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Jan. 15, 2024 - Epoch Times
31:57
FULL INTERVIEW: Why Leaving Los Angeles Was the Best Decision of My Life: Roger Simon
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We're having a mass migration that's been going on for seven or eight years, or maybe even longer, from blue to red states.
And what that is going to add up to is not yet clear.
In this episode, we sit down with Epoch Times editor-at-large Roger Simon.
He's an award-winning novelist, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and author of the new book, American Refugees, the untold story of the mass exodus from blue states to red states.
They wanted an America that they either had grown up with or dreamed of.
We also take a look at Roger's unique perspective on the Israel-Hamas war.
They were offered many times a country.
So it became clear to me that they didn't want a two-state solution.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Roger Simon, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Great to be here again.
Roger, of course, I love reading your column every day on the Epoch Times.
Always something new and fascinating and beautifully written.
And now you've put this into another book, American Refugees.
Quite honestly, it was such a pleasure to read.
But let's start with here.
What is happening in America right now?
Give me your succinct explanation here.
Well, we're having a mass...
It won't be succinct, but I'll try.
We're having a mass migration that's been going on, I think, for seven or eight years from...
or maybe even longer from blue to red states.
And what that is going to add up to is not yet clear.
But one part of it is clear that if we want to save the republic...
The one that was started by the founders, it will be by saving the red states, because the blue states have predominantly lost it already.
And it's hard to know whether they can be recaptured easily.
But the red states are sort of teetering.
And one of the things in my book, I think, Is the description of where they are now, what happened to all the people that came there from California and New York and Illinois, looking for maybe a nirvana of the past of America, looking for Norman Rockwell's America, and found it's a little bit woke here, too.
And, you know, the culture clash that ensued from that, which is, I think, permeates the book.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
That's actually one of the most fascinating finds of the book, right?
That the people that you call are the cavalry, I think, you know, are arriving at these states expecting to be...
They end up becoming sort of agents of cultural change in these red states themselves.
Yes, you know, here was the basic...
I would say ignorance accident occurred.
And my wife wasn't, all of us were.
We did not realize exactly what red states were like before we moved there.
That's not to say we hadn't visited.
I was in the Civil Rights Movement, so I visited South Carolina in 1966, thank you.
So I've seen it.
But it's so different from living in a place.
But you were living in L.A. Let's say it, right?
Forty years in Hollywood Hills, I was in the bowels of Hollywood, so I was in an extreme kind of leftist environment.
But I expected something that doesn't really exist anywhere anymore, and maybe it really never existed.
So when we arrived, all of us, The book has, I think you see, a little epigraph that was described for me by a man I use in the book as a guru that I call Rocky Top.
He calls himself Rocky Top.
I can't say who he is because I've been sworn to secrecy because he's someone who was heavily duty in politics here in D.C. and also in In Tennessee.
So this man acted as my subliminal guide, sort of my Don Juan for the book.
I used an epigraph to the book from a story he told me which was, he had heard this, a place in rural Tennessee which is quite different from Nashville where I live.
They were building a very fancy house for two years and no one knew who it was and finally when it was finished the woman of that new house came in and said, we're from California but we want to tell you that We're not bringing our California values with us if you're afraid of that.
This is the kind of thing that's gone on in that state all the time.
My friend Glenn Reynolds, who is known as the Instapundit, a very well-known blog, he and others originally, when all this migration was beginning, were going to set up a welcome wagon.
And the welcome wagon was to explain to these people, you're in the South now, don't bring these California values with you, blah, blah, blah.
And I started to tell them, Glenn, it's the reverse.
These people who did this Are more constitutionalist than the people in Tennessee.
And of course, that is a rank and despicable generalization.
Generalizations suck, but it's true.
It's true to the level that generalizations are true.
If you think about it logically, who in the world wants to get up and move 2,000 miles with their family and start all over again or start a new job or do all kinds of things.
I mean, I was privileged because I'm a writer and I carry my work, but most people don't.
