Destroyed Community

 

 

I subscribe to online emails sent to me by Chris Rufo, and I pasted it below in its entirety, and will comment where pertinent to do so. Rufo and reporter Christina Buttons wrote this article.

 

Rufo and Buttons (R & B after this):

 

“A Troubled Place

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Christopher F. Rufo <rufo@substack.com> Unsubscribe		Tue, Oct 8, 7:06 AM (1 day ago)

 

to me Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more A Troubled Place In Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the local population grapples with a surge of Haitian migrants. Christopher F. Rufo and Christina Buttons Oct 8     READ IN APP   Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is a deeply troubled place. The former steel town, built along a stretch of the Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh, has experienced the typical Rust Belt rise and fall. The industrial economy, which had turned it into something resembling a company town, hollowed out after the Second World War. Some residents fled; others succumbed to vices. The steel mills disappeared. Two drug-abuse treatment centers have since opened their doors. The town’s population had steadily declined since the middle of the twentieth century, with the most recent Census reporting slightly more than 4,000 residents. Then, suddenly, things changed. Local officials estimate that approximately 2,000 predominantly Haitian migrants have moved in. The town’s Belgium Club and Slovak Club are mostly quiet nowadays, while the Haitians and other recent immigrants have quickly established their presence, even dominance, in a dilapidated corridor downtown.”   My response: Why would the federal government push 2,000 Haitian residents into a very troubled community of 4,000 people? That makes a bad situation much worse. R & B: “This change—the replacement of the old ethnics with the new ethnics—is an archetypal American story. And, as in the past, it has caused anxieties and, at times, conflict. The municipal government has felt the strain. The town, already struggling with high rates of poverty and unemployment, has been forced to assimilate thousands of new arrivals. The schools now crowd with new Haitian pupils, and have had to hire translators and English teachers. Some of the old pipes downtown have started releasing the smell of sewage. And, according to a town councilman, there is a growing sense of trepidation about the alarming number of car crashes, with some vehicles reportedly slamming into buildings. Among the city’s old guard, frustrations are starting to boil over. Instead of being used to revitalize these communities, these residents argue, resources get redirected to the new arrivals, who undercut wages, drive rents up, and, so far, have failed to assimilate. Worst of all, these residents say, they had no choice—there was never a vote on the question of migration; it simply materialized.”   My response: Too many immigrants without the right cultural and value orientation tear up a community and a country, and these residents had no say in what the government did to their community. R & B: “Former president Donald Trump, echoing the sentiments of some of Charleroi’s native citizens, has cast the change in a sinister light. As he told the crowd at a recent rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, “it takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. . . . But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently.” Progressives, as expected, countered with the usual arguments, claiming that Trump was stoking fear, inciting nativist resentment, and even putting the Haitian migrants in danger.” My response: American rejection of the millions of immigrants and their often-bad values is not racism, fearful overreaction or nativist resentment; the objection is reasonable, but no violence should be shown towards any immigrants either. R & B: “Neither side, however, seems to have grappled with the mechanics of Charleroi’s abrupt transformation. How did thousands of Haitians end up in a tiny borough in Western Pennsylvania? What are they doing there? And cui bono—who benefits? The answers to these questions have ramifications not only for Charleroi, but for the general trajectory of mass migration under the Biden administration, which has allowed more than 7 million migrants to enter the United States, either illegally, or, as with some 309,000 Haitians, under ad hoc asylum rules. The basic pattern in Charleroi has been replicated in thousands of cities and towns across America: the federal government has opened the borders to all comers; a web of publicly funded NGOs has facilitated the flow of migrants within the country; local industries have welcomed the arrival of cheap, pliant labor. And, under these enormous pressures, places like Charleroi often revert to an older form: that of the company town, in which an open conspiracy of government, charity, and industry reshapes the society to its advantage—whether the citizens want it or not. The best way to understand the migrant crisis is to follow the flow of people, money, and power—in other words, to trace the supply chain of human migration. In Charleroi, we have mapped the web of institutions that have facilitated the flow of migrants from Port-au-Prince. Some of these institutions are public and, as such, must make their records available; others, to avoid scrutiny, keep a low profile. The initial, and most powerful, institution is the federal government. Over the past four years, Customs and Border Patrol has reported hundreds of thousands of encounters with Haitian nationals. In addition, the White House has admitted 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country. The next link in the web is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middleman in the flow of migration. The scale of this effort is astounding. These agencies are affiliated with more than 340 local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations. In Charleroi, one of the most active resettlement agencies is Jewish Family and Community Services Pittsburgh. According to a September Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report, JFCS staff have been traveling to Charleroi weekly for the past year and a half to resettle many of the migrants. The organization has offered to help migrants sign up for welfare programs, including SNAP, Medicaid, and direct financial assistance. While JFCS Pittsburgh offers “employment services“ to migrants, it denies any involvement with the employer and staffing agencies that were the focus of our investigation. And yet, business is brisk. In 2023, JFCS Pittsburgh reported $12.5 million in revenue, of which $6.15 million came directly from government grants. Much of the remaining funding came from other nonprofits that also get federal funds, such as a $2.8 million grant from its parent organization, HIAS. And JFCS’s executives enjoy generous