Conservative elites and their institutions are concentrated in New York and Washington. Even some of the ones that are outside of the Acela corridor are in blue areas, like the Hoover Institution, which is at Stanford University. Most conservative intellectual leaders don’t live in red states or redder areas of blue states. This shows a couple of things. The first is that elites are drawn to elite cities. If you want to be part of the elite, then you need to be around other elites and where the institutions of elite society are located. That’s the top tier cities, especially the big four of NYC, DC, LA, and SF. If you want to influence the federal government, for example, you basically have to be in Washington.

Where to live is one of the most critical choices we will make in life. My readership skews conservative. Since I moved from New York City to Carmel, Indiana, you might think that I think all conservatives should leave the cities or move to red states.

But that’s far from the case. For many people, especially those who aspire to succeed at the elite levels, it makes sense to live in big, progressive elite cities – even if you are a conservative.

Vanity Fair just ran a nice and largely favorable profile of the startup community in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles near LAX Airport. I’ve highlighted the scene in “the Gundo” before. It’s a collection of heavily conservative, pro-America, Gen Z, male founders looking to work on defense and other hard tech businesses.

For over two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real s—t, not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds….When it comes to “The Gundo,” the technological zeitgeist is, like all of these places, fueled by venture capitalists, who have invested more than $100 billion in defense tech companies since 2021, many of which are located in El Segundo.

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The founders in El Segundo have settled on an expansive terrain in which to express sentiments that might chafe otherwise progressive sensibilities. They have an outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their Lord and savior Jesus Christ. They are aspirationally blue collar, often wearing blue jeans, clean leather work boots, and dark T-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets. By day, the founders often trek to the Central Valley to launch drones into the airspace. By night, they can be found drinking Singapore slings at the Purple Orchid tiki lounge, or burning pallets at Dockweiler Beach, chewing nicotine pouches, and chugging energy drinks.

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During the three days that I visited companies in The Gundo, I saw three women and spoke to one: the wife of an employee at Valar Atomics who attended the Bible study along with her two young children. She had moved to a house near the beach with her husband three weeks earlier. When I asked if she was meeting many nice people, she laughed and said that she was too busy taking care of her children to leave the house.

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Sometimes it seems that the El Segundo founders are acting out a studied caricature of nostalgic Americana, especially on Twitter, where they frequently post about smoking cigarettes, bench-pressing, and loving their country. At least some part of the scene is pure performance. “It’s totally intentional. You have to make it cool,” says Cameron Schiller, the cofounder and CEO of the aerospace manufacturer Rangeview. “We’re trying to bring more young people into manufacturing.”

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s a fun article.

As I’ve said many times before, I’m bullish on Generation Z. They have a new kind of positive, can-do, let’s start building attitude that you just don’t see in the older generations. The Gundo is a good example of that.

This article is suggestive of a lot of things.

First, I’m seeing these sorts of lifestyle pieces about the Gundo scene. This is important, because people are drawn to a “scene.” So creating and maintaining the idea that you have a scene is important in catalyzing something real.

At the same time, your scene actually has to produce something of real value, whether that’s music or military drones. The Gundo needs to actually produce real companies with real products and real exits. It’s the nature of scenes to be ephemeral, so they don’t have forever to make this to happen.

Secondly, I’m very struck that the epicenter of the young, high talent, conservative, pro-America, pro-Jesus startup community is…..Los Angeles. That is, they are in what’s effectively a neighborhood of an extremely progressive elite coastal city in one of America’s bluest states.

Essentially all cities are blue cities politically and culturally, so to the extent that you are located in one then you are located in a blue area. But Los Angeles is actually an elite center of progressive wealth and culture creation. It’s one of the elite citadels of progressivism.

Now, Los Angeles is a long time hub of aerospace and defense. That’s why SpaceX was based there. So it makes sense for defense oriented companies to choose Los Angeles. But it’s still notable that these conservatives didn’t even choose a red state, much less a less aggressively progressive city.

The Gundo is hardly the only example of this. There’s the “Dimes Square” reactionary culture and politics scene in New York City. To be sure, these folks are not exactly conservative as has been conventionally understood. But it’s still an interesting dissident phenomenon. And again, it’s in New York City, a citadel of the left.

Even within a red state like Texas, we see that a lot of the higher wattage and leading edge conservatives are moving to Austin, the bluest and most progressive city in the state. The most famous is Elon Musk, who just announced he was moving the headquarters of X to that city. Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist and founder of Palantir, also moved to Austin.

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