I’ve been waiting for a while to write this post, because for a long time I’m not sure anybody would listen.

But eventually, the data gets so strong that it overwhelms the rhetoric from even the loudest screamers. And we’ve had basically a year and a half of very loud screaming from people who, frankly, aren’t very credible.

The volume has been turned down of late, mostly because we no longer have a Republican Senate primary which was turned into something of a referendum on Jeff Landry as governor to gin it up. But the screaming continues, whether out of principled objections or personal demands for relevance. And what’s obvious about this is there is a faction of people, or perhaps multiple minor factions, who think that passing out black pills about Louisiana and how it’s doing is the right way to go.

What I notice is the blackpillers don’t seem to be making a lot of headway right now. And they shouldn’t. Most of them need to shut up for a while, and there’s a group of them in particular who definitely should zip it.

There’s the collapse of the effort to recall Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill, for example; the same people organizing that scam also tried to recall Baton Rouge mayor-president Sid Edwards and it collapsed in a heap.

But a lot of the people pushing that doomed recall have attempted to create a cultural civil war between Landry and the City of New Orleans, and I don’t think that’s worked out for them, either.

The argument is that because the political cabal which runs New Orleans, and which is hurtling toward municipal bankruptcy at an astonishing rate, picked a fight with Murrill over her defense of state law in the aftermath of several reform bills the state legislature passed aimed at cleaning up the city’s courts, that somehow Landry is at war with the Big Easy.

This is a ridiculously illegitimate argument.

The fact is that the political clown-car in charge of New Orleans is not New Orleans. They’re the vampires whose fangs are in New Orleans’ necks. City government has always been a major impediment to the city’s economic, political and cultural success and that has never been more true than it is today. Last week, when New Orleans’ mayor Helena Moreno staged a pathetic  photo op on Canal Street announcing a bunch of aspirational feel-good measures purportedly aimed at revitalizing that thoroughfare, something ineffectual politicians in that city have been promising for 30 years or more, it was a perfect example of just how useless the clown-car is.

Moreno and the clown-car have been trash-talking Landry all year, and Landry has given as good as he’s gotten, but New Orleans has been anything but neglected by this governor. In fact, today Moreno is touting statistics on crime which show that the murder rate in New Orleans is down by more than two thirds since 2022. Those are indeed good numbers, and it’s fair to say they reflect more than just the heroic work of the trauma surgeons in the city’s hospitals. But let’s also remember that the overwhelming factor driving the murder rate down in the city is the additional law enforcement resources flowing into it, whether state or federal but most notably the presence of the National Guard and the Louisiana State Police in taking and holding territory which used to be governed, more or less, by New Orleans’ criminal class.

This gets zero recognition from the clown-car. They’re patting themselves on the back for that success, which they’ve had nothing to do with – New Orleans’ legislative delegation does almost nothing at the Capitol anymore other than bringing bills to increase the quality of life of criminals in their interactions with the judicial system and other arms of government – while screaming that Landry is out to get the restaurateurs, hoteliers and bar owners they tout as the lifeblood of the city.

And that same clown-car then makes pronouncements about how New Orleans won’t participate in the economic development going on around the state.

For example, the City Council in January banned any development of data centers for a year and the City Planning Commission has now recommended a permanent ban on any data centers of more than 100,000 square feet. This in response to an idea somebody had to convert blighted office space in New Orleans East, which is about as close to a ghost town as anything you’ll find this side of China’s ghost cities, into a data center complex.

They’re actually complaining about the water use of a data center. In New Orleans. It’s utterly ridiculous.

Of course, they’re also complaining about data center electricity use, and that is a real concern given that the clown-car has stood against building a reasonable supply of electric power, particularly in New Orleans East, for years.

Which makes absolutely no sense at all. New Orleans East is where the open land is, it has transportation infrastructure which actually makes it a desirable site for economic development and there is a real need for redevelopment of the brownfield commercial and industrial spaces decades of city mismanagement have produced. If ever there was a place somebody ought to put up a natural gas-fired power plant it’s New Orleans East.

So they poison the environment which could lead to economic growth, and then they try to blackpill the rest of the state about the governor who’s trying to grow the state’s economy.

And by the way, that’s actually going pretty well.

One of the things you can bank on as a good barometer of economic activity is construction jobs. If construction companies are hiring people, it means there’s a lot of work for them to do – labor is the biggest factor in that business and it comes and goes. So when Baton Rouge pops up as the hottest construction jobs market in America, with a 22 percent jump in construction jobs in the Baton Rouge metro year over year, and the state of Louisiana is tops in the country, having added 10,200 construction jobs, it ought to raise eyebrows.

And that isn’t a blip on the screen, either. Louisiana’s economic development pipeline now has $206 billion in capital investment sitting in it, which is tops in America. You’d say “yeah, sure, but that’s because of Meta’s data center complex,” and that’s partially correct. But only partially. Hyperion, the data center project in Richland Parish, is a $50 billion monster. But that’s only a quarter of the economic development wins going on around the state. There are massive industrial projects everywhere – from Hyundai’s steel plant to the multiple data centers, to the LNG export terminals in the Lake Charles area to a host of manufacturing projects, petrochemical plant expansions and other things.

And later this month they’re going to announce the SpaceX facility which is going to break ground on Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish, and that could well end up being a bigger deal even than the Meta Hyperion project.

There are blackpillers outside of New Orleans who are screaming about a lot of these things and bitching that it’s just corrupt politicians getting rich and the working man in Louisiana is getting left in the dust. That’s a really dumb argument. Who do you think works construction jobs?

Hyperion is being built on land that was mostly abandoned cotton farms, because the demand for Louisiana cotton is being met using a whole lot less land than North Louisiana has in supply. And yet there are people complaining that Meta is going to change Richland Parish’s character.

Well, of course it is. That’s the point. Richland Parish is one of the most underperforming, impoverished places in Louisiana. It’s depended on cotton farming since before the Civil War and that’s worked out terribly for Richland Parish. Somebody comes along and invests so much money in the place that the local tax base quintuples and you want to complain about that? How stupid are you?

The state ranks 1st in reading growth and 2nd in math on the national Education Scorecard over the past three years. We’re no longer at the bottom of K-12 educational performance but instead we’ve climbed into the pack. Louisiana has turned around a decade of outmigration – the state recorded its first population growth in years with a gain of 24,000 in 2024, the first increase since 2017, and we continued those modest gains into 2025 with the expectation of accelerated growth this year. That’s driven by net domestic in-migration turning positive for the first time since 2016 – we brought in 12,000 more people than we drove away, and that reversed eight straight years of net outmigration which perfectly coincided with John Bel Edwards’ eight years as governor. The most interesting part about those numbers was the sharp drop in out-migration, the lowest since 2010, which weighed more heavily than some big surge in arrivals.

Young adults (18–35) and families with kids under 18 led the inflows. Labor force participation rose notably (tied for the nation’s largest year-over-year increase in one recent period), with the civilian labor force expanding. And now we’ve got all-time high nonfarm employment (2.01 million in May 2026, +16,700 over the year).

Those numbers are real. The state is beginning to prosper. The blackpillers are actually full of brown stuff. And the arrogant clown-car people in New Orleans who can’t produce much good news in their own right are looking down their noses at the people responsible for the positives going on all over the state.

Just imagine if New Orleans wasn’t run by that clown-car.