Mr. Huckins and his wife, Ginger, were leaving Portland, Ore., one of the most progressive cities in the United States. They said Portland’s tolerance of homeless encampments, along with the open use of hard drugs and rising crime, had filled them with despair. So they headed 2,000 miles east, to deep-red rural Missouri.

Driving around their new hometown in June, about an hour outside St. Louis, they admired the old Victorians and a tractor defying the minimum speed limit on a state road.

“One thing I do like about Missouri, there’s lots of American flags,” Mr. Huckins said as he steered around a traffic circle where the Stars and Stripes flapped crisply on a pole. “In Portland, the American flag was offensive.”

One day earlier, in a neighboring state, another couple making a politically motivated move had a different flag on display — a Pride flag on a T-shirt.

Jennie and Jeff Noble were packing their possessions into a 26-foot U-Haul truck in suburban Iowa. Ms. Noble, 37, who was wearing the Pride T-shirt, and her husband were leaving Iowa for Minnesota.

Their only child, Julien, came out as transgender at age 11. Now 16, Julien uses prescription testosterone. After Iowa banned gender-affirming medical care for minors, criminalizing their son’s treatments, the Nobles — lifelong Iowans — concluded they had to get out.

Folks that think anyone is offended by the American flag are showing how narrow and focused their worldview has become. Time and time again I hear feedback from certain people visiting "liberal hell holes" like Seattle and Portland saying that the fear seems overblown and things aren't bad as they're being reported.

That being said, it's not like homelessness and drug use in major cities aren't a problem, but rather they have been for a long while now, and frustratingly so. We have solutions to some of these problems, or even ideas we can try but we just aren't doing them. Instead people are just pointing at the problem and pretending it actually affects them, when they just ignore those people who are struggling anyway.

"Both sides do it, both sides to it," is the mantra of the willfully stupid mainstream press, pretending against all evidence that our problem is 'the rift between left and right' instead of the growth of American fascism. To say plainly that Republicans are lying about everything and advocating policies of hate wouldn't be 'impartial journalism', so they contort the facts into knots to look fair and balanced, instead of reporting the facts.

This article is a fine example, from America's finest practitioner of mainstream and impartial journalism, the New York Times.

One family moved from Oregon to Missouri because they were sick of seeing poor and homeless people. Another family moved from Iowa to Minnesota because Iowa had banned medical care for their son.

These two families are not a matched and balanced set, fodder for a thoughtless think piece. Moving to avoid seeing unpleasant people is not the equivalent of escaping to save your child's life.

@flta

Love to see the follow-up in 5 years to see how happy they are with their choices.