The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally at the southern border reached the lowest point of President Biden’s administration in September, three months into his crackdown on asylum claims, according to internal Department of Homeland Security statistics obtained by CBS News.
In September, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded nearly 54,000 apprehensions of migrants who crossed into the country between legal entry points along the border with Mexico, the government figures show. It’s a smaller figure than the previous Biden-era low in July, when Border Patrol processed roughly 56,000 migrants who crossed the border without authorization.
Border Patrol’s tally of migrant apprehensions in September is the lowest number recorded by the agency since August 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and the travel restrictions countries enacted in response to it led to a sharp decrease in migration to the U.S. southern border.
It would be nice if there were screaming headlines about this but there are a lot of screaming headlines about everything right now. But considering that Trump’s main line of attack is that hordes of migrants are coming to slit your throats in your kitchen (he actually says that) it seems pretty salient.
I happened to spend some time with a highly intelligent 17 year old over the weekend who’s taking AP Government and is keenly interested in the election. She’s following all the polling and the punditry and knows the ins and out of the battleground map better than most adults I talk to. And she said something that struck me because I hadn’t really considered it before.
We were talking about the VP debate and she found it odd that it was so civil. She kept waiting for something to happen. And I realized that there are millions of people for whom Trump’s brand of demagogic politics is normal. They are either young like this person and have literally grown up in this era of bad feelings or they are those for whom politics wasn’t of interest until Trump came along. That’s a lot of people who don’t know that it isn’t supposed to be this way.
Granted we have had more spirited arguments in televised political debates than the one we witnessed last week between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But we never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016. It’ also true that we never had election campaigns like Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns and we certainly never had a presidency like his. You have to wonder, is this going to be the way it is going forward even after he’s gone?
It’s hard to imagine that it will be exactly the same. Trump is sui generis. But what has the next generation of GOP leaders learned from him that can be put to use for their own ambition? I imagine there are many things but I think there is one very clear lesson.: they can lie with impunity. And some of the new leaders like Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have obviously discovered that if they lie with a congenial look on their face, there is no limit to how much they can get away with.
Politicians have always lied to some degree, of course. In the past we used to call it spin because they would not dare to just lie outright and essentially tell the voters that they shouldn’t believe their own eyes or depend on their own memories. But what we are seeing today is a major shift in what is acceptable in politics. And it goes way beyond Trump.
Vance does not have a naturally pleasant personality but he discovered in that debate that if he didn’t crudely disparage “childless cat ladies” or accuse Haitian immigrants of eating pets, he could lie flagrantly about the past and his plans for the future as long as he kept a smile on his face. Consider that he congenially but blatantly lied about having said that he favored a national abortion ban, that Donald Trump had saved Obamacare, that carbon emissions aren’t the main cause of climate change (suggesting that climate change is “weird science”),that Chinese imports raised the cost of consumer goods etc.
That’s not spin. It’s an assault on reality. Those lies and more went unchecked and I would guess that millions of people watching believed him because he said them with such a pleasant tone.
Out on the stump Vance plays to the MAGA crowd, but he’s just as dishonest. One of his favorite lines is “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.” Whichever persona he assumes, attack dog or affable colleague, the lies are the one consistent feature of his speeches.
Another up-and-comer, Mike Johnson, ever the reasonable sounding fellow, has become adept at MAGA lying. Just this weekend he went on Fox News and said that the federal response to Hurricane Helene is a failure.
The Biden-Harris Administration’s response to Hurricane Helene has been a complete failure.
The massive hurricane was expected well in advance, but they were still not adequately prepared. Now they are playing catch up while the American people suffer.
That’s a lie and he knows it. You can ask any of the Republican Governors and local officials in the affected area and they will say that the feds have been on the ground since before the hurricane hit and have been excellently coordinating the massive response. In the past one would have expected this sort of thing from the likes of Florida gadfly Rep. Matt Gaetz but not the Speaker of the House. This kind of blatant falsehood is now completely normal among Republicans. They are spreading these lies on social media and television and are backed up by Trump’s eager endorser Elon Musk and a massive disinformation campaign.
