Inside the conservative Facebook group cheerleading a California exodus

When Leaving founded California in 2018, he envisioned it as a place to contest about current events in his state.

“I knew I was not the only one who felt this way, dissatisfied with the way things were going, and had no end in sight,” he said — and he pointed to the California state legislature aside. In his view of the foreseeable future, one reason for this is to have Democratic superior competencies.

It took about six months to reach 200 members.

Then the group started clicking with other disgruntled, often right-leaning Californians. “I would publish articles about businesses that left California and it started growing from there,” he said.

“Most of us saw what California became years ago because of ongoing policies,” he said.

(Hoover InstituteA conservative think tank reported that businesses in California left the state last year due to high taxes and regulations. Despite the migration of tech empires in the Bay Area, other experts companies will not leave the basis of the skills and opportunities available in the state.)

At the end of 2019, the group had a modest member of around 2,000 people. Then 2020 struck.

“Of course my timing was fine,” he said.

Whenever Gilliam published an article or initiated a conversation vaguely expressing the disaster and gloom in Golden State, membership increased. The lockdowns that followed the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, among others, the Black Lives Matter protests, bushfires, and vaccination authorizations – each led to an increase in new people wanting to participate.

“They’re like, ‘Okay, okay, we have to close,’ but they can’t handle the riots,” he said. “Or they lift the shutdown, but they can’t handle the fires. It looks like everyone has reached a breaking point.”

“We feel like we’ve been forced out … Most people don’t want to leave this air, the beauty, everything else.”

And then it turned around.

Gilliam defended his real estate in good faith – currently working at a real estate marketing company – reached out to several real estate agents and turned Leaving California into a community for people looking for a way out, politically motivated or not.

He founded a separate group, Life After California, to openly celebrate how good life is outside of the country’s most populous state.

It looks at over 80,000 members between the two groups. Where most people want to move? Outside of Texas, it particularly points to Austin, Idaho, and Tennessee, which emerged as a major technology hub.

During this time, he remained true to one belief: California is dying a slow, inevitable death.

“I believe in the next three to five years,” he told SFGATE, “I think millions of Californians will go because they can’t afford to stay here any longer.”

If you’re one of those people who want to move, Gilliam and his community will be happy to help you move.

Within Leaving California and its sister group, Nextdoor, a micronutrient that combines real estate websites and disdain for California politics, forms a critical mass of content designed to finally bid farewell to a disgruntled, possibly conservative Californian.

There are some articles that focus solely on the affordability of the outside world. “The best part is I don’t feel so distorted every time I get paid,” says one parent who uprooted his life in California to move to Texas. “I feel very happy to be able to give my child the chance to survive in the world.”

Another woman in Tennessee playfully shared photos of dollar eggs at her local grocery store.

Meanwhile, there are others concerned about the cost of moving one-way trucks out of state – a sign of alleged mass migration Outside of California. (One of the carriers said a moving truck costs about $ 3,000 just to move to Arizona.)

But for every correspondence showcasing a fabulous home on the cheap, or for a breakup looking for clues about moving services, Democrats have at least a few punches thrown freely. Key targets: Governor Gavin Newsom, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Democratic mayors of San Francisco or Los Angeles, or just “lib” as an unspecified audience.

A post about a high pressure shower head ended with “Stupid libs !!” Added the hashtag “#keepinitred” to a woman sharing her family’s debut to Idaho.

“Leave your blue politics in California,” one commentator proudly said of a blue mover. “California is not the rest of the country.”

Gilliam will be the first to say that the group’s collective political ideology is extremely conservative – whatever he says, not on purpose.

“Obviously I will not eliminate someone who is liberal or conservative. I will not prevent them from being in the group. I want them in the group. But I will say that most of the people in the group look that way. Be conservative.”

(This is evident in the description of Leaving California, which perhaps has traditional conservative talking points: “People need to leave California for a better life, less traffic, lower taxes, less regulation, better education, lower cost. a group dedicated to helping life etc. “)

Depending on your membership in these groups, you have the understanding that wherever you go you won’t be voting blue, similar to the old park ranger principle of not littering your campsite or leaving anything behind.

“Because of the same policies that got California where it is, they don’t want to move somewhere else where they have the same problems in 5, 10 years,” said Gilliam.