And the people who did that The big excuse was, oh, they're all doing it for the money because there's no taxes in Tennessee, there's no taxes in Texas, blah, blah, blah.
But the truth of the matter is that's, of course, true, but that's not the reason that they really did it.
They really did it because they wanted something else.
They wanted an America that they either had grown up with or dreamed of, and they didn't necessarily get it.
And that created an interesting clash.
And it was this, you know, kind of traditional view of Western culture, the sort of, you know, I guess the dream of American culture, the dream of Western culture, the self-reliance, the meritocracy, the faith in many cases.
And you talk about that quite a bit in the book.
Oh, yes.
I talked to you earlier about this.
That faith...
If you live in California, where I lived in California, California's really a couple of different states because it's like a country.
Where I lived in California, most of the people, religion is definitely something in the far back door, unless they're joined in some kind of very strange cult or something.
That the latest guru came up with.
But other than that, they don't talk about it because they're all worried about their careers and their girlfriends and all the rest of the very material lives.
And I was like that, more or less.
I mean, I like to pretend to myself I was more serious than that, but I wasn't.
And I went to this man's house, you know, for a political gathering.
They're trying to get some money for a guy who was running for Congress.
So I met these people.
The next day, it turned out I ran into the same guy in the gym.
And the guy said to me, oh, it was great to see you.
We'll welcome you to Nashville, blah, blah, blah, very, very nice.
What church are you joining?
And I went, well, I'm Jewish.
And so he did a beat, and he went, hmm.
Then he said, well, what synagogue are you joining?
But I realized something right away, that the assumption was there, that part of the world, that you did that.
Whether you were Christian or Jewish, you did it.
American refugees, and the reason the title is there is because we really are refugees within our own country, from very different cultures.
It took me several years before I became more comfortable with faith.
It's near the end of the book quite deliberately because there's nothing more important than faith.
I call the chapter steeples.
Because if you go to a place like Tennessee, you're struck.
All of a sudden, there's steeples all over them.
What is this?
I mean, if you're driving around California, yeah, you would see a church area there.
Yeah, you'd see a synagogue on Wilshire Boulevard.
But most of the time, you're seeing sushi bars.
Or you're seeing Korean restaurants, or you're seeing Taco Sands, or you're seeing farms, or you're seeing people in flashy cars, but you're not seeing steeples.
I mean, they are there, and there are famous churches in Southern California and so forth.
But it doesn't permeate the culture, and it doesn't permeate your mind.
And I talk in the book because Not just with you and other people here at the Epoch Times.
I became very interested in Falun Gong.
I also was surrounded there by evangelical Christians who I began to respect a great deal.
And then I also became more interested, and I always have been a little bit interested, in the Chabad movement and Judaism.
So I ended up, and toward the end of the book, if you read the book, you'll see that I'm a very confused man who has interests in all of those things.
I happen to think that's not bad.
I happen to think they all, if you read carefully and know what you're talking about, have a lot to do with each other.
But I have more evangelical friends now than anything else in Nashville.
After they got to know me well, they would come up and say, What is it with the Jews that don't like Israel?
I would have a million answers to that.
There are a million answers.
It is a world in which faith had tremendous significance.
The thing I liked most about the South when I got there is everybody was very nice.
And I started to think it was a trick.
It didn't go on for that long, but I did think it was a trick.
Why is everybody being so nice?
Because I'd grown up in New York and lived most of my life in Los Angeles.
You know, this is the kind of place where if you're at the supermarket and everybody says, oh, you're just moved here, you're wonderful, come, where'd you come from?
All that kind of stuff.
Hey, you don't even know me.
That's a remarkable point.
There's more community, right?
I mean, that's what you're talking about.
Oh, totally more community, except that the dark side, and you have to face right away, is that all these red states, I think you can almost say all, There's a war going on between the people of the state and the people who run the states and who are in the cities.
They are working from those cities outward to change these red states into being mini Californians.
Well, I want to talk about that a bit more in a moment.
But before we go there, you mentioned, you know, you said people ask you, what about these Jews that don't like Israel?
Okay.
