry Brown, and then you get into the DEI-woke progressive insanity.

At what critical point was it 1970, 1980, that we could have saved the state?

What happened?

Was it just people leaving and then tech money coming in, $9 trillion of market capitalization alone in Silicon Valley that made people exempt from worrying about what they'd done to others?

Or was it the 15 million people who came into California illegally from across the border?

Was it all of them?

Or what was the point where

we couldn't be saved?

The tipping point?

You know, I have to,

I knew Jerry Brown for very strange reasons.

One of which is we had the same girlfriend, but not at the same time, and not Linda Ronstead.

But

I knew him a little bit.

And he was a very bright man, but he was also,

you know, prey to kind of the self-deceptive hippie culture ideas that I think probably

account for the decline.

And to begin with an exact year is tough.

But

I think that the, you know, pervisiveness in society is fine, but too much pervasiveness goes crazy.

And I think that, you know, we're in, California is in a kind of a Jacobin

period now.

And nobody's in the guillotine, but it's

all these different forces coalesced.

And I think that in the 80s, probably a lot of it was going on without our knowing it.

I mean, I participated.

I was a very happy camper.

This is something that's not in the book, but it may

amuse you, that my first use of a computer for communication

was with a man who lived across Laurel Canyon from me at the time.

His name was Timothy Leary.

I know it.

I was a graduate student at Stanford University between 1975 and 80.

And I can remember people coming from what was starting to be Silicon Valley.

And

I mean, they were long-haired and they were fooling around with computers even then.

But the evil, and then when I come back, you know, they use a library, but the evil person was either, you know, IBM or something like that.

They were kind of renegade, populist, but they weren't like Mark Zuckerberg or the Google Fortune or the Jobs Fortune.

They weren't these intolerant, huge, multi-billion dollar monopolies and emulating the worst traits of the things that they had earlier criticized.

And then I went at Stanford as a graduate student, all my professors were liberal

in the PhD program, but they were tolerant and they didn't bring their politics into class.

And now being on that campus, I'm kind of an influencer.

I just walked by not too long ago, the Gaza

encampment that's the longest occupation of the Stanford campus in its history.

And it's right between my apartment and my office.

But when I look at what that university has become, and it's kind of a, for me, I wrote about in the new criterion, it's a metaphor for what the state,

it's the good, the people like yourself that were reasonable in that generation have left and people came in who were in dire need of subsidies.

Half our births are on Medi-Cal now.

And then the people who run the state have so much money that there is no middle class and that they're not subject to the ramifications of these green policies or race policies or crime policies.

And

it's in a doom loop.

And it's...

Well, you know, I have to say, Victor, you have the best training of anybody I know for trying to understand this because

I go back, I never really studied classics in college.

I took courses in the Greek theater because I was headed for the the theater and I learned a lot about Greek theater and I love the Greek theater,

but the history of the Roman Empire is probably the most useful.

It is.

And it's being so referenced now.

I don't even like to think of it.

I've been reading the letters of Jerome or Augustine or some Procopius, some of the late Roman Western writers and early Eastern Empire.

And it is scary because,

you know, everybody quotes that aphorism, and you're in a novelist, know it better than anybody from the sun also rises suddenly, I mean, gradually than suddenly.

And that's kind of what decline is.

You think you're in it, but you really kind of convince yourself if you're in Rome around 4:40 or 4:30, or,

well, there's still the aqueducts, there's still the Senate, and then you realize it's all over.

And then just suddenly you look around, and people are coming across the Tiber, or, excuse me, the

Rhine River and the Danube, and it's over, complete, kaput.

You know, I think the problem with California is

I think it became a culture without God.

And, you know,

I was enjoying it.

I mean, you know, back in the 70s and 80s, everything was fun.

And okay, you smoked dope, you tried this, that, and it made any difference.

I mean, it wasn't going to hurt you, especially if you weren't a substance abuser, really.

You know, you could just taste things and you could try this and try that.

And, you know,

and nobody, there were no limits, really.

And then we didn't realize,

at least I didn't realize the degree that that was treacherous.

