The Ladies Want to Flee: On Performative Patriotism and Political Cowardice

When the Going Gets Tough, Half the Country Checks Zillow in Amsterdam

I need to talk about the Gallup poll that’s been making the rounds—the one showing record numbers of young American women suddenly want to pack up and leave the country. Specifically, younger women. And if you’ve spent any time on political TikTok since November (scroller beware), you know precisely which demographic we’re talking about.

Here’s what caught my attention: This isn’t just abstract polling data. I watched this play out in real-time after the election. My social media feeds exploded with declarations of “I’m moving to Canada” and “How hard is it to get a European visa?” One family member literally told me they were considering leaving the country—directed at me personally, as if I’d somehow personally wronged them by... existing? Voting differently? Having the audacity not to share their political panic?

Am I surprised? No. Gallup has a similar poll in 2019 that showed the same, but here’s where it gets interesting—and by interesting, I mean darkly ironic.

Cast your mind back to the Biden years. Remember when social media platforms were pressured into censoring COVID dissent? When the Hunter Biden laptop story got memory-holed as “disinformation” until it very much wasn’t? When the administration floated the idea of creating an actual Disinformation Governance Board, a la 1984?

Remember peaceful pro-life protesters getting aggressively prosecuted while other protests got the kid-gloves treatment? Or those FBI memos categorizing concerned parents as potential domestic terrorists for daring to question school COVID policies and the rapid-fire push of gender ideology into classrooms? Don’t even get me started on the Title IX expansion forcing biological males into women’s sports, or the OSHA overreach attempting to mandate vaccines on the entire American workforce. Thousands of military members and federal workers lost their jobs for declining an injection.

These weren’t minor policy disagreements. These were fundamental constitutional violations—free speech, religious liberty, bodily autonomy, and women’s rights. The hits kept coming.

And you know what I didn’t see during all of that? Conservatives threatening to flee the country.

Not once did my right-leaning friends start researching Costa Rican real estate or Canadian immigration law. The sentiment was the exact opposite: dig in, fight back, defend the republic. Win elections. Change bad policy through the system designed for exactly that purpose.

But lose one election, face policies you disagree with, and suddenly half the left is browsing Zillow listings in Amsterdam.

Look, I’m not actually surprised. One of the least-discussed but most revealing aspects of modern progressive politics is the fundamental ambivalence, sometimes outright hostility, toward America itself. They’ll wrap themselves in the flag when it’s politically convenient (remember the weird anger about MAGA “co-opting” the American flag? The American flag?). They’ll lecture about “defending democracy” while supporting policies that expand executive power and censor speech.

But when things get hard? When they actually lose? The response isn’t “we need to convince our fellow citizens” or “we need to build a better coalition.” It’s “this country is irredeemable and I’m leaving.”

That tells you everything about whether their patriotism runs deeper than their preferred policy outcomes.

The Constitution, to them, isn’t a framework to preserve—it’s a “living document” to be stretched until it means whatever they need it to mean this week. History gets rewritten to justify present-day ideology. And when voters reject that vision? Well, clearly the voters are wrong. Time to find better voters. In Europe.

Here’s my advice: If you genuinely believe America is a fascist hellscape and you’d be happier elsewhere—go. Truly. No one’s stopping you. Europe has plenty of countries with healthcare systems you’ll love and speech codes you’ll tolerate until they’re used against you.

But something tells me most of these declarations are performative. Virtue signals to the in-group. Because actually emigrating is hard, and expensive, and means leaving behind everything familiar.

I’ll see most of you back here in six months. Try the stroopwafels while you’re gone.