We've just had a very kind of clarifying moment with this Hamas invasion of Israel, unprecedented number of deaths in a very short time of Israelis.
Do you think some of the people who quote-unquote don't like Israel are thinking differently now?
If they're not, God help us.
Because I can't imagine anything more clarifying than what went on.
If that doesn't affect people, I don't know what will.
But what makes it different in your mind?
Right now, what makes it different?
Oh, the extremity of the actions.
These were almost Holocaust-type actions.
Infanticides and things like that are just so horrifying to the human mind that you realize, and you hope you realize, you hope people will go home How can they stand it?
It's a terrifying moment in a lot of ways because you want to know that most people are going to recoil as this is beyond humanity.
I mean, animals kill each other, but they kill each other to live.
They need food.
This is people who did it in a one-time manner.
You're Jewish, I kill you.
And then laugh about it or rape them or whatever.
As someone was telling me on the phone the other day, that's an insult to animals.
Because animals have a reason to kill.
These people had no reason to kill.
Right.
Well, from the far left, which you yourself once hailed from, there's a lot of people saying, well, this is justified because of the terrifying and terrible Israeli policy over God knows how many years.
How do you respond to that?
The reason I'm asking about this As you know, you have a very wide breadth of experience, both around political ideologies and people, as we're discussing here.
Well, I've been wrestling this for a long time.
And I will have to go back to the days of the 1967 war.
When Israel defeated these countries all at once and enlarged, I was one of those who in those days felt that, well, land for peace was the way to do this.
And then along came the Oslo Accords.
I was so moved and so happy that there was going to be land for peace.
And I think Bill Clinton, someone to whom I thought was okay then, now have less good feelings about, but you could see he was very excited to have done this and that everybody wanted to believe that Yasser Arafat was for real.
But Yasser Arafat was not for real.
He did not want land for peace.
He was just stalling for time and getting money.
And then it turned out that he was followed by this man Abbas, Mahmoud Abbas, who took over the Palestinian Authority, and they too Don't really want land for peace.
They were offered many times a country.
At least five or six times.
And in the case of Ehud Omar, who is the Israeli Prime Minister and a real peacenik, practically a hippie, they refused him.
So it became clear to me that they didn't want a two-state solution.
So then you have Hamas.
Someone's admitted from that.
They also said, and I was in Paris one time and heard this live and wanted to run and hide, they said, Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the guests.
Well...
That is not a Tuesday solution or any kind of comedy.
So the people who are saying that now, I don't think...
I just gave a quick pre-see of that history, very quick.
Dave's people don't know any of it.
The horrible part and the difficult part is I don't think they want to hear it.
So let me jump in here, okay?
So one of the themes, you know...
One of the reasons why the refugees moving from the blue states is that a lot of the blue states I guess getting rid of history would be the right way of saying it.
History is going to be what we say it is because that will help us chart the future.
That's very glib.
It's not exactly something like that.
What you were just saying strikes me in a similar way.
It's of course critical to understand the reality of how things got to this point today.
Hamas's intent, for example, very transparent, consistent, and very deliberate intent for its entire existence.
Let's come back to America.
The effect of getting rid of history or manufacturing new history like the 1619 Project to justify the ideological persuasion you have.
That would be one of these things that people are running from.
That is one of the things they're running from.
But here's an ironic point on that, is that every few days, I play tennis a lot for my health, because I love it.
And on the route from my house to the tennis, which is about 10 minutes, I drive down Robert E. Lee Drive.
When my wife and I first moved there, we said, that's amazing.
They haven't changed the name?
It's still Robert E. Lee Drive, and there's actually right next to it is Confederate Drive.
Anyway, it's not a particularly lavish neighborhood, Robert E. Lee Drive.
It's not Old South where you could see some, you know, antebellum mansions.
It's kind of middle-classy.
You know, one of the things I write about a lot in American refugees is our culture of yard signs in politics.
And in that particular street, always Democratic yard signs for ultra-liberal candidates.
But they still don't take Robert E. Lee away.
Relating to what you're saying, They don't do that so much down south.