And

I think that

it was all over the place.

Because when you look at a guy like

Zuckerberg, who thinks of himself as a liberal doing things for people and is actually as pernicious as it gets,

I think it comes sort of out of that.

Yeah.

We're going to take a brief

time out, a commercial from our sponsors, and we'll be right back with Roger Simon and his new book on the exodus of people from blue states

to red states.

And I want to ask some practical questions if I could, because I think some of people

when they read American refugees are going to be interested as a how-to book.

And we'll be right back.

Do you ever just want to turn off the news and ignore politics?

That's understandable.

It's overwhelming.

But here's the thing.

We're citizens of a republic.

The decisions made by our government affect our everyday lives.

In order to be a good citizen, you have to read and understand the United States Constitution.

And that's why I'm so excited that Hillsdale College is offering a brand new free online course called The Federalist.

This course explains how the United States Constitution established a government strong enough to secure the rights of citizens and safe enough to wield that power.

And today, it's our responsibility to pay attention, to be vigilant, they may say, in order to preserve and protect Republican self-government.

Hillsdale's online course, The Federalist, includes 10 lectures, each about 30 minutes long.

You can take the course at your own pace.

There's no cost to sign up.

I'm like many a college alumnus who's benefited from the Federalist course.

It's filled those big gaps with exceptional and unbiased analysis that was all too often missing from our higher education experience.

Go right now to hillsdale.edu/slash vdh to enroll.

There's no cost and it's easy to get started.

That's hillsdale.edu slash vdh to enroll for free.

Hillsdale.edu slash vdh.

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dalliance with a Duke or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Mas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like Bridgerton Bridgerton and Outlander.

And of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wondery.

That's audible.com slash wondery.

And we're back.

So, Roger, I'm going to shift radically.

And I'm just going to ask you, when you decided to move, Were the mechanics of it, did the state of California keep auditing you as they do some people?

Did you have trouble even running a trailer?

Was it easy?

Was it hard?

Does the state of California make it hard?

I was afraid of that, but

it didn't really, for me,

I think I had my eyes open and

closed all my books to the degree I could and everything before I left.

Because yes, they do have the reputation of, you know, you're here for a year and a half and suddenly get a bill.

Yeah.

You paid 11% of your income for blah, blah, blah.

You know, it's uh, it's

something that people should,

if they're anticipating doing something like this, be very careful.

But

renting a U,

you know, moving is, no, I think moving is an arduous task, and I'm not planning on doing it again soon.

Let me ask you some questions.

So you had a house in the Los Angeles area, right?

Yes, in the Hollywood Hills, right?

So you sell a house in California prices, and is it true that this magic happens when you sell at California prices?

Then you go to a nicer place, but the housing is cheaper and you get a bigger, better house?

Yeah.

To some extent, but not as radically as you think.

But it does, it is true.

It depends on where you are.

I mean,

the whole metropolitan Nashville area is booming.

So,

you know, prices are reflected.

It's cheaper, but not that much.

I mean,

I do live in a bigger home, though, because

people have more property in these places where there's more spaces.

And, of course, you have a lot of property.

But so I used to joke about my house in Colatara, but it's not quite that.

You know, everybody says, everybody's leaving California.

Why haven't prices go down?

And

I I think it's because we've stopped building homes.

But

so you get to Tennessee and what,

I mean, what, if I were to go to Tennessee, what would I notice right away?

Is it all of a sudden I don't have to pay 13.3 taxes?

Or was it the taxes that you noticed?

Or the people don't come up to you and say, where's your mask on?

Or what is it about that you feel more, I guess, the free state of Tennessee?

You feel the mask kind of thing much more because taxes,

you know, they only come up when they come up.

But

you do feel freer, and there's no question about that.

And there's less, there are fewer hassles, but

the same forces are here trying to do them.

I mean, they're desperate to turn these states blue.

It's like, you know, it's almost like a scalp.

And

so you, one of the, one of the things you have to do is get involved politically and help stop it.

Yeah.