How about Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl., was once a respectable conservative and considered a strong candidate for president. Today he sounds like a Russian trollbot on X:
Another fake jobs report out from Biden-Harris government today
16 of the last 17 reports have been significantly revised downwards after media helps them with their fake headlines
But all the fake numbers in the world aren’t going to fool people dealing with the Biden-Harris…
The last two reports have been revised up but that beside the point. The BLS is a non-partisan agency. He knows this. He is lying.
Republicans do this reflexively now, without any fear of repurcussions from their voters some of whom actually respect them for doing it while those poor souls who actually believe what they’re saying give them money and take their lives into their hands. There is no price to be paid for dishonesty and evidently they believe they have something to gain.
This didn’t start with Donald Trump although he’s the first one to turn a profit at it. This really started back in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich and the primer written by Republican strategist Frank Luntz called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” for Gingrich’s political action committee GOPAC. A few years later we were lied into the Iraq war by the Bush administration.
New York Times Magazine published an article in 2004 by reporter Ron Suskind who interviewed a senior administration aide, presumed to be Bush’s Brain Karl Rove:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.
I’m not sure Rove thought it would devolve into the orgy of lying about everything, distorting even their own concept of reality, but that’s where we are now. (Thanks a lot Karl.)Perhaps it was inevitable that a celebrity demagogue and pathological liar would take the mantle of “history’s actor” and turn it into political world wide wrestling but the consequences of this little experiment are dire.
We owe it to my young 17 year old friend to do everything we can to turn this country back into the reality based community. No society can function swimming in deceit and corruption for very long. And right now we are drowning in it.
It’s been an article of conservative faith for as long as I can recall that government ought to be run more like a business. On that topic….
A long time ago, in a high school far, far away, a decade before the breakup of Ma Bell, I read a book about corporate rip-offs.
It included a tale of a private school bus service in Greensboro or High Point, NC that (IIRC) had a run of burned-out clutches in its fleet of brand new buses. Despite his repeated complaints, the owner kept getting the runaround from the maker’s regional manager who claimed that no other customers had experienced similar problems. This was a lie. The owner had contacted other fleet owners by long distance and letter (remember when this was) and had a file of receipts. Yet the regional manager insisted the breakdowns must have been caused by the service’s drivers.
The money quote went something like this: “He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he lied anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”
As you may have noticed from the political faction that wants our government run more like a business, lying is now company policy. During the vice-presidential debate last week you watched J.D. Vance tell transparent lies and, when called on them by the moderator, double and triple down on them. He was lying, We knew he was lying. He knew we knew, etc.
When Gov. Tim Walz challenged Vance to acknowledge that Joe Biden won in 2020, Vance dodged and accused Kamala Harris of suppressing the free speech of Covid deniers.
Let’s be clear, though. On the free speech battles that matter most — in our beleaguered public libraries or in our high school classrooms — Republicans like Vance are on the side of government repression. It’s only on the right to tell Americans that public health experts are lying about wearing masks or the efficacy of vaccines that they discover their inner James Madison — even after studies showed that unvaccinated people in heavily GOP counties had higher death rates.
God Bless America. They will defend to your death their right to spread disinformation.
“Republican commentators and officials with a stake in the recovery effort have decided to play both sides against the middle: calling out lies to facilitate the recovery, but suggesting all parties are to blame,” Brian Beutler writes. This lie-fest over Hurricane Helene response is a dry run for Insurrection 2.0:
Now imagine it’s Election Day. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are posting and reposting lies and rumors about election workers destroying ballots or stuffing ballot boxes, illegal immigrants voting by the hundreds, while turning away red-hatted Republicans.
By then it will be too late for mainstream media to make any particular pattern of behavior a major issue for undecided voters. Republican state officials will continue to have it both ways, condemning lies in an intentionally ineffective way. The die will be cast. And then, if Trump slips behind in the vote count, the stage will be set for insurrection 2.0.