salaries: the CEO earned $215,590, the CFO $148,601, and the COO $125,218—all subsidized by the taxpayer. What is next in the chain? Business. In Charleroi, the Haitians are, above all, a new supply of inexpensive labor. A network of staffing agencies and private companies has recruited the migrants to the city’s factories and assembly lines. While some recruitment happens through word-of-mouth, many staffing agencies partner with local nonprofits that specialize in refugee resettlement to find immigrants who need work. At the center of this system in Charleroi is Fourth Street Foods, a frozen-food supplier with approximately 1,000 employees, most of whom work on the assembly line. In an exclusive interview, Chris Scott, the CEO and COO of Fourth Street Barbeque (the legal name of the firm that does business as Fourth Street Foods) explained that his company, like many factory businesses, has long relied on immigrant labor, which, he estimates, makes up about 70 percent of its workforce. The firm employs many temporary workers, and, with the arrival of the Haitians, has found a new group of laborers willing to work long days in an industrial freezer, starting at about $12 an hour. Many of these workers are not directly employed by Fourth Street Foods. Instead, according to Scott, they are hired through staffing agencies, which pay workers about $12 an hour for entry-level food-processing roles and bill Fourth Street Foods over $16 per hour to cover their costs, including transportation and overhead. (The average wage for an entry-level food processor in Washington County was $16.42 per hour in 2023.) According to a Haitian migrant who worked at Fourth Street and a review of video footage, three staffing agencies—Wellington Staffing Agency, Celebes Staffing Services, and Advantage Staffing Agency—are key conduits for labor in the city. None have websites, advertise their services, or appear in job listings. According to Scott, Fourth Street Foods relies on agencies to staff its contract workforce, but he declined to specify which agencies, citing nondisclosure agreements. The final link is housing. And here, too, Fourth Street Foods has an organized interest. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Scott said, Fourth Street Foods was “scrambling” to find additional workers. The owner of the company, David Barbe, stepped in, acquiring and renovating a “significant number of homes” to provide housing for his workforce. A property search for David Barbe and his other business, DB Rentals LLC, shows records of more than 50 properties, many of which are concentrated on the same streets. After the initial purchases, Barbe required some of the existing residents to vacate to make room for newcomers. A single father, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was forced to leave his home after it was sold to DB Rentals LLC in 2021. “[W]e had to move out [on] very short notice after five years of living there and being great tenants,” he explained. Afterward, a neighbor informed him that a dozen people of Asian descent had been crammed into the two-bedroom home. They were “getting picked up and dropped off in vans.” “My kids were super upset because that was the house they grew up in since they were little,” the man said. “It was just all a huge nightmare.” In recent years, a debate has raged about “replacement migration,” which some left-wing critics have dubbed a racist conspiracy theory. But in Charleroi, “replacement” is a plain reality. While the demographic statistics have shifted dramatically in recent years, replacement happens in more prosaic ways, too: a resident moves away. Another arrives. The keys to a rental apartment change hands.” My response: The Leftist and Democratic plot to keep borders open through a policy of replacement migration is not disinformation, a racist and right-wing racialist conspiracy, but is a Progressive plot to bring in millions or tens of millions of non-Americans to vote Democrat into perpetuity so Democrats can rule America as a UniParty, and millions of new voters turn America into California writ large.   R & B: “In one sense, this is unremarkable. Since the beginning, America has been the land of migration, replacement, and change. The original Belgian settlers of Charleroi were replaced by the later-arriving Slavic populations, who are now, in turn, being replaced by men and women from Port-au-Prince. The economy changed along the same lines. The steel plants shut down years ago. The glass factory, the last remaining symbol of the Belgian glass-makers, might suspend operations soon. The largest employer now produces frozen meals.  In another sense, however, legitimate criticisms can be made of what is happening in Charleroi. First, the benefits of mass migration seem to accrue to the organized interests, while citizens and taxpayers absorb the costs. No doubt, the situation is advantageous to David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods, who can pay $16 an hour to the agencies that employ his contract labor force, then recapture some of those wages in rent—just like the company towns from a century ago.  But for the old residents of Charleroi, who cherish their distinct heritage and fear that their quality of life is being compromised, it’s mostly downside. The evictions, the undercut wages, the car crashes, the cramped quarters, the unfamiliar culture: these are not trivialities, nor are they racist conspiracy theories. They are the signs of a disconcerting reality: Charleroi is a dying town that could not revitalize itself on its own, which made it the perfect target for “revitalization” by elite powers—the federal government, the NGOs, and their local satraps. The key question in Charleroi is the fundamental question of politics: Who decides? The citizens of the United States, and of Charleroi, have been assured since birth that they are the ultimate sovereign. The government, they were told, must earn the consent of the governed. But the people of Charleroi were never asked if they wanted to submit their borough to an experiment in mass migration. Others chose for them—and slandered them when they objected. The decisive factor, which many on the institutional Left would rather conceal, is one of power. Martha’s Vineyard, when faced with a single planeload of migrants, can evict them in a flash. But Charleroi—the broken man of the Rust Belt—cannot. This is the reality of replacement: the strong do what they can, and the weak endure what they must.” My response: The strong, the Leftist ruling elite, are sheltered from the consequences of too much immigration, but the weak or commoners, must deal with it directly in their neighborhoods, and are told to endure it while shutting up about it. R & B: “Christopher Rufo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribed This article was originally published in City Journal   A guest post by Christina Buttons Investigative Reporter for Manhattan Institute “

