Paul said people have claimed he’s trying to create a “white utopia,” which he finds insulting, because if you’ll recall from the fraternity story, he doesn’t “look at people by color.” (But if he did, he would approximate that over 50 percent of those flying out to explore moving to Texas from California “have a Latino surname.”)

Some people seek out Conservative Move because they homeschool and feel “threatened” by their liberal states. Conveniently enough, Derek also homeschools. He can help them find the right church. He can rescue them from a blue state and show them a house with a pool for less than $400,000.

But another major force pulling conservatives to McKinney is their desire to stop feeling like outcasts. People tell Derek that they can’t even admit to their California neighbors that they’re Republican. “In California,” Derek told me, most of his clients “can’t even talk about politics. They get shouted down, they get called names, they get called racist and other things.” Other than an inability to buy a house, without fail, Derek says, his clients come because they feel ostracized and unwelcome in liberal enclaves.paul

Paul’s project is, in a way, facilitating what the journalist Bill Bishop called The Big Sort.331 It’s the idea, described in his 2008 book by the same name, that Americans are increasingly moving to places where everyone is just like them.332 In 1976, Bishop points out, less than a quarter of Americans lived in counties that one presidential candidate won in a landslide. By 2004—when the playwright Arthur Miller asked, “How can the polls be neck and neck when I don’t know one Bush supporter?”—nearly half of all voters lived in a landslide county.333 What happened was that evangelicals moved to other evangelical strongholds, and Godless college-educated people moved to places with tiny apartments and injera bread. In 2014, 50 percent of “consistently conservative” people told the Pew Research Center that they want to live near people who share their political views, as did 35 percent of “consistent” liberals.334

Paul acknowledges that sorting along racial, ethnic, and even ideological lines happens, but he genuinely believes the conservative way is better for America’s future. It’s how we can avoid becoming Europe, which, I take it, would be terrible. “When they look at the more Open Society George Soros model, that’s more like a European Union,” he said. “It’s not so much an American way of looking at things.”

If you still don’t believe him, he urges you to come see McKinney for yourself. “We tell them to do it all the time, catch a Southwest flight dirt cheap at Sacramento, land here at Love Field [Airport] and just come here and just get lost.”

Where is there to lose yourself in McKinney? I thought.