Trump’s allies, corporate ones among them, know they are spreading lies, and do so dutifully.
Helene lies serve two mutually reinforcing political purposes: saddling Biden and Harris with the same reputation for incompetence that Trump earned in his single term (sapping the Harris campaign of enthusiasm) and fueling right-wing hatred of Democrats and the government (fueling GOP turnout). To the extent that it actually interferes with command structure and emergency-management logistics, all the better. If they can make the relief effort chaotic, they can lay blame at the feet of the people who are legitimately in charge.
Lies about fraudulent voting lay groundwork for rejecting election results, quite possibly also for retributive violence in Democratic strongholds.
“Democrats should try to prime the public to expect what’s coming,” Beutler warns, “so they aren’t caught flat-footed as they were by lies about Helene.”
There is anecdotal evidence that when MAGA lies are as blatant as they are about Helene recovery that there is a growing backlash among Republican voters here who are living among the truth. Let’s hope that’s real. But real or not, MAGA Republicans won’t change. Lying is company policy.
Where’s Lockjaw when you really need him?
In the Black Forest, lives an ogre named Lockjaw. Lockjaw doesn’t like children Who tell lies. Late at night he stalks the houses of the fibbers and the Falsifiers, and before they can cry out from their beds, he nails their jaws Open with a rusty nail, using his head for a hammer. You may escape him for a While and think you fooled him, but he’ll get you in the end. He’ll get ya! He’ll get ya!!
Thousands of people, government agencies, military, and private volunteers, responded to Hurricane Helene’s devastation in western North Carolina. Don’t let the People of the Lie tell you otherwise.
The official death count here is mounting. Our county sheriff reports over 70 so far. Search and rescue teams expect to find more victims among the tangles of branches and debris left behind by the flooding.
Neighbors helping neighbors
Not only is the military here, but an army of volunteers.
Drew Reisinger, Buncombe County Register of Deeds, turned his office into a relief center for coordinating welfare checks on thousands of people unaccounted for (mostly because of lack of cell service, thankfully). Many of those processing incoming reports worked remotely.
Everyone has heard that Asheville’s drinking water system will be down for weeks, so they’re sending in cases of bottled water. And cases. And cases. And cases.
Thank you. What they’re missing is you can’t flush your toilet (or bathe) with bottled water. (The city’s waste treatment plant never went offline.) So for the elderly and less mobile, another immediate need is water for flushing. These volunteers responded.
Family Assistance Center Oct. 6 – Final Summary
2,685 volunteers — managed by a team of hundreds of volunteers — through the Family Assistance Center at the Buncombe Co. Register of Deeds deployed to check and re-check 15,982 high priority households with 10,000+ care packages distributed and 4,413 toilets flushed. 13,049 of our neighbors confirmed safe and sound by volunteers, and via email and text, as of Sunday, October 6, 2024.
It’s been a bittersweet week since Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina. Homes and lives were lost. People and pets displaced. There was no water, no electricity, and no communication for hundreds of thousands of people. Despite the sudden, tragic devastation, the good people of Buncombe Co. stepped up to help one another. In just eight days, thousands of volunteers, tasked with checking on tens of thousands of our neighbors, made their way to the far reaches of the county to deliver food and water, render emergency aid, flush toilets, and relay the good news — their loved ones were safe and sound.
The Family Assistance Center will close on Sunday, October 6th. As we rebuild, our community will have many needs in the coming weeks. You can find more local volunteer opportunities at bit.ly/4eRc5kZ
Volunteers, from near and far, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Join our Facebook group: FlushingAwesome
To report a missing person, please contact the Buncombe Co. Sheriff’s Department at (828) 250-6650.
Today’s Good News
A father and daughter volunteer team found an individual in extreme distress. He was in the middle of a stroke. They immediately took him to a hospital. Just a few hours later, doctors reported, he would’ve died. Today he was able to visit his children who had to climb trees to avoid the flooding.