The Permanent Counnter-Elite

 

I receive subscribed emails from Chris Rufo, and there is one below entitled JD Vance and the New Right, which I included and will comment on.

 

Rufo: “JD Vance and the New Right

How the Ohio senator can rationalize Trumpism—and win.

Christopher F. Rufo

Oct 05, 2024

 

For conservatives, Donald Trump represents a paradigm shift. The brash real estate mogul challenged the old consensus and, for many, especially those of us under 40, there is no going back.

But this does not mean that the path forward has been entirely clear. Trump is a creature of instinct and his ideological formula—we can call it Trumpism—was never quite clear. In fact, he left open a number of important questions: What are the principles of Trumpism? How does it operate? And can it govern? “

 

My response: Trump, the non-intellectual, has pro-American instincts whichyounger, conservative intellectuals like Vance and Rufo have the education and intellectual self-application verbally to  identity the principles of Trumpism, how they will operate, and promote that Trumpism can govern America.

 

Rufo: “Enter J.D. Vance. The Ohio senator is a gifted writer and a talented institutional operator. And, as the vice presidential candidate, his task is to rationalize and explain Trumpism to Americans, and, in particular, to members of the elite in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington D.C.

His recent debate performance reveals what this philosophy might entail and how it could shape the New Right. Let’s dig in.

 

The following is a rush transcript of the episode. Please let me know what you think in the comments:

We can start by looking at JD Vance's biographical arc. In some ways, Vance seems like an old story. Someone who grew up in Appalachia, who survived poverty, who had an environment of extreme dysfunction, and yet through his intelligence and hard work, and determination was able to make something of himself. It's the old Horatio Alger story in the contemporary setting. But there's an interesting twist at the end of that story. 