What you have all over the place in Tennessee are plaques of what happened at a certain place.
And most of them are, this was a Civil War battlefield, that was a Civil War, everything was a Civil War battlefield.
They just mark it.
And that's probably what should have done with You know, Teddy Roosevelt in front of the Natural History Museum in New York, or the Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson in the City Hall.
I thought this was such a great observation you made, you know, because you kind of, you go in the book, you kind of struggle through this question, but ultimately, you know, why not have this here with an explanation of what the meaning is?
Like, this is the, you know...
I think George Santayana in his famous cliché about those who don't remember the past or condemned to repeat it and all that, he would probably approve of that because that's really telling you something.
Jefferson's a fantastic character.
He's obviously a great genius.
Look at the buildings of the University of Virginia and all that.
Not too many people have that many skills.
And yet he was a slaveholder.
He undoubtedly wrestled with it, maybe more than we know.
They all did.
Washington did.
They all wrestled with it.
Why throw that information away?
Slavery has been as old as civilization.
It's treated in our country like we invented slavery, which is kind of a funny idea.
They missed reading Exodus, I guess.
Another issue that you mentioned, which again I guess I can't help but think about in the context of everything we talked about, is civil war.
I don't sit around thinking about civil war very seriously.
But it seems like you and some people that you're talking to in this book are thinking about it seriously, and I found that very concerning.
I had a number of discussions with the man I describe as Rocky Top in that, because both of us fear it a lot.
I don't know if it is merely because of living where the Civil War is right around you all the time with all those flax.
And so I'm looking at it every day, almost.
And I try to understand what's happening in this country and how extreme it's become because I am old enough to remember the 60s and 70s very well.
I was a Student agitator of the time of a certain sort.
And people, because I'm older, ask me, well, is this worse than the 60s or is it better than the 60s?
I say, I tell them, it's worse.
I think the social fabric is more driven apart.
Now, I may be looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, quote-unquote, but I don't think so.
I think that most of us...
People who were protesting the Vietnam War or involved in the civil rights movement, as I was, always thought it would be okay and we're making things better.
I don't think people have that same feeling now.
There's a feeling that the center may not hold.
And I hate to say that.
Well, you know, one of the things we're trying to do here, right, at EPOC, for example, is to facilitate some conversations, for example, with lawmakers or prominent people with very, very different political persuasions, but around an issue they can agree on, or there can be some discussion, you know, as a starting point.
That's very much similar to an experience I had starting PJ Media many, many years ago now, in 2004.
Our original intention was to do just that.
But having been a professional writer all my life, I said, we're going to pay the writers.
We were going to hire writers on both sides to argue issues.
And the writers on the left were demanding more money.
Not the writers on the right.
Now, the reason for this is that in much the way that on Fox or Newsmax or something like that, the left-wing contributor has negotiating power, they had the same thing with us and we said no.
And then the whole idea fell apart.
So all I'm saying is I wish you luck.
But I think you'll have more luck because you're more established.
Well, we have to try.
There's just places where there's no discussion.
But I think if we can have some discussion on the few things we do agree on, even when we're very suspicious of the person, maybe we can shift things a bit, at least in the right direction.
I am concerned that the lack of ability to see a person—we were talking about Israel moments ago, When you see another person as somehow less than human or just, you know, beyond the pale, you hear these terms being thrown around, Nazi, whatever, right?
Hitler, blah, blah.
So what that really means is, I don't need to talk to you.
You're beyond the pale.
There's no point in discussing.
But that also means that I can do things to you that I wouldn't do to a human being that I respect.
So that's, to me, the dangerous direction.
Dehumanization.
100%.
Dehumanization.
I've seen that.
So in American refugees, in a way, having all these people exit...
Blue states that are actually the strong holders of the constitutional values and strong faith and things like that.
They don't want that anymore.
Are you concerned that this is creating greater bubbles and maybe fostering that civil war scenario?
Yes.
Unfortunately, yes.
I have to admit it because I'm part of it.
I mention it in the book, as you know.