Former Asheville resident and current Pittsburgh resident, Adam Casto — employing advanced AI tools — processed 6,477 unique emails and voicemails, automatically extrapolating the data into spreadsheets.
Asheville native and Missouri resident, Emily Woodall, and the Remote Data Team of 70+ active volunteers from across the country — and Finland — processed 2,000+ emails and 730 voicemails — one by one — and called, texted, and emailed 630 grateful loved ones.
Emily writes, “The most surreal moment of this experience was Saturday, Sept. 28th as I was watching emails come into the buncombesearch gmail account. People were reporting dire situations. With everyone in Asheville and WNC literally in the dark, I realized in that moment I was the only one reading these messages, and besides sending them our form, all I could do in that moment was to bear witness to this unimaginable situation. To be able to grow our remote efforts from that very lonely experience to a team of more than 70+ volunteers, to see the deep love for WNC pour in from across the country, has been one of the best experiences of my life and probably the best thing I’ve ever done.”
FYI: After nine and a half days, my power came back on Suday night about five p.m. Made coffee with bottled water. We’re still tapping springs and creeks for flushing water.
Trump on how his mass deportation will impact other countries: “We’re bringing them back, and we’re gonna shove them right down their throats.”
Trump on how his mass deportation will impact other countries: "We're bringing them back, and we're gonna shove them right down their throat." pic.twitter.com/Zg6FoMrZcP
Do all those Hispanic men who love his guy think they are are immune from this? I don’t think Trump’s cult makes many distinctions when it comes to someone with brown skin and a Latino last name. I hope they watch their backs. If he wins they’re in for a rude surprise.
Republicans are refusing to answer whether Trump won the 2020 election. Their dodging is transparent and anyone with half a brain would consider whether or not Trump might just be lying about this. If so, they simply cannot consider themselves decent Americans after everything he did and continues to do.
Trump said last week that if they hadn’t stolen the election he wouldn’t be running again:
“You know last time, last election, we did great in 2016 a lot of people don’t know we did much better in 2020. We won, we won, we did win. It was a rigged election, it was a rigged election. You have to tell Kamala Harris, that’s why I’m doing it again, if I thought I lost, I wouldn’t be doing this again. You know where I’d be right now, on the beaches of Monte Carlo maybe, or some place. Be having a nice life.”
If only.
He knows he lost. He’s said it numerous times in the last few weeks. “We lost by a whisker.” But his broken psyche just can’t handle that reality. So he’s putting the country through all this again to soothe himself. And maybe it soothes his cult followers too, who also can’t accept the fact that their God is not universally worshiped.
So I keep saying that the polls are just the polls, they’re often wrong, and we shouldn’t spend any time worrying about them. But I have also admitted that I have a poll dependence problem and I’m afraid I’ve fallen off the wagon. Please feel free to scroll on by if you have taken my advice to spare your sanity.
But if you are still playing the parlor game against your better instincts, as I unfortunately am, here’s Dan Pfeiffer on the current state of the race according to the polls:
The national polling has been remarkably stable. As of October 4th, Harris leads a bit more than two points nationally.
Her lead sat between one and three for months with very little change. It “ballooned” to three points after the debate but later regressed as public memory faded.
Harris’s lead seems durable. It is, however, not yet big enough to feel particularly confident about her chances with the Electoral College. The battleground states that Harris needs to win are more Republican than the nation as a whole, which is why the Electoral College is biased towards Republicans.
The Electoral College bias is calculated by looking at the delta between the national popular vote and the margin of the “tipping point” state. This margin puts the winner over the top. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 points and Trump won Wisconsin by 0.8%. Therefore, the bias was 2.9%. In 2020, the gap was 2.8%. If the Electoral College bias looks like 2016, Harris will win. If it is as large as 2020, she (and we) are in trouble. The good news is that the polling thus far suggests less bias towards Republicans than in ‘16 or ‘20. This is why electoral models like Nate Silver’s suggest that Harris is a slight favorite to win.