 

Vance very famously went to the Marines, went to Ohio State University, and then Yale Law School, which cemented his rise into the elite. And in some ways, he is the product of these elite institutions, which trained him and more importantly, gave him that imprimatur. But the story changes because he eventually revolted against those institutions, the very institutions that provided his pathway to rise.

I think this is why what you see in this campaign especially, is a certain elite hatred of JD Vance. There's a sense that they let him into the elite institutions and that he betrayed those institutions. And so you see professors, journalists, cross-partisan governmental figures, really venting their spleen at this young man from Ohio. This is why we also see, for example, a number of people from his past who have leaked his old text messages to show that he once held the conventional views of the establishment. And it’s hypocrisy that he's abandoned those in favor of an uncouth and really hated ideology like Trumpism. “

My response: Vance is not hypocrite, and kudos to him for his Horaito Alger’s kind of meteoric success and rise based on belief in himself, a vision for the future, and a willingness to work very hard to make his dream come true.

 

Rufo: “But this actually misses the point. It's not hypocrisy to change your beliefs. It's hypocrisy to say one thing and simultaneously believe another. I think actually JD's transformation is genuine. And in fact, the people, for example, who have leaked his old messages, betrayed their own lack of conviction, lack of principle, and lack of integrity, they're betraying him as a friend much more than he's betraying them as a class.”

 

My response: Yes, Vance did reject the elite institutions that gave him a chance, but they are limited in what they now offer young Americans, so he was correct to pull back from them.

 

Rufo: “We can look at JD Vance's biographical arc in this way as a new twist on an old story, one in which the right is not just advancing the simple Horatio Alger myth, but complicating that myth and showing that the system as it exists today, the establishment, the elites not only in places like Yale Law School, but as a symbol more broadly, are not adhering to the principles that they should be. In fact, they've been corrupted even if they still offer that pathway. 

 

What is this? In my view, this is an ideological crisis that's been embodied in this single person. JD Vance believed the myths of the establishment liberal institutions. And then around 2015, Trump blew them up. This is again, why we see JD Vance's own ideological development as a never-Trumper who bought into the myth that Trump was orange Hitler, that he was an existential threat to democracy, that he was an interloper on our democratic norms. But eventually, JD Vance, like myself, and like many other people, stopped believing in that myth, stopped believing this media narrative that had formed around Trump in 2015 and then held constant for a short period after that. 

 

In fact, what this is in my view is that the establishment will welcome you into the circle on the condition that you maintain its orthodoxy. But through the experience of that first Trump administration, I think many of us realized that that old orthodoxy that really transcended the narrow division of left and right was no longer working, was no longer functional, and had some fatal flaws. In this light, we can think of Trump and his primary purpose as a wrecking ball to the old consensus. And he did this. He really broke through many of the norms, and I think, exposed many hidden truths about what was happening in the country. And he shook up, especially the consensus on the right, a consensus that we have not returned to now almost 10 years later. 

 

But there was also a related problem with this. Trump could not rationalize his ideology or his political formula. He is an instinctual person, a deal maker, an improviser, someone who is not an intellectual or a thinker in those purely and self-consciously rationalistic terms. He reduces everything to the very simplest essence. And he operates on his own intuition, which I think is an extraordinarily powerful attribute as an individual. But the downside is that it's unable then to be replicated through complex institutions, which is what we have today. We have a country of 350 million people with these massive institutions that employ hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals. And then a culture that is dispersed and decentralized from coast to coast, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

 

This is why I think perhaps he chose JD Vance as his vice presidential nominee. Vance is in some ways an ideological searcher. I first met JD a number of years ago at the National Conservative Conference, I believe in 2021, and I watched his development and checked in with him from time to time, from his beginning as a never-Trump traditionalist, believing in the National Review consensus, to a creeping curiosity about Trump, and then into a number of different ideological burrows. 

 

He's of course engaged with some on the postliberal right, like Patrick Deneen, some of us on the new right, who are trying to wage a successful culture war and bring culture rather than economy into the forefront. He's even had a relationship with some members of, say, the neo-reactionary movement like Curtis Yarvin. In fact, I had dinner with JD, Curtis Yarvin, and a number of other people at that first NatCon conference, which provided a kind of dizzying but very fascinating conversation that showed not that JD or I or anyone else were agreeing with someone like Curtis. I of course have famous disagreements with him. 