And that's what you find that a lot of the people who came in from California and New York are doing.

And Chicago.

Chicago, a lot of Chicago.

Are you because you don't have a southern accent, you come under suspicion when people first meet you and they learn that you're a Californian?

No,

not that much.

Not anymore.

I mean,

you know, I play tennis regularly with 10 guys,

most of whom are evangelicals, and only one of them has a real southern accent.

So the first few months, I couldn't really understand it, but we were playing tennis and we knew the rules.

But, you know,

you don't hear in the big cities now or even the suburbs of the big cities that accent so much.

Or maybe I'm become inured to it, but what you do notice is that people are genuinely nicer.

They are generally nicer.

I mean,

this is an addition.

You feel sometimes that when you're, when you were in California, I feel it all the time, that when you meet people

or you go out to dinner and somebody you don't know, there's just a sense of that you have to be careful what you say, what you do,

because

You never know this California judgmental stuff.

It just jumps out at you.

I I know, and I guess I'm hypersensitive because I'm on a campus, but when anybody comes into my office where I work, I just assume that one untoward, I'm going to be pounced on.

You know what I mean?

That sense of dread.

Just you don't feel comfortable in California because of the cancel, doxing, whatever term we use.

It's just, it's so self-righteous, it just becomes smothering.

Well,

in a campus situation here, you're not, especially at vanderbilt vanderbilt being sort of the ivy of the or the ivies of the south with duke i think the atmosphere is not as bad as stanford or harvard but not great um public universities i i think you're probably in a better shape um university of tennessee and so forth interest incidentally the university of tennessee i write about this in the book is is uh

uh is actually trying to

aiming to be more middle of the road politically, the way universities should be, in order to attract students and that normally would go to Yale.

And I think they're to some degree having some success with that.

So that's an interesting sidebar to this.

But,

you know, the general question

of

whether you have to shut up,

It still exists here.

I mean, I hear from my daughter who works for NASDAQ here, but she works at home, but she has all kinds of business contacts that a 25-year-old might have.

I mean, in my case, you know, everybody already, I'm out like you're out.

I mean, everybody who walks into the office of Victor Davis Hanson pretty much knows who he is.

People coming up to me often know I write for the Epoch Times, you know, so it's not,

you know, then what's to hide at that point, if you know what I mean.

But, but,

but she is a young lady in the business world, and she, I know,

she has told me that she's very careful at times, and when she knows she's in a certain atmosphere.

And so it's not, it's not, as I said, it's not Nirvana in Tennessee or for that, or I would be surprised to say, and I've been in Florida quite a bit lately, that that it's not always Nirvana, Florida.

So

it's definitely better.

And in certain neighborhoods, you don't worry.

I think everybody should

take counsel because so many people that are listening, we have a big California

audience about what it's very eerie, and I don't think anybody has described it as well as Roger.

In the last 15 months, I've been to Idaho, I've been to Tennessee, I've been to Florida, Arizona, Nevada,

and I met Californians.

But I guess the flip side of the bookend is I live on a rural street, and I can remember in 1960, 1970, all the way to the middle 70s, there was this diverse group of family farmers.

There were the Fenukis, Italian.

There were the Israelians, Armenian, there were the Lopezes, Mexican-American, there were the Ciotas that were Indian,

Sikhs, but they were all the same.

They were all small farmers.

They were all very conservative.

Nobody locked their door.

And now, and their kids all went to the public schools.

Everybody would talk to each other.

They're completely wiped out.

It's all corporate.

They've all fled.

to different states because land was pretty valuable.

They sold out.

And when I drive down the same streets, it's like going through Bode or a ghost town.

It's a corporate,

the small farms have been conglomerated into absentee corporate almonds, usually.

And then the

farmhouses that I used to go and stay overnight with my friends or talk to their parents.

They're all rented out to mostly people who are here from south of the border illegally.

And so all of a sudden,

The flip side of when I see

the boom and the excitement and the youth of what's going on in Tennessee or Florida, then I see the other side where we have one house on our street where there's M13s.

We have another where there was a chop shop.

