Tales abound of normal people fleeing blue states to escape a laundry list of ills. Taxes, illegals, crime, homelessness, drugs, gangs, taxes, regulations, fraud, democrats, taxes, did I miss any? I did. All that COVID crap they pulled moved a small mountain of people, belongings, and U-Hauls from Blue States to Red States. But you don’t hear much about that happening in reverse.
We’ve actually volunteered to help New Hampshire Democrats pack so they can live where their values are in full bloom. Massachusetts is just across the border, as are Vermont and Maine. Close enough that you can still jump the border to buy things without the taxes you love and then take them back home, where you brag about your scheme to your progressive neighbors. The ones who would have ratted you out for having too many people over (outside and masked) for a BBQ in 2021.
Silence is, after all, violence.
If you wanted to cross more than one border to get away, there’s New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, all ready and willing to tax your labor and then everything you buy with what’s left. And plenty of other taxes on everything else to still pay for a government they all know can’t be big enough.
Then there’s Canada, where, once the weight of what you think the government should do has worn you down enough that same government you love will ask if you’d like to kill yourself.
We can’t seem to get them to leave, which is why stories about the Red state to Blue state migration are rare. Is it because they sound like this one?
A couple from Austin, Texas, traded the occasional hurricane and heat wave for the gritty realities of progressive governance in Bangor, Maine—and promptly woke up to human feces on their front porch. Far from reconsidering their grand escape from “catastrophic” weather, Shawn and Sara Good framed the disgusting incident as a minor inconvenience worth celebrating in the pages of the Bangor Daily News.
The great thing about TDS, or maybe the slightly less viral but still terminal Red State Derangement disorder, is that someone crapping on your porch is an improvement over lower taxes and the government leaving you alone more than wherever you landed.
According to the AI overview, “Bangor, Maine, frequently reports some of the highest statistical crime rates in the state (over 104 crimes per 1,000 people).”
NeighborhoodScout ranks Bangor as safer than 3% of US cities (Austin is safer than 4% of US Cities, by the way).
If you want Maine’s version of a typical Blue City/Blue state experience, Bangor is the place to be. It has 40 crimes per square mile compared to 2/mile statewide (Maine being a mostly huge open bunch of nothing without enough people or things to make crime possible). Texas, which is 8.5 times larger and has even more open space, does have a higher crime rate per capita statewide than Maine, if that matters.
The Bangor Daily News presented the Goods as sympathetic climate migrants seeking a safer, more aligned community. They had endured extreme heat, tornadoes, snow, and ice in Texas. Yet every region of America contends with natural challenges.
You blew it on the safer community bit, unless you lived in a particularly awful part of Austin, but the city is blue, so that’s probably your fault too.
As for Climate Change, guess what? You’re about to experience some. The average annual temperature in Austin, Texas, is 70 degrees. Bangor’s is 45. Winter in Austin might dip into the low sixties, while in Bangor that looks a lot more like nine. As in nine degrees, and since that’s an average, you’ll experience a change that has negative numbers before we add in the wind chill.
Bangor is also not as culturally diverse. Austin is majority minority with only 47% white folks, while Bangor is 88% white. You are also likely squatting on stolen land, taken from the Penobscot people, who may have been in the area since just after the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago.
Colder, whiter, more dangerous, but liberal, in a smaller state filled with Republicans, but not in numbers that can overcome those in the urban progressive plantations. Oh, and porch pooping.
It might not be the climate change you were hoping for, but on the bright side, they also offshore their emissions to third-world countries and pretend it’s not affecting the planet because they can’t see it.
Welcome to Maine.