 

But it just showed that there was this intellectual ferment, an intellectual openness, a new entry point for ideas that then had to fight it out in public. What we've seen in the last two years, with his rise to the Senate, but in particular the last few months as he's campaigned to be vice president, is that he's started to cohere this ideological formula and to rationalize what is really a folklore around Trump into a sophisticated political theory, sophisticated political rhetoric, and a sophisticated operating ideology.”

My response: If Vance and Ruo are able to translate Trumpism into a sophisticated political theory, a sophisticated political rhetoric and a sophisticated operating ideology, great, for that is good for the country and the masses, needing a workable ideological, articulated message outside of and in opposition to postmodernist Leftism.

 

Rufo: “When I say rationalize, I don't mean make excuses for, I actually mean rationalize in the original sense of the word, to take something that is scattered, distorted, folkloric, and to cobble it together into a rational and logical formula. 

 

JD Vance is an intellectual. He's written a bestselling book. He takes policy matters seriously. He's very interested in the art of governing at that logical linguistic level. And we've seen this, for example, even in the recent vice presidential debate where JD had laser-sharp rhetoric that was grounded in philosophical and policy positions, but then was able to really outmaneuver his opponent linguistically and rhetorically.

I think that this debate, at least for me watching this was a key moment. You see the principles of Trump and the new right start to be adapted to the traditional format of political debate. In some ways, the interesting takeaway from that debate is that JD sounded like a normal politician engaging in issues of economics, inflation, immigration, housing, all of these kitchen-table issues that have traditionally dominated the political discourse, but he's infusing them with a new philosophical core, and then he's touching lightly on the ideological issues that surround them, whether it's critical race theory or DEI or higher education or elite institutions.”

 

My response: If we can rear up a generational of principled, patriotic, learned, intellectual individuating supercitizens, then these exceptional common people and voters can, like Vance, cam become functioning, hybrid political operatives, running the country: ½ commoner talking about bread and butter issues, and ½ political idealist, doing what supporting what is good for the country.

 

If the supercitizens are very competent per capita in their linguistic and rhetorical communications and understanding of political discourse, and the elite masses can well direct and limit their elected politicians, on how to govern in logical, linguistic terms.

 

Rufo: “He can speak in both registers and he can speak in a way that is, I think, comforting for normal people who are used to normal political discourse and that he can discipline himself so that his rhetoric advances the principles that have been established in practice by Trump. But he's advancing them in a way that I think has a lot of distance that it can cover. 

 

So what would it look like to see JD Vance in the White House in the Vice President's office? I think we're seeing that prototype being built right now. JD Vance knows how to maintain a broad rhetorical consensus, but I think that given his experience, not only in the Senate but also in Silicon Valley and in the elite institutions, he can operationalize that philosophy as public policy. In the Senate. JD Vance, for example, introduced legislation to dismantle DEI. He's talked about holding universities accountable, and of course, he's in the process of building a viable counter-elite.”

 

My response: Note again, that Rufo refers to Vance’s role in introducing a new, ascendant, viable, conservative counter-elite.

I want to make the conservative counter-elite permanent, and the only counter-elite that will keep the masses free, and ruling classes curtailed, will be a counter-elite that is the citizens themselves the individuating supercitizens.

 

Rufo: “I think that the closest analog that we might have to JD Vance is another very young vice president who cut his teeth and the culture war issues—fighting communist subversion and then rose to the vice presidency at a very young age. This, of course, is Richard Nixon. 

 

Nixon, I think, remains the touchstone president who is misunderstood, who is unfairly maligned, but who can reveal to us certain truths and insights about our own era. I compare JD Vance to Richard Nixon in only the best way. He's a young, smart intellectual who rose from humble beginnings into a position of prominence and power, and who has the potential to reshape our country towards the greater good. We'll see what happens in the closing stretch of the campaign. We're now almost exactly one month out. But keep in mind that while Trump is the headliner, JD Vance is an important addition to the ticket, and I think he could make important contributions to the country.”