Heading west to escape liberal tyranny

As our nation navigates a “return to normalcy” in a post-Covid world, one return most workers won’t be making is to the office. And as an estimated 40.7 million American professionals plan to be working fully remotely within the next five years, expect the great political divide to widen as liberals and conservatives move farther apart, both ideologically and physically.

With working from home becoming the norm, “home” for many people is changing. “Anywhere from 14 to 23 million Americans are planning to move as a result of remote work,” an Upwork.com study taken at the height of the pandemic found. “[N]ear-term migration rates may be three to four times what they normally are.”

Where are workers moving to? Away from cities, for starters. A majority (52.5 percent) of the Upwork respondents reported wanting to move somewhere with more affordable housing, and even more (54.7 percent) said they were planning to move “beyond regular commute distances” (more than two hours away).

More recently, the Associated Press reported on a trend of real estate companies “advertising themselves to people on the right, saying they can take them out of liberal bastions such as Seattle and San Francisco and find them homes in places such as rural Idaho.”

According to Todd Savage, who runs “Flee the City,” a “strategic relocation” real estate and consulting firm that markets property to “liberty-minded” clients with a “desire to live free anywhere in rural America,” the movement is nothing new, though it has intensified in the last couple years.

“The Flee the City movement has been around for decades and started in the 1960s and early '70s with ‘libertarian-minded renegade hippies,’ as they were called back then,” Savage told me. “They sought land in rural areas all over the country, including Northern Idaho (Sandpoint) and northwest Montana (the Yaak). They simply wanted to be left alone to live the way they saw fit. Today, folks from all walks of life, but mainly conservative libertarians to the religious right, have felt pressure to simply vote with their feet and make a strategic relocation to a rural region of the country. For many, Idaho and Montana are seen as the last refuge of the patriot, as they offer lower taxes, less government oversight and more freedom regarding sustainable living and respect for the Bill of Rights for all.”

Savage said clients he works with are “simply tired of the tyranny” — soft-on-crime policies, “insane regulations killing small businesses” and immoral public schools — and are “choosing to flee to a state and locale that they see as a bastion for liberty in dark times.”

A common theme among such movements is a preparedness element, with conservatives seeking to live off the land instead of relying on government or on the institutions subject to Big Brother’s strong arm. Savage markets parcels of land in Idaho or Montana “where you can start a garden, grow your own organic food, start a family, homeschool your children and teach them the ways of our founding fathers while building a legacy for your family for generations…”

This article was originally published by The Spectator. Read the full piece here.