I mention that issue.
And speaking personally, it had gotten untenable for me to live where I was living and my family.
I mean, because much like Tucker Carlson, I had warnings.
In my mailbox scrawled writings, we know where you live.
And also, I think moving is not a bad thing in general.
There's much to be gained by new horizons.
And also, one of the things I discovered while I was writing the book was that there are many, many more people who think about it than do it.
I had a lot of phone call conversations with friends in New York and L.A. and other places.
So what's it like?
They would say, what's it like?
And this went on for a couple of years.
I mean, it wasn't like, because they would say, well, you know, I would, for instance, well, is it better to live in Franklin or Nashville?
They're really getting into their specifics.
What's the school like in this place?
And all the rest of the things.
And you know after a while they're never going to leave.
Because there's a certain mentality and a certain kind of person that moves on and another kind of doesn't.
And that's a kind of sub-theme of this book.
But I think we can look at the whole refugee thing in a more optimistic way.
I think the internal refugee thing is really optimistic, but the refugee thing of the people that come to this country and have, you know, come in not illegally, not members of Hamas or whatever coming across the border, but the kind of people that built this country were people willing to leave.
They were people who sought a better life psychologically.
Well, and what's really interesting is, at least early on, I think a lot of them were actually ideological or religious refugees, not people doing it for basically, you know, the quote-unquote better life from the perspective of money.
And something I've discovered over the last year is that it is actually fundamentally different.
The people who have the motivation, I need freedom, I need to be able to practice my faith, and that's the reason I'm moving, I'm escaping, versus I'm just looking for a better life.
It's just very, very different groups of people.
Yes, and my contention in the book is that a good percentage of the people that came to these states in the South now are people who are looking for more than just More than just an easier life for themselves with no taxes.
Even though, like you said, the money might be a factor.
Of course it is.
You know, who wants to pay taxes?
I mean, Jeff Bezos, as we know, doesn't want to pay taxes.
What is the most shocking thing you discovered?
In your adventures.
And by the way, I'll just mention, the book to me, as I was reading it, it makes me think of a kind of an almanac.
Right.
It's over our times, you know.
It's very interesting that way.
It just occurred to me.
I was thinking, what is an almanac anyway?
But yes.
You know, I think shocking is a big word for it.
I think what I had is more of a growing up, which means a certain amount of disillusionment, a certain amount of maturity, and then out of that, with faith, more happiness.
You know, Roger, I think we're going to need to finish up shortly.
I'm going to write myself into the story a bit here.
Part of the almanac, so to speak, is this adventure that we actually shared together in Nashville, organizing the primary debate for one of the Tennessee districts.
I hope you enjoyed the encounter.
I did, and it was very interesting because it speaks to a number of the things that we've just been talking about.
But one thing that struck me, because it was like getting the play-by-play from the outside, I don't usually get to see that, is I think we organized something pretty unique in the debate.
I've not heard, we just kind of made it.
I think it was very successful and hasn't been replicated since, but I don't think it's been done before.
I think I would have to put that down there as a treasured experience.
And I hope you share that.
Absolutely.
It's a treasured experience.
And you learn from treasured experiences that if you put special effort into a unique idea, just do it.
Don't be afraid to do it, just do it!
Our dream was that it would take off and all around the country people would do this kind of debate instead of the nonsense that we all watch.
But, and guess what?
It didn't happen.
On the other hand, it didn't happen.
And a lot of people saw it, and I have never met anyone who was there or watched it on Epoch TV or NTD. They told me they didn't find it very interesting.
Everyone said it was.
Now, that means that it's implanted in brains.
So maybe the little acorn will grow.
We'll see.
Well, Roger, a final thought as we finish?
I wrote this book in part as a kind of layman's guidebook to anybody considering moving.
Not in a way that shows you that there are pluses and minuses.
Right.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Yeah.
But in the end, I think it's good.
Well, Roger Simon, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again.
Well, great.
I hope we'll do it again.
I hope we'll write another book.
Thank you all for joining Roger Simon and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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