I didn’t get to this yesterday because I’m just now finally getting over this terrible COVID crud that has driven me batty and diminished my energy level for the last two weeks, but amid an avalanche of evidence that Louisiana is being cleared out of its productive citizens due to awful blue-state policies that it defended for the eight years John Bel Edwards was the governor, The Advocate has now woken up to our outmigration problem.

An editorial – which of course doesn’t carry the byline of any of the individual editorial writers, which is a rather cowardly way to hide from accountability for the dumber things they write under the banner of “Staff Editorial” – which appeared Tuesday…

We’ll let reporter Jeff Adelson tell it: “The precipitous loss of residents that Louisiana has seen over the past three years has been spread across nearly every parish, with urban and rural areas alike seeing large decreases,” he wrote. “Some of the steepest declines were in areas hard-hit by hurricanes in recent years, or in parishes that have long struggled with dwindling populations. But the exodus from Louisiana was far more widespread than just those regions.”

That’s an alarming thought. Yes, Louisiana has lost some people due to catastrophic events, a hazard of life in the hurricane zone. But the figures from the U.S. Census Bureau — 84,000 fewer people living here in 2023 than in 2020 — suggest something more systemic is going on.

And whatever that is, Louisiana is doing a poor job of fixing it. As demographer Allison Plyer, of The Data Center in New Orleans, put it: ”Our recent policies are not supporting population gain.”

That statement alone should serve as an alarm bell to the new Landry administration and the folks now gathering in Baton Rouge, as well as officials from cities and parishes all over the state.

Let’s cue the meme…

What you’ll notice reading this entire thing is that not once did these faceless clowns bother to mention the name John Bel Edwards. Instead, they laid the outmigration issue at Jeff Landry’s feet and those of the state legislature, as if to say “you have to fix this.”

And how do you fix it? Well, they consulted this woman Allison Plyer, who works for a New Orleans left-wing nonprofit spouting all the same crap which ran off the people in the first place (and yes, The Data Center is a left-wing outfit; if you don’t believe us just scroll through their X account), and what were the solutions she offered?

‘Invest in higher education!” Because of course what we want to do is continue overfunding the woke indoctrination factories which are soaking up an ever-increasing amount of capital and padding their payrolls with staff, rather than faculty, as the quality of their product decreases.

College attendance is dropping in America, not because the kids are getting dumber but because society is recognizing how much of a waste of time and money it’s becoming to mortgage your prime years for a piece of paper which signifies less and less the marketable skills it’s supposed to confer. But obviously, Louisiana should continue down this road.

Did Louisiana spend less on higher education during the eight years Edwards was the governor? Not really. But hey, good tip. Very innovative!

What else?

Well, there’s an exhortation to “tackle long-standing conditions that lead to poor health outcomes,” owing to the lesser life expectancy in Louisiana.

Sure, our people are too fat. And we smoke and drink too much. We saw when COVID showed up that those questionable habits carried a death toll, but we already knew that was true.

Exactly what do you think the state legislature should do about that? Pass more laws restricting people’s freedom to eat, drink, smoke and do what they want? That’s more or less a non-starter, and frankly, none of that gets at the outmigration problem anyway.

The Advocate’s faceless editorial writers then note that crime and infrastructure are problems (once again: You Don’t Say), and then claim that people might be leaving due to climate change (LOL!), before talking briefly about the crisis in home insurance in the state.

And then there’s this…

Instead, they should focus on measures that directly address the problem of population loss, rather than on hard-right, ideological battles that don’t solve the problem — and may even send a message that Louisiana is not a welcoming state.

Because unless our leaders — and all of us — figure out how to turn Louisiana into a place that people want to stay, not leave, little else matters.

Time to cue another meme…

via GIPHY

“Hard-right ideological battles” like what? Does The Advocate oppose Sen. Beth Mizell’s bill making kiddie porn sex dolls from China illegal in Louisiana? Should we send a couple of those to their offices so as to show how “welcoming” a state we are? Should we not protect women in places like Planet Fitness, where apparently you lose your membership if you complain about a man calling himself a woman shaving his face in the women’s locker room?

We can’t grow our population if we take a stand for the Judeo-Christian morality that our civilization is based on?

John Bel Edwards threw in with the Hard Left on every cultural issue he could. How come he ran off the equivalent of the city of Baton Rouge’s population over the course of his eight years in office? Were people not aware that we were a “welcoming” state then?

And here’s a dirty little secret nobody at The Advocate is willing to share: Louisiana had net INmigration and population growth in every one of the eight years Bobby Jindal was the state’s governor.

Yes, Bobby Jindal. That guy who abandoned the people of the state to go and run for president, and who “destroyed” the state’s public sector with budget cuts and one-time money and all the rest of it. Jindal actually didn’t have this problem.

Why? Because instead of raising taxes and regulating the hell out of the private sector, Jindal cut taxes and actually tried to grow the business community. It’s no great endorsement of his time in office to recognize that he got that basic and obvious function correct.

Edwards didn’t. Edwards ran off almost a quarter million Louisianans because he governed like a Latin American communist dictator and made it a sign of insanity to try to grow a private business in this state. And if the faceless editorial staff writers at The Advocate ever expressed the slightest concerns about that, we sure as hell didn’t see it.

It’s not complicated. Freedom – real freedom, not sexual license disguised as freedom – and capitalism bring prosperity. Try to bring more of those things and your people will prosper, and a prosperous population is a growing population.

Landry doesn’t need any advice from the faceless clowns on The Advocate’s editorial staff in attempting to do that. He’d be right to ignore them completely. They’ve got the same failed track record that Edwards does.