We have another where I won't even get into it, but there was prostitution, et cetera.

I used to ride my bike.

I had to stop because of unlicensed dogs biting me.

And then, what do you do with raby shots and stuff?

So

it's civilization in reverse, and yet

it's partly responsible for creating a new civilization, if you know what I mean.

It's schizophrenic almost to see, to be so excited about America when you go out of California and be so depressed about what California is accelerating to the

descending into.

Well, you know, I have that feeling too when I go to New York, which I do more often than California now because I go to the Epoch Times office.

And

I grew up in New York, you know, in the 50s, and I remember,

you know, playing stickball in the streets like Willie Mays and all that stuff, and with kids of all races, and nobody cared.

Nobody cared.

Now, I'm trying to remember whether this is like some fantasy

that I,

you know, project back of my youth, the way people do as they get older.

But I don't think it's completely that because I can remember my friends and I just, you know, we could go up to the Yankees Stadium for a night game when we were 11 years old by ourselves on the subway,

come back at 10.30 at night, and our parents would say, hi, how was the game?

It is.

And

I have one.

When you went to Tennessee, did you look at other cities like Knoxville or areas around Tennessee?

Actually, we looked at not Tennessee, we looked at Charleston.

You did?

It's South Carolina, yeah.

Yes.

And

I sort of wanted Charleston because I loved, and I wondered if my California real estate could help me afford it.

I loved those old buildings in Charleston that they have down by the water.

I wanted something, you know, 1870, so who knows, right?

Anyway,

but I got voted by my wife and daughter.

I like Nashville too.

So,

but two weeks after we moved, there was a hurricane and all those buildings had two feet of water in their living room.

So I think it's

God was looking out for me.

One of the things I think people deal with that are not an American refugee yet is they kind of have, I think I used the term once called a monastery of the mind.

They just,

they don't turn on the Oscars.

They don't know who they could care less about the Emmy Awards.

They don't know anything about the Grammys.

They haven't, if you told them who won the NBA championship, they'd have no idea.

If you'd say, when's the last time you saw a movie?

And actually, I know that it's downloaded on Netflix and all that, but if you actually went to a theater, they don't go.

If you said, do you follow the movie stars?

Do you know who the no, they don't know.

They've just dropped out of American popular culture or American institutions because they feel that they're unrecognizable.

You know what I mean by that?

So even though they haven't moved out of California, psychologically or mentally, they're not in California.

I don't blame them.

Yeah, it's an alternate reality that we were created.

Do you think I mean, because we're getting out of time.

What do you think the ultimate trajectory is of

this mass exodus, these refugees and

these new red states politically, do you think that

what's happening is going to be the majority culture?

Or is it, I mean, it's going to, it seems to me that they're not reconcilable.

The Joe Biden, what we're seeing with Joe Biden and the Obama, that type of agenda is not reconcilable.

And what happens?

Who's going to win?

Or which, where's the country?

It seems that the majority of people, I think, are more red state than blue, don't you?

I actually do.

And that's why when I get up in the morning now, I'm on balance optimistic.

And this is not a particularly.

Your book is very, I thought, I found your book very optimistic.

Yeah, well, you know, that's partly my personality.

I mean,

I

made a decision for optimism.

But I think it's in my DNA.

And I thank God for that, because I think optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and pessimism certainly is.

So

I think that our country was the greatest experiment in history that I know of.

And I think it's certainly worth fighting for.

And that's why

partly why we made the move so I could be part of the fight.

You know, I was always sort of part of the fight, but I was part of the fight on the wrong side.

So I got to

be on the right side and I still feel that way.

And yeah, there are problems all the time but otherwise it wouldn't be a fight let me just finish by asking one last question if i could because i think it's really important to um

your book and what you've what you're describing and and conveying and that is why why is it so you take a

why do people when they look at

what's happening in chicago and or what's happening in new york or what's happening in california or what's happening in downtown Seattle or Portland.

And they know it doesn't work.

They know the border is not working.

They know that critical legal theory and letting people out with serious felonies the day they're is not working.

