We have Roger Simon with us today. He is a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, co-founder of

pajamas media, and editor at large of the Epoch Times. His new book is American Refugees,

the untold story of mass exodus from blue states to red states. That is our topic today.

Welcome, Mr. Simon. Great to be here and love what you're doing.

You open with a migration of your own. Why did you leave sunny, freewheeling, happy, hip, and easy Los Angeles, man?

Because of all the above except the sun.

I like the sun.

In fact, I miss it a little bit.

Especially today, it's very gloomy here in Nashville.

But the other things had destroyed the city and the rest of California along with it and a good deal of the West Coast.

Was there anything specific that happened or just the general drift of Los Angeles?

Both.

The specific took a long time to digest.

Way back when, essentially, 0.4.03, I started a company called Pajamas Media, which then morphed into PJ Media to sound more official.

Anyway, shortly after I did that, I got a note in my mailbox in the Hollywood Hills,

scrolled, and said, we know where you live.

Yeah.

This is not a, it was not a happy moment for me or my family.

And I realized something in that.

I was a leftist of a sort, I think phony one looking back on it, for much of my life.

And I learned from that experience that Muslims aren't the only people that abhorred apostates.

You become, you're more, I have friends who were conservative screenwriters all their lives and no one, oh, they say, oh, Lionel's a conservative and they shrug.

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