However, the moderators of the group are aware of California’s urge to sneak out. (The number of moderators on the page increased by about a dozen; however, he estimates that around 90% of the posts were successful.)

One of the basic rules in Leaving California’s guidelines says “Most people who join the group already know why they want to leave.”

From time to time new members of the group – middle class, politically neutral or lefts who have returned to their homes or retired, very ballyhooed technicians The flock to other, largely liberal metropolitan areas that became safe, low-tax havens clashed with the group’s beet-red roots.

Christine Mettel is one of those people.

He loved his pre-epidemic life in San Francisco, where he rented a studio in Mission. He currently loves California, especially the Bay Area.

Mettel first moved to the city more than ten years ago when he attended art school at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has since built a career in event marketing and works in Bay Area heavyweights such as Live Nation, SFMOMA, and Google.

When the pandemic broke out, the studio he moved to two years ago began to feel lonely.

“Calls for zoom did not fill the gap left by hugs, parties and concerts,” he told SFGATE. “IM in depression.”

Then his father died.

To move back to Arizona and reunite with her grieving family, she turned upside down the sweet Bay Area existence as much as a farewell party outside. “I was far from my family and hadn’t hugged for months,” he said.

A colleague told him about Leaving California after reading it in the New York Times; Mettel agreed that he could share some information about leaving the state. He says he learned a little from the members. “It’s fun to live them indirectly,” he said. “Like me, most are remote workers who can now choose to live anywhere.”

But for him, entertainment turned into evil.

“Sometimes the conversation there is upbeat and funny,” he said. “Then the other 90% of the polarized ‘Republicans’ posters blame their disappointment on the fact that California is a blue state,” Mettel told SFGATE. He has silenced the group ever since.

Victoria Howard is another member who is planning to leave California soon. Howard has been working as a nurse in Castro Valley, where he has lived for nearly 30 years.

He joined the group with an eye on Montana. His wife revealed to SFGATE, he fell in love with fly fishing in the area, a love he has since cultivated.

Howard plans to retire, sell his home, and move to the hip college town of Missoula, Montana, not far from the state’s natural splendor.

“We started imagining what our retirement would look like in our apartment in Montana,” he said. “There is no longer any need to fish, fish, watch the fish passing by the condo without having to go anywhere.”

Expressing his concerns about the homelessness crisis, epidemic and natural disasters, he says he is not “crazy” about the community while he is now sharing the same complaints with the members of the group.

He recalled that he had told the group that they were planning to move to the Treasury State. Someone immediately commented that “you have to be careful because it is full of liberals.”

“I really had to hold my tongue and not respond. I don’t see myself as a Democrat or a Republican,” he said, “but that’s not the main reason for leaving California as it is for everyone.”

With a newly discovered national spotlight on Leaving California – and with the assumption that millions of Gilliams will leave the state – the group will inevitably face some growing pain as it expands.

While people who have historically moved to the red states have sworn to vote blue, the group has already faced some internal tensions amid its rapid expansion.

“If you’re a left-leaning person and you come to the group and say ‘I want to move to Dallas and vote blue,’ you’re going to jump,” he said with a laugh.

Some posters already acknowledge this inner tension, with a person moving to Maryland changing his role to indicate the fact that historically he knew the blue state was not popular among the group.

But at this stage of growth, a few questions remain: Are you maintaining the white, conservative resentment that Leaving California is based on? Are you on both sides of the group, admitting that the request to leave California goes beyond those that accommodate the political grievances?

It seems that Gilliam has no desire to give up the current policy of the group. He doesn’t seem too interested in finding any compromise between conservative and more liberal members.

Some of the members of Leaving California see a state that is irreparable, driven by liberal politics that it cannot be separated from California’s identity.

“The problems with California I see have no end,” he said, “they have no end. The thing is, despair, he [things are not] It will change for the better, and most of us don’t think that will change anytime soon. “

But this sense of despair doesn’t seem uniquely partisan. It wouldn’t attract as many people as it would otherwise.

Rather, the grievances shared by him, all of his California Leaving members, and other Californians are largely failures of the political system – one is not equipped to handle the simultaneous, multifaceted crises that lift his head as soon as the pandemic hits. responsible. No anti-Newsom post can change this.