These are both pre-existing tendencies (with the exception of California, which lost population for the first time in 2020 and 2021), but the lockdowns and societal unrest caused by American authorities' bad management of the Covid-19 epidemic appear to have hastened them.

Americans are moving from high-tax, forced-unionism, business-unfriendly blue states like CA and NY with high housing costs to low-tax, right-to-work, economically vibrant, business-friendly red states with lower housing costs like FL and TX. https://t.co/CZqJkEzMSN

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) December 30, 2021

Coasting Isn’t Leadership, It’s Laziness

Red states, however, also tend to accept this situation passively. Rather than seeking to be places of excellence and well-being for their citizens, often red states simply congratulate themselves that they “Aren’t Illinois or California,” and leave it at that.

However, it is not a mark of success to say that one's state isn't as bad as those that have unleashed welfare addicts, homeless addicts, and violent criminals, just as it isn't a mark of success for public schools with middle and upper-class children to perform slightly better than schools that supervise mostly the children of never-married drug addicts. In neither scenario can they claim to have made any progress. They're merely taking credit for the decisions and benefits of others. Leadership isn't about coasting. It's a case of leadership resigning.

The Masculinist's Aaron Renn examines Indiana in a piece for the winter 2021 issue of American Affairs, where Republicans have controlled the legislature for a decade and the governorship since 2004. Many additional red states, especially those in the South and West, can benefit from his study. While Republicans have seen attracting large, primarily low-wage corporations and keeping taxes low as a sign of success, Renn claims that promoting policies that benefit corporate interests has come at the price of serving the state's residents and taxpayers.

In fact, Renn told a local reporter in a follow-up to his piece that "too frequently what's billed as limited government is in reality a special interest giveaway." "...Donald Trump's victory in Indiana, despite his rejection of many key conservative ideas, demonstrates that there is a larger demand for innovative thinking than the GOP leadership would have us believe."

Renn told the reporter “he is a lifelong Republican who is interested in ‘updating the Republican policy toolbox to respond to today’s 21st century realities, not the bygone Cold War era in which the legacy conservative policy consensus was formed.’” His article gives ideas for how local leaders can shift away from Republicans’ habit of subordinating citizens’ rights and freedoms to big business, to instead govern on behalf of those who elect them.

What Does It Mean to Put Citizens First?

“Absent favorable external factors like warm weather, the conservative approach has failed to generate demo­graphic and economic success in states like Indiana,” Renn says. He chronicles how state leaders aimed to improve Indiana the midcentury Republican way, by focusing on fiscal policy such as cutting government spending and taxes, instituting right to work laws, using public money to subsidize politically favored local business districts and development deals, and subsidizing big businesses and career-focused schooling.

In other words, Indiana’s leaders did pretty much the same stuff as the leaders of 2021’s top ten population-growth states, but didn’t get an economic or population boost from it. Renn points out that Indiana isn’t an outlier in this respect. Many Midwestern and Northeastern states have seen the same: “Looking around the Old North region, one will see many states that are a lot like Indiana: low population growth, a stagnant labor force, many shrinking counties, weak job growth, and limited success at attracting higher-wage, new economy industries.”

Renn believes that, similar to schools, variables that politicians have little influence over, such as weather and culture, have the greatest impact on state health. "Rather than thinking the iron law of the marketplace requires us to disfavor our own population in order to gain the favor of the economic gods," Renn said in the interview, "we might instead put our citizens' interests and preferences first."

Fight For Your Voters On…Anything At All

What would that entail? For starters, it would entail Republicans following Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis' lead in openly pushing back against the cultural war. Or battling for their inhabitants on a variety of fronts – education, health, federal regulations and bankrupting programs, fears of job loss, and so on.

"Republican lawmakers in red states need to start caring a lot more about their constituents' priorities than they do now." This is especially crucial now, when most of our major institutions have succumbed to progressive dogma, leaving Republican state governments as one of the few significant institutions left to defend conservative individuals," argues Renn.

On the urging of big corporations, Gov. Mike Pence and the Republican legislature rendered Indiana the most unfriendly to conscience liberties in the country in 2015. Indiana served as a test example for leftist business pressure campaigns, and state Republicans' quick surrender on religious liberty insured that the left would employ corporate cancellation as a key political tool in the future.

