Fox host Tucker Carlson is getting back to nature. He is channeling Horace Greeley, Google it, and wants the population to move into the interior of the nation. He has gone so far as to say only insane people would prefer a penthouse to a cabin in the woods. He thinks his bucolic fetish is common to us all. He is wrong.

Sure, the Midwest is a fine place full of many good people. But I’ll channel Lisa Douglas, only in living preferences, and request the East Coast penthouse thank you very much. If Carlson wants the great outdoors, no problem. Just leave the rest of us in peace to enjoy our martinis, cigars, and preppy urbanity. On a related note, here he is tweeting on January 6th.

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Carlson: One of the weirdest features in modern life has to be how we’ve all been trained to ignore the things that really matter. You might have wondered — to pick just one of many examples — why hundreds of thousands of your fellow Americans seem to be living in squalor on the sidewalk. How did that happen? These are the so-called homeless. Drugs have destroyed their lives. So where are those drugs come from, exactly? And why is no one asking? And speaking of chemicals, men in America seem very different from what they used to be. Anyone over 40 knows this, the changes are dramatic you can’t help but notice. Could those changes have something to do with the unprecedented drop in testosterone levels that scientists have measured repeatedly? And by the way, if that’s happening, why is it happening, and so on? There’s something a little scary about watching this happen. It’s like an entire population transfixed by issues that ultimately don’t really matter…

The size of your population matters very much. The size determines a nation’s character. It often determines its fate. Yet we don’t talk much about the size of our population. We probably should. The United States is growing faster than most Americans understand. If you were born in 1969, and some of us were, you arrived in a country with a little over 200 million people in it. There are now 334 million people in it. That’s an awful lot of new people in an awfully short time. How many people is that exactly? Well, it’s nearly twice the population of the entire western United States. That’s 13 states, including California. That is massive and incredibly rapid demographic growth, and it’s accelerating…

If there’s an upside to the last two years of the COVID insanity and there may be, it’s that many Americans seem to be remembering what they long for. Look where they’re moving. Almost always, it’s to someplace smaller: L.A. to Austin, New York to Burlington, Seattle to Boise, Chicago to Naples. So it’s the reverse of any other internal migration we’ve ever seen…

Americans are moving from the cities to the farms, or at least to the outer suburbs. They want more nature, more human contact, more trees, more quiet, and it’s hard to believe they’ll ever stop wanting these things. Because they’re natural. They’re the things we all want. At some point down the road, you can imagine young people setting out for the all but abandoned interior of our continent. Some of them may figure out that a depopulated Finnish settler town on the banks of Lake Superior may be a better place to live and raise children than some sterile commuter parking lot 20 miles from a crumbling metroplex. They could figure that out. People aren’t that stupid. They’ve just been misled.