But as we all know, it’s all about the battleground states. The rest of us might as well just watch Netflix and forget about it since we are pretty much irrelevant. Of course, the campaigns need our money and if there’s a House race that’s close to where we live we can devote our time or you can write postcards and phone bank wherever you are. But in the end the swing states are going to decide the presidential election regardless of what the majority wants and the fact that we’ve had two elections in the past two decades decided by the minority shows that our archaic system isn’t working the way it should in a healthy democracy. But that’s for another day…
Pfeiffer asks why Trump is as popular as he is and he chalks it up to the fact that Biden is unpopular and the wrong track numbers remain so high. In other words, it’s not that unusual under the circumstances. (I might argue that this raises the question of why Biden is so unpopular and the wrong track numbers are so high and I would suggest that’s a consequence of Trump being out there pounding the negativity in a media environment that rewards that.) I also think that the cult-like devotion of the MAGA base skews the fundamentals in some unprecedented ways. After all, Trump is a convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist who tried to upend a legitimate election and brags about overturning Roe. That seems pretty fundamental to me and yet he’s got nearly half the country behind him.
The good news is that Harris has everything else going for her which explains why she leads slightly. Pfeiffer notes that her favorability rating is positive while he’s 10 points down. She has more money than him and she has a much better campaign. A Harris campaign aide toldPolitico last week:
The campaign [has] 238 offices and roughly 1,750 staff in battleground states as of Wednesday. And the record fundraising hauls Harris has brought in — raising $310 million in July, including $200 million in the first week after she replaced Biden — has allowed the campaign to pour additional resources into its ground game, including 418 staff and 30 offices in the last month.
Trump’s ground game looks pathetic compared to that. He’s outsourced it to Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk and they have no experience at any of it. They’re trying an unconventional approach of targeting non-voters but the word is that they really don’t have much presence anywhere. Republicans in the swing states are loudly complaining that they don’t know what they’re doing.
Pfeiffer concludes:
Harris’s field advantage could be the difference maker in such a close race. While the voters could break one way or the other in the coming 30 days, this race will likely be decided on Election Night.
He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.
With Mr. Biden out, Mr. Trump, at 78, is now the oldest major party nominee for president in history and would be the oldest president ever if he wins and finishes another term at 82. A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.
According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.
Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)
Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.
This has been obvious for the past year but the media has not focused on it because, unlike Joe Biden, his garish make-up obscures the fact that he’s aging rapidly. He deterioration is obvious to anyone.
This is from just last week. He seemed half asleep and made little sense when he was off teleprompter. Nobody paid much attention because it was the day of the VP debate but it was alarming, even for him.
Trump in Milwaukee says he wants to close down the Department of Education and have parents run public schools to make sure teachers aren't "teaching woke" or "start teaching a language we don't want them to teach" pic.twitter.com/HTjYIIqfQU
this speech Trump is delivering right now in Milwaukee is the lowest energy speech I have ever heard from him. Here's a more than 2 minute clip where he gets 0 response from the crowd other than a stray cough here and there pic.twitter.com/upkVgTsj7R
He’s now in the “good days and bad days” phase of his encroaching senility. I get it. It can happen to anyone. But if Joe Biden was subjected to ruthless coverage of his aging because he is the president — fair enough — Trump should have been subjected to the same thing. He’ll be older than Biden by the end of his second term.
In that speech he complained about his campaign schedule being too gruelling. It probably is. And even with his ample use of “executive time” the presidency is going to take an even bigger toll. Look how much Biden’s declined since 2020. Even the young ones look like hell when they’re done. Trump will be even worse because he starts out much worse.
The debate should have brought that home a month ago at least. But they’ve finally done it so let’s hope the rest of the media picks this up and talks about it as well in these last few weeks before the election.
Elon Musk said at that rally that he’s saving the first amendment by backing Donald Trump.