It has already spread to the point that President Joe Biden utilized this strategy to push through his unlawful vaccination requirement, while Republicans did little in reaction. On this topic, Indiana's government has likewise refused to safeguard voters from corporate abuse, consistently failing to protect Hoosiers from corporate and state university medical demands that are more stringent than those in many blue states. Amy Coney Barrett, a native daughter and incoming Supreme Court Justice, followed suit. Indiana's governor continues to demand children to wear masks in school or be routinely prevented from attending school for days at a time, a policy that is totally unscientific and inhumane, and which the legislature has failed to address.

Renn uses other examples, such as the state legislature overriding local tenant protections against slumlords, refusing to require employers to allow pregnant employees to use the restroom on the job, and elder abuse in nursing homes: "In Indiana nursing homes, over 20% of Covid-19 patients died, compared to a national rate of 13%." The state GOP's answer was to adopt a bill exempting nursing homes from accountability for deaths that occurred in their care."

"It's perplexing that state Republicans would side with businesses like warehouses against their own pregnant voters," Renn observes, "especially since the warehouse owners are largely major firms that have completely adopted the 'woke' party line and are aggressively antagonistic to conservatism."

For another current example, parents in Indiana, like those all over the country, want their legislators to ban critical race theory in the session that starts this week. Insiders say what they’re most likely to get is a bill that claims to do so while providing no enforcement teeth.

Deliver the Goods, Republicans, Or Die Quickly

Trump stomped on the traditional Republican style of conducting business by pissing on their people and telling them it's raining. In 2020, Indiana voters chose Trump by a 16-point margin. However, Indiana's Republican Party, like that of many other states, is led by people who act more like little Mitch McConnells. That political epoch is a wandering corpse. It's a perfect example of zombie Republicanism.

Flyover Politicians who sell out their own constituents for 30 pieces of campaign silver are unwelcome in America. They want to be in charge. Giving your voters the parts that dropped to the ground after campaign funders have had their fill is hardly a sign of leadership. It means, as Trump did, offering what the base genuinely wants.

One thing Trump delivered was punches that landed in the culture war. Another was protecting and preferring conservative voters, not their enemies.

“State and local governments are some of the few powerful institutions where conservatives retain some control,” Renn notes. “Thus, a prime emerging responsibility of elected leaders at the state level, especially in red states like Indiana, is to use the power of their offices to protect their communities against ideological coercion or abuse from other institutions. Red states must not only be willing to aggressively challenge any federal government overreach; they must also be willing to resist coercive behavior from the private and nonprofit sectors.”

“If Indiana Republicans did implement conservative voter preferences and aggressively defended their voters’ priorities, that might be a draw in itself,” Renn notes. Just look at how Florida has bloomed under a governor who shed the old Republican formula for the new one.

DeSantis is not Trump, but he has learned a lot from him. That is precisely what the remainder of the Republican Party must do, not just for their own political survival, but also for the benefit of their constituents.

Project Veritas founder O’Keefe noted: “Within an hour of one of our reporter’s homes being secretly raided by the FBI, The New York Times we are currently suing for defamation contacted the Project Veritas reporter to ask for comment. We do not know how The New York Times knew about the execution of a search warrant at our reporter’s home, or the subject matter of the search warrant, as the grand jury investigation is secret.”

Four business days after O’Keefe’s apartment was ransacked by the FBI, The New York Times on Nov. 11 published information from internal Project Veritas legal documents. It’s currently not public whether The Times obtained those documents from discovery in Project Veritas’s defamation suit or from an FBI leaker (or leakers). Project Veritas lawyers say they suspect a leaker.

“We have a disturbing situation of the U.S. attorney’s office or the FBI tipping off the New York Times to each of the raids on Project Veritas current and former employees,” O’Keefe lawyer Harmeet Dhillon told Tucker Carlson the evening of Nov. 11.

The FBI currently claims the raids stem from Project Veritas viewing what is alleged to be President Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary. Last week, a judge extended a ban on the Times publishing articles about Project Veritas until at least Dec. 1, reportedly due to its publication of those internal Project Veritas documents.

The FBI's Project Veritas raids therefore served to safeguard not only the Biden family but also The New York Times. It's only the latest instance in a long and tumultuous history of the FBI and the New York Times misusing their positions of power.

