For the fourth year in a row, the state of New York has lost population.
And for the fourth year in a row, critics of Gov. Andrew Cuomo have pointed with derision at him, or quoted again mockingly his explanation that it is the weather that drives people from the state.
They have seen falling population numbers as a Cuomo loss.
In actuality, they are a Cuomo win. They are the milestones of a steady progressive march to subjugate and depopulate New York City’s upstate colony.
The undeniable goal of Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic Party is the political and social cleansing of a vast rural population which is culturally and philosophically different from its progressive New York City masters. The people who are moving out of New York are the people Andrew Cuomo doesn’t want, and their departures year after year are merely the falling dominoes of his tightening grip around the neck of a people he hates.
When Andrew Cuomo said there was no place in New York for those with whom he disagrees – the “extreme conservatives” with their Christianity and their Second Amendment – it was the statement of a policy. It was the declaration of an objective. It was a decree.
It was a verbalization of the war against the culture and people of rural upstate New York which has defined the Cuomo administration.
The roots go back in history, and are reflected in the state’s nickname – The Empire State. An empire is a monarchy comprised of subordinate principalities. The kingdom of England was one place; the British empire was a collection of places under one sovereign. New York state is two places under one government: The nation’s largest metropolis, and one of the nation’s most rural backwaters. One is dominated by urban progressive culture and interests, and the other is dominated by rural conservative culture and interests.
For most of 200 years, this empire has managed itself under a dynamic tension. The interests of the city and the country have been in rough balance because of politics and decency. That balance has been in decline for a generation, and has been dead for a handful of years, at the hand of Andrew Cuomo.
By denying upstate New York of the prosperity and tax revenues of hydrofracking for natural gas, he has made the Southern Tier counties among the very poorest in America. By imposing both mandates and tax caps, he has nearly bankrupted the municipalities and schools of upstate, and denied their elected leaders any true role in local governance. He is pushing hard to consolidate and eliminate rural, local municipalities, denying upstaters even the pretense of self-government.
He has attacked the rural culture of upstate with gun bans in his Safe Act, harassed the faith of many with his disallowing of religious exemptions in vaccination mandates, and imposed a progressive political regime on scores of counties where it is anathema.
He has dumped New York City’s trash in upstate’s pristine Finger Lakes region, and disfigured rural hills and fields with grotesque “green energy” projects that rape the upstate countryside to assuage the downstate conscience.
And now, upstate New York is stripped of representation or participation in the state government. Except for a smattering of city assemblymen mostly eager to be yes-men to New York City bosses and progressive dogma, upstate New York does not have representation in the Assembly, the Senate, or in the statewide offices. The comptroller seems to be the only Albany official who doesn’t have open contempt for the 8.4 million people of upstate.
Yes, upstate can elect members of the Assembly and Senate, but those members – in the Republican minority – play no role whatsoever in the formulation of legislation or the writing of the budget. The Democrat majorities in the legislature both work on the principle of not bringing forward legislation that won’t get enough Democrat votes to pass. That means that no Republican vote or voice plays any role whatsoever in the direction of New York state.
Which emboldens and incentivizes the war against upstate.
The body count of that war is enumerated by the census, with the overwhelming majority of those leaving New York being upstate Republicans harassed out of the state by externally imposed poverty, and state-government hostility to their culture and beliefs. There are two tribes in the state, and the city tribe has decided to push the rural tribe from its ancestral lands.
This is a purposeful depopulation, and the New York diaspora is comprised primarily of political and economic refugees.
And like tyrants the world over who push people from their homes, Andrew Cuomo does not mourn this, he celebrates it. It is his purpose and objective.
And it furthers the political prospects of his party.
As Republicans are driven from upstate, and as the rural population increasingly becomes dependent on a government check, the population will be reseeded with people more likely to be Democrats. Putin invaded Crimea and moved Russians in. Cuomo bankrupted rural upstate and created an environment inviting to progressives. It’s the same thing, and it is a system of subjugation, removal and replacement which has played out across the world and across history.
Upstate New York is a crown colony, without representation or voice, and wholly subject to the dictates of a hostile foreign master. In 1776, New Yorkers had George the Third; in 2020, we have Cuomo the Second.
The irony of modern New York is that the state whose main harbor welcomed refugees from European oppression is the state which now sends similarly oppressed refugees out into the rest of America.
People leave New York looking for a better life.
That’s because Andrew Cuomo and the Democrats have screwed up the life here.
And that’s exactly the way the governor wants it.