Shortly after assuming office in January 2017, President Donald Trump accused the press of being an “enemy of the American people.” Attacks on the media had been a hallmark of Trump’s presidential campaign, but this charge marked a dramatic turning point: language like this ventured into dangerous territory. Twentieth-century dictators—notably, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—had all denounced their critics, especially the press, as “enemies of the people.” Their goal was to delegitimize the work of the press as “fake news” and create confusion in the public mind about what’s real and what isn’t; what can be trusted and what can’t be. That, it seems, is also Trump’s goal.
Elon’s making that happen for him every single day. Twitter is a sewer of lies.
By pointing to McKinley’s presidency to justify his economic plan, Trump gives away the game. The McKinley years were those of the Gilded Age, in which industrialists amassed fortunes that they spent in spectacular displays. Cornelius and Alva Vanderbilt’s home on New York’s Fifth Avenue cost more than $44 million in today’s dollars, with stables finished in black walnut, cherry, and ash, with sterling silver metalwork, and in cities across the country, the wealthy dressed their horses and coachmen in expensive livery, threw costly dinners, built seaside mansions they called “cottages,” and wore diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. When the daughter of a former senator married, she wore a $10,000 dress and a diamond tiara, and well-wishers sent “necklaces of diamonds [and] bracelets of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies.”
Americans believed those fortunes were possible because of the tariff walls the Republicans had begun to build in 1861. Before the Civil War, Congress levied limited U.S. tariffs to fund the federal government, a system southerners liked because it kept prices low, but northerners disliked because established industries in foreign countries could deliver manufactured goods more cheaply than fledgling U.S. industries could produce them, thus hampering industrial development.
So, when the Republican Party organized in the North in the 1850s, it called for a tariff wall that would protect U.S. manufacturing. And as soon as Republicans took control of the government, they put tariffs on everything, including agricultural products, to develop American industry.
The system worked. The United States emerged from the Civil War with a booming economy.
But after the war, that same tariff wall served big business by protecting it from the competition of cheaper foreign products. That protection permitted manufacturers to collude to keep prices high. Businessmen developed first informal organizations called “pools” in which members carved up markets and set prices, and then “trusts” that eliminated competition and fixed consumer prices at artificially high levels. By the 1880s, tariffs had come to represent almost half a product’s value.
Buoyed by protection, trusts controlled most of the nation’s industries, including sugar, meat, salt, gas, copper, transportation, steel, and the jute that made up both the burlap sacks workers used to harvest cotton and the twine that tied ripe wheat sheaves. Workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs hated the trusts that controlled their lives, but Republicans in Congress worked with the trusts to keep tariffs high. So, in 1884, voters elected Democrat Grover Cleveland, who promised to lower tariffs.
Republicans panicked. They insisted that the nation’s economic system depended on tariffs and that anyone trying to lower them was trying to destroy the nation. They flooded the country with pamphlets defending high tariffs. Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888, but Republican Benjamin Harrison won the electoral votes to become president.
After the election, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie explained that the huge fortunes of the new industrialists were good for society. The wealthy were stewards of the nation’s money, he wrote in what became known as The Gospel of Wealth, gathering it together so it could be used for the common good. Indeed, Carnegie wrote, modern American industrialism was the highest form of civilization.
But low wages, dangerous conditions, and seasonal factory closings and lock-outs meant that injury, hunger, and homelessness haunted urban wage workers. Soaring shipping costs meant that farmers spent the price of two bushels of corn to get one bushel to market. Monopolies meant that entrepreneurs couldn’t survive. And high tariffs meant that the little money that did go into their pockets didn’t go far. By 1888 the U.S. Treasury ran an annual surplus of almost $120 million thanks to tariffs, seeming to prove that their point was to enable wealthy men to control the economy.
They don’t want to govern. They want to rule. Problem is, a lot of these freedom-obsessed MAGAs want to be ruled.
4,413 toilets flushed. 13,049 of our neighbors confirmed safe and sound by volunteers, and via email and text, as of Sunday, October 6, 2024.
