THE MORNING RANT – Can Blue State Refugees Save Red States from the Woke Assault; plus, Transgenderism’s Lucrative Cash Flow Model

For this morning’s Rant, I’d like to discuss a couple recent essays from writers I am finding to be indispensable reading, along with a few of my comments on their essays.

Ace linked to a piece at HotAir few days ago (“Demand For Trans Treatments Overwhelming Minnesota Clinics”) about the booming business for child gender transition in Minnesota since it declared itself a “trans refuge” state.

I won’t bother discussing what these diabolical “treatments” entail. We all know by now. But with more and more states banning them, business is booming in Minnesota, where there is a growing number of doctors who are new to this lucrative surgical fad. In many cases, they are doing very poor work, causing serious medical problems above and beyond the normal problems from these procedures.

Interestingly, Jeffrey Carter of “Points and Figures” just wrote an outstanding essay (“Why the Emphasis on Transgender?”) pointing out why transgenderism has supplanted abortion as the core issue of Democrats and their media army of agenda-pushers.

Both of these stories tie together. As always, follow the money.

Mr. Carter is a business and finance guy with an analytical mind, and he points out, “There are ways to look at this without making value judgments about abortion and transgenderism.” While it can be hard to put aside our emotions about these subjects, this does help clarify why the transgender social contagion is so financially beneficial to those who are promoting it.

An abortion is a one-time revenue event, whereas a sex-change generates a lifetime subscription service of medical treatments that cannot be suspended or canceled. Further, the potential market of those who might be a revenue-producing abortion customer at any given time is a very small percentage of the population.

Once a customer is acquired, there is only one transaction. One and done. An abortion is performed and the customer walks away.

This produces on average $700 of revenue to the abortion provider.

This is not the case with transgenderism cash flows. It is not a one-and-done business model. There is an entire stream of payments that come with a one-time customer acquisition.

The upfront, one-time revenue for the surgery and counseling all by itself is much greater than that of an abortion’s one-time revenue, but the lifetime medical costs for a sex-change are especially lucrative.

The real money is in the drug cocktail Transgenders take for the rest of their lives. They will spend $40 to $400 per month on hormone drugs. The average cost is $2,880 per year. If a person transgenders at age 18, the age of consent, and lives to the full life expectancy of 77, that’s 59 years of consistent payments or 708 months.

Carter calculates the lifetime discounted cash flow from the drug regimen alone to be over $70,000 per transgender patient. That is a pretty compelling reason for those who get a cut of that recurring cash flow to want to expand the number of patients needing a lifetime of treatment.

Mark Pulliam’s writing always strikes a chord with me, because he is also a conservative refugee from Austin who fled to the deep-red sanctuary of East Tennessee. And like me, he is troubled by how RINO-infested the GOP political establishment is here, and he’s also concerned that the local citizenry is unaware of the threat to its traditional conservative culture.

Pulliam wrote a recent review at The American Conservative (“American Refugees: Will the influx of blue state refugees into the heartland ruin the country or save it?”) of Roger Simon’s book “American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States.” I found myself nodding in agreement throughout the entire piece.

Based on his interactions with blue state refugees, Simon finds that, in many cases, the transplants are more conservative and certainly more engaged than the natives, who tolerate establishment-oriented politicians in their states. Simon pulls no punches in his evisceration of the “Republican-in-name-only” political culture in many red states—Tennessee included. Complacent natives, not yet having experienced the disorienting regime change of wokeness, are surprisingly content with the RINO status quo.

Pulliam finds himself in agreement with Simon on the core issue of whether blue state refugees are making their destination states redder or bluer. My observation is the same as theirs - the refugees are making their new states redder.

My Tennessee neighborhood is filling up with refugees from Illinois and other blue states. Some casual conversations have made it clear that they lean conservative, but even more noticeable are the flags and patriotica they display proudly. As Jesse Kelly famously observed while walking neighborhoods during a political campaign, if a house has a flag flying outside, the owner is almost certainly a Republican.

Newly arrived transplants, acutely aware of the peril posed by leftist policies, often find themselves acting like Paul Revere, warning the cliquish locals of the dangers of passivity and complacency.

There is no better anti-communist than those who have lived under communism. Much like the Eastern Europeans in Hungary, Poland, and Czechia who are appalled at Western Europe’s ongoing suicide in pursuit of 21-century communism, those of us who lost our beloved home towns or home states to the radical left are passionate about preserving traditional America where it still flourishes.

While my escape to Tennessee may have been from the red state of Texas, Austin itself had long since become an exclave of California by the time my wife and I left.

For example, so many Californians relocated to Austin, Texas, in order to work in Big Tech that they turned the Capital City into a demographic replica of Silicon Valley. Austin has effectively become a province of California and votes accordingly. However, this has not been the case in Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Tennessee has little in common with Austin.

Those who are relocated from blue states to red states for high tech jobs are often colonizers. Those who flee of their own volition are refugees who will make the red state they relocate to even redder.

I strongly agree with Pulliam’s final line, which stresses a point I have been pounding on recently – we can achieve real victories in the culture wars at the state and local levels, which is where our most important votes are cast.

Red states should embrace freedom-loving blue state refugees, whether they are “real rednecks” or not. In these tumultuous times, patriots must unite. If America is to be saved, the battle will be fought at the local level, and it is here that the blue state refugees and red state natives must learn to work together as allies.

Cynical Publius responded to Pulliam’s piece with an example involving himself as a refugee to a still-red state, and how his efforts to warn the local GOP establishment of the woke assault that is coming was like trying to warn a dinosaur of the incoming meteor.

I can confirm. In 2016 I successfully escaped from California to a deep red Mountain West state. In 2020, after the election, I made an appointment with my GOP state senator to discuss my concerns about voting integrity. She was a late-30s attorney who had lived in the state her whole life and had both her BA and JD from the state university. We ended up talking for over an hour on a wide range of political and social topics beyond just voting. I felt like I was trying to warn a brontosaurus about the incoming meteor. She was still convinced we lived in a Scoop Jackson era of political comity, and was convinced I was greatly exaggerating the threat of woke ideology. In fact, I think she saw ME as a bigger threat because I was trying to change "the generosity of spirit" that defined our very neighborly and kind state. She simply refused to believe that in California and elsewhere there were literally tens of millions of Democrats who actively and aggressively sought to have our state's way of life wholly exterminated. It was a shocking and demoralizing experience.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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