The FBI Has Been Politicized From Its Origins

From its very beginning, the FBI was racked with abuse of power. The FBI’s own history notes that “In the early twenties, the agency was no model of efficiency. It had a growing reputation for politicized investigations. In 1923, in the midst of the Teapot Dome scandal that rocked the Harding Administration, the nation learned that Department of Justice officials had sent Bureau agents to spy on members of Congress who had opposed its policies.” Spy on members of Congress — who are supposed to control the FBI.

The infamous J. Edgar Hoover who took the helm after that scandal kept secret police files on his political opponents and used them unlawfully, including to keep multiple presidents from firing him and to manipulate U.S. senators. That’s called “blackmail.”

Things haven’t changed. The long chronicle of FBI abuse of power has only lengthened, and persists to this day. Most recently, there’s the evidence still coming out about FBI incitement and provocations related to the Jan. 6 altercations and the trumped-up Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.

A whistleblower recently claimed the FBI is surveiling moms and dads mad at public schools. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s denials about this don’t look too well against the backdrop of Democrat spy agency heads repeatedly lying to Congress under oath, as well as on TV, and facing zero consequences for doing so.

Those are only the most recent stories made public. One of the biggest stories of the past five years has been Spygate, the collusion between Democrat politicians and spy agencies including the FBI to frame and obstruct the man Americans elected president in 2016.

The FBI’s election interference also affected 2020. As Victor Davis Hanson noted recently, the FBI “did not disclose that it had possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop at a time when the media was erroneously declaring the computer inauthentic.” The FBI had possession of that laptop in 2019, in fact. As we now know, polling indicates that if the public had been informed of that story, Joe Biden likely would not have generated enough votes to declare himself president.

Hanson also resurfaces “the agency’s inability to follow up on clear information about the dangers posed by criminals as diverse as the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.”

Without writing a book about the FBI’s endemic failures on every level — investigative, political, constitutional — suffice it to say that the past five Trump years may have intensified this politicized use of police power, but they are not in any way an anomaly. It almost appears as if comprising a secret police is what the agency exists to do, using the law enforcement part as its cover story.

The NYT Has Propagandized For Tyrants For a Century

As Ashley Rindberg writes in this year’s “The Grey Lady Winked,” The New York Times has a long history of pimping propaganda for totalitarians and tyrants. It’s about as old as the FBI’s institutional history of using police powers for politics instead of justice, dating back to at least the 1920s.

In numerous instances, the FBI and New York Times have worked together to manipulate public affairs. In fact, The New York Times has been a routine location for FBI and other intelligence leakers to plant news stories that often turn out later to be false but still accomplish political goals. In other words, they help the deep state manufacture and spread propaganda.

Just consider a few recent stories we know about that demonstrate this. There are plenty more, many related to starting or perpetuating wars, which are lucrative for intelligence agencies and news organizations alike.

Without intelligence agency leaks, often of false information, to The New York Times and similar outlets, the Spygate attempt to subvert the 2016 election might not have come off at all. The FBI was deeply involved in these leaks and the whole collusion conspiracy, to the point that my colleague Mollie Hemingway described intelligence agencies and corporate media as “co-conspirators” in the operation.

Of course, the Times' employment of FBI leakers isn't confined to Spygate. The New York Times, for example, recently published a false story about Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick's death after Jan. 6, 2021, which stifled public debate about election integrity by falsely linking such concerns to murder and providing political cover for ongoing show trials of Democrats' political opponents. Another evident example is governments' prolonged suspension of individuals' rights and regular lives in reaction to COVID, which was definitely aided by media panic, as seen by The New York Times' COVID "death map."

Take a step back for a second and imagine the power of being able to blackmail any American, member of Congress, or the president. That’s the power to control government itself. Consider also that the power to determine what the public knows also confers massive political power in a democratic republic. Control public opinion, and you control the country.

This is what the FBI and New York Times have done in the past century, sometimes in concert. That’s why the FBI raiding an antagonist of its longtime information operations partner, and possibly leaking information obtained in that raid to that partner, is no surprise at all.

As long as such ops keep working, there will be more government-media joint information operations designed to keep control of the United States well out of voters’ hands.