They know that the green solar wind is not going to save us and it's the prices that they look at California's cost of living.

They look at the foreign policy, what we're doing abroad and the flight from Afghanistan or the Chinese.

What is the

why do they keep doing it when they know it doesn't work is what I'm saying.

Is it just the utopian impulse or that they insulate themselves from the fallout of what they're promoting for other people?

But I ask this because you say you're there

in Nashville and you're in this place that you see clearly

did something antithetical to California and therefore it's civilizational.

But there's people inside Tennessee.

One of the reasons you went is to stop the Californization of Tennessee.

Why would they keep doing it when you can see where it leads?

Why do you think that is?

Well,

to give the simple answer, it's a bad habit like smoking.

But

I think a lot of stuff, when I look at California and

I look at people I know, friends, family, coworkers from Hollywood, all that kind of stuff,

I see a lot of fear.

And

a fear fear of change because

their peers will hate them, they'll lose family, they'll lose jobs, most of all, and all of those things.

And fear governs a lot of people.

And,

you know, I think it also explains the 30s in Berlin.

I mean,

you know, there are an awful lot of people who just avert their eyes because it's just too much trouble.

And maybe that's the way of the human race.

I guess it's a lot of the human race.

It's almost a progressive addiction, do you think?

It's generations.

It's tremendous for deaths of addiction.

But I think that addiction is built a lot around fear.

I mean, because

if you go off the reservation for a moment, you get

all of a sudden your phone doesn't ring.

Or you don't get a text message.

Yes.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And then you're alone.

Well, I know that

you asked earlier you know

you know about then you have to build up a whole new set of friends you know you're to me you're a new friend even though we've been friends for 20 years what i mean is i i never would have known victor davis hanson if i hadn't changed my politics well i just talked to a phd uh candidate who's very conservative was asking me to what degree he could be transparent or candid i said if you your thesis which should be disinterested but if it does

betray some traditionalism or it doesn't embrace cultural theory or Marxism, critical theory, I should say, and if you read certain things, and if it gets around that you are not right-wing, but not even conservative, but moderately,

but you're not left, you're not going to get a job, especially because you're a white male.

You're just not going to do it.

And you're going to have to think about why you got your PhD.

But then if you compromise and you say that you're not what you are and you get the job, then you're going to be unhappy unless you would.

And it's going to be...

So I basically said to them, you're in a profession that requires you to emulate the behavior of people in the late Soviet Union of the Warsaw Pact.

You've got to go through the rote

protocols and customs,

and you don't believe in any of it.

Otherwise, you're going to be exiled from the party.

And that's kind of what conservatives or people in blue states do now, I think, to survive if they're going to be in any of the institutions that are controlled by the left, most of which you've spent your life in writing, screenplays, reporting, journalism, academia, et cetera.

And yeah, no, I would have, you know, I couldn't not be honest.

That's why I changed my politics.

I mean,

I couldn't be a writer anymore.

My God.

You know, interestingly, I had a story that was

might be interesting to your listeners.

In 97, I made a movie in Prague and

my AD, which is a very important job of

a beautiful Czech woman of a certain age who had been

years

before the lead commentator on their television shows, the nightly news.

But

she was totally anti-communist, but in in those days, she had to be a communist.

So she would be drunk.

She would drug herself to get on the news every night.

Because

she actually saw the news

wires coming in that said what was actually happening, and she was told she had to lie about it.

It was fascinating to talk to her about this because then I started to realize so many people in our culture are basically that way.

Anyway, this is a fascinating book, everyone.

American Refugees.

It's out January 9th today.

It's from Encounter Books.

The author has been speaking with us for the last hour, Roger L.

Simon.

And if you've ever thought about the people coming into your state, or you've ever thought of leaving your state, or you're ever in a state where people have left,

this is the book for you.

It's endorsed by Vivek Ramaswamy, by Tucker Carlson.

It's really a great book, and I think you're going to love it.

And, Roger, thank you for spending an hour with us on the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Tremendous pleasure, Victor.

I talk to you again soon.

Thank you.