Red Land, Blue Flame: When the Bear Wakes (6)
Loyalist Graves, Loyalist Roads, and the Next American Exodus
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“This is what urban Democrats get when they keep ideologically poking at the non-urban, constitutional-originalist populace—they’ve jabbed the bear for too many decades; the beast is awake now, and lumbering toward them . . . hungry and ready to feed.”
The line is harsh, but the history behind it is harsher, and if we want a preview of what may unfold once the bear’s claws are fully unsheathed on urban America, we need only wind the clock back to 1783 and watch what happened to the Loyalists when the first American civil rupture finally ground to a close.
Loyalist Blood in the Streets
While the muskets cooled at Yorktown, the cost for those who had backed the Crown kept rising. Modern tallies record about 7,000 Loyalist militiamen and civilians dead—roughly 1,700 in combat and another 5,300 to disease, exposure, and prison hulks. In the population of the 1780s, that equaled 0.28 percent of every soul in the colonies; mapped onto today’s 330-million-strong pseudo-republic, it would empty the bulk of Tulsa, Oklahoma or Fresno, California of its living flesh—~924,000 American corpses—before the peace terms were ever inked. Death is the first bill in any civil war; exile is the second.
The Tide of Wagons and Sails
Property seizures, loyalty oaths, and bare-knuckled vigilantism convinced tens of thousands of Loyalists that staying was suicidal. Estimates vary, but Philip Ranlet’s conservative 20,000 (0.8 percent) and Maya Jasanoff’s 60,000 (2.4 percent) frame the realistic band. Roll those same percentages over the modern census and you get an evacuation of 2.6 million (think Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown, Texas) to 7.9 million people (think Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach, Florida or all of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania extending of into its Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland suburbs)—all forced onto interstates or air-bridges.
Those Loyalists who fled traced the vectors sketched in the map above: north through the Hudson and over the Lakes into Quebec and Ontario, east by packet boat to Nova Scotia and what would soon be New Brunswick, south into the Bahamas and Jamaica, and for the better-heeled, across the Atlantic to a mother-country that mostly shrugged at their arrival. Canada absorbed roughly forty-five thousand of them, enough that Westminster carved two new provinces simply to house the influx and keep French and English populations from each other’s throats. Some six-plus thousand white Loyalists (and the enslaved men and women they held in bondage) tried to rebuild Caribbean fortunes, and about thirteen thousand landed on the London docks only to find the empire too cash-poor to bankroll their second act.
Land, Money, and the Spoils of Victory
Patriot legislatures did not merely inherit Loyalist estates; they sold them. British commissioners later judged claims worth nearly £5 million and paid £3.1 million—about 37 percent of losses—putting the confiscation haul in the £8 million range. Colonial output hovered near £40 million, so Patriots vacuumed up roughly 20 percent of annual GDP in real estate, livestock, and bonds. Apply that appetite to the contemporary U.S. economy—GDP circling $28.3 trillion for 2025Q1—and you’re staring at about $5.66 trillion in seized blue-zone assets, more than the market value of the seven biggest tech firms combined. War is also a tax policy.
The Loyalists Who Stayed—Lessons in Humiliation
Not every Tory packed the wagons; a silent majority remained, and survival demanded choreography. They filed public oaths, paid taxes promptly, bought confiscated farms to prove new loyalties, volunteered for militia drills, married into Patriot clans, and, above all, learned to keep their mouths shut in taverns. Translate those tactics to a hypothetical defeat of urban Democrats in our near-enough future: the stay-behind blue American might have to renounce federal supremacy in front of a county judge, enroll in a local defense levy, surrender online anonymity, maybe even display a red-sanctioned door-placard the way Loyalists once hung neutral flags. (Heck, let’s make them all vote to ratify “The Second Bill of Rights” while we’re on a roll!) Victory writes the etiquette of submission.
The Other Exiles—Black Loyalists and Iroquois Allies
Alongside the white caravans moved about 3,500 Black Loyalists who had taken up British offers of freedom. They reached Nova Scotia only to receive segregated settlements and sub-standard rations; by 1792, many had sailed yet again, this time for Sierra Leone. Three to four thousand Iroquois followed Joseph Brant to Ontario’s Grand River, trading ancestral valleys for a ribbon of Crown land that remains contested in Canadian courts. Liberation is rarely equitable, even among the liberated.
Urban Flashpoints, Rural Powder Kegs
Fast-forward. The fault line today is not King George versus Congress but “urban Democrat” versus “non-urban constitutionalist.” The Kenosha, Wisconsin fires of 2020 and the Milwaukee spill-over the year after, followed by this summer’s ICE-raid riots in Los Angeles, are early tremors in the crust. (Go play the SBOR’s Parlor Game — it’s fun and thought provoking!) Each episode convinces more and more of non-urban America that the cities are both morally reckless, filled with unrelatable aliens, and quite physically vulnerable—barns may soon enough grow banners that read We feed them, we can starve them. Every new riot is one more jab at the ursine snout.
The Looming Money Bomb
Yet bullets may not fire the opening salvo; spreadsheets might. The CBO now projects interest payments ripping past $2 trillion a year by 2034, swallowing 29 percent of every federal dollar. When servicing old debt costs more than defending the nation, the currency itself begins to wobble; when it wobbles, supply chains thin; when supplies thin, the countryside suddenly holds the upper hand because it hosts the soil, the grain, and the men with combines who also keep deer rifles in the cab. In other words, the bear doesn’t even have to swing—the basement furnace is already leaking gas.
What the Numbers Foretell
If the Loyalist template repeats, expect something like one million urban dead in a second civil convulsion, three to eight million evacuees, and a property-transfer shock north of five trillion contemporary dollars. That is the ledger—and that is without modeling the blowback from a dollar crisis layered atop the gunfire. (At least not here and not today—the Appendix to “The Second Bill of Rights” will tell a considerably different and more detailed financial analysis, as you might expect from me!)
The Bear’s Closing Roar
I began by saying that America’s urban progressive bloc has spent most of my lifetime poking an animal it neither understands nor respects. The 1783 Loyalists learned—too late—what happens when the side holding the fields, the food, and the firearms decides that negotiation is finished. Their graves and their refugee trails are still stamped on the landscape of Canada and the Caribbean. Substitute Brooklyn for Boston Neck, swap the Bronx River for the Hudson, add the inflationary spark of a debt-drunk treasury, and the parallels stop looking academic. The bear is awake. The bear is hungry. The paw is already in motion. And history keeps the tally even when the cities refuse to read the ledger. Urbanites and Democrats will learn again what every farmer already knows: poke the bear long enough, and the bear comes for you.
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