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It seems like his real problem is not lack of money but lack of community. If you gather 5 large families that's enough to form homeschool group and friends for the kids, if you can't well... that's the problem. The Hasdics don't money to do all this the Amish don't either because they have a real community. If he's Catholic why can't his kids be homeschooled and make friends at church? You need a community for your kids to grow up in and into.
And his idea of Nantucket? of all places? Like moving to a very blue place in Massachusetts is going to lead his kids to be conservative Catholics and a state where it's considered child abuse to not transition your kids. There are dozens of states where childhood transition is illegal he could go there. Or St. Mary's the tradcath Mecca.
Ultimately though I think your wrong about family autonomy. He has family autonomy no one is going to force him to stop going to Church and if he doesn't like how the state educates his children he is free to do it himself or move to a state that's more in line with his values. Now I agree that the schools teaching weird gender stuff is a problem I really do. However, the issue he is really worried about is not family autonomy it's that his kids will convert to a different ideology do to him being a lone man in the sea of mass society. If the schools were that powerful they'd convert all the Muslim youth in Europe into good therapeutic deist liberals who support LGBTQ+.
Anyway you really don't need to deal with any of it if you don't want to. You just need to move to a red county in a red state and turn off the internet and get involved with the school board. Ideally somewhere like Wyoming or Nevada where the population is more libertarian. That's it. It‘s really not that hard or insurmountable.
Because he doesn't get along with normie tradcaths, they think he's a deadbeat for making his wife and baby live in a shack with no central heating and eat roadkill while he doesn't have a normal job. And in upstate New York, those are the only Catholic children around- there are of course novus ordo parishes to go to, but their congregations, like everyone else up there, are dying of old age. The other tribes of observant Catholics are, like most other people under seventy, not present in upstate New York.
There's also a few of the screwier sedevacantist groups in the general vicinity but they come with their own weird lifestyles that are unlikely to overlap with Hickman's.
St Mary's is not a tradcath Mecca. It is a funny farm where the SSPX stables its more embarrassing lay affiliates.
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Gonna disagree with you on the Chasidim; they are well-documented welfare cheats all throughout the northeastern US.
I just meant that they can raise their kids to follow their values outside of the failings of the American lower class without large amounts of money.
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