What's Going On At The Overton Window?

WATCH: @JDVance flips the script on a New York Times reporter by pointing out that the government, media, and Big Tech rigged the 2020 election by teaming up to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, costing President Trump millions of votes.🔥 pic.twitter.com/2EO9Tl3v0a

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 11, 2024

It occurred to me yesterday that Sen Vance is suddenly forcing the Overton window, the range of potential policy subjects that are considered appropriate for polite discussion, wide open. His recent exchanges with highly respectable lady journalists on January 6 and Aurora have had the effect of asking why "deplorable" opinions shouldn't be just obvious, not disreputable. Here's his exchange with Martha Raddatz of ABC:

Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes... A handful."

Vance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a HANDFUL of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem??"pic.twitter.com/6PlNAPur8y

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 13, 2024

Is this just Vance? Effective as he is, I think something else is going on. Last night I was watching a National Geographic series on Witches: Truth Behind the Trials. which in passing mentions witch hunts as a type of moral panic. This rook me back to the view I've expressed here that the 2020 phenomena of COVID lockdowns, masking, and Black Lives Matter riots were also a moral panic.

In fact, I've thought that COVID as a disease took on a metaphorical aspect, that it was a societal sickness that needed to be cured, at least in part, by canceling perfectly good and popular TV shows like Live PD and Cops -- but the real sickness was Trump, and that was behind his defeat in the 2020 election. The subtext of the lockdowns and masks was that, at least for the people who supported them, they fended off the Trump disease, and in fact, they might cure it in society at large.

But in reviewing other moral panics, from witchcraft to secret rooms with bad clowns at pre-schools, I've consistently found that they die out and end with a "morning after" phase, following which there's a final collective recognition that there were never witches, or there was never a secret room at the pre-school where the bad clown killed rabbits.

Let's recognize that over the past year, a general recognition seems to have emerged that things under Trump were better than they are now. In addition, the traditional 2016-2021-era objections to Trump -- that he paid hush money to a porn star, for imstance, or that he incited an insurrection on January 6, have not only lost their former effect, but in fact they had a contrary impact when court cases were brought against him for those prior allegations, and their actual effect was to improve his standing in the 2024 polls.

This says to me that not only is the 2020 COVID-BLM moral panic over, but even the "morning after" phase is also over. The Live PD producers, for example, were able to bring back the show with a duplicate studio look, the precise format, and two of the three original hosts on the REELZ channel as On Patrol: Live in 2022 after A&E canceled the show in 2020 at the height of the moral panic. If anything, On Patrol: Live, essentially the same show, has lost any controversy that ever attached itself to Live PD. This is how much the country has changed.

What's going on, I think, is a basic societal re-perception of Trump, in many ways equivalent to the much better established re-perception that a witch in the public mind is not only not a threatening or harmful idea, but is actually nothing more than a Halloween costume or a cartoon character.

This is what Vance has actually been exploiting -- the uber-respectable lady journmalists are trying to revive the peception of Trump as a social sickness, the cause of a moral panic, when the moral panic is in fact now long under the bridge, and by now we're even beyond the "morning after".

Trump, The Media, And The Achilles Paradox

Corporate media's take on the polls channels the Achilles Paradox:

in logic, an argument attributed to the 5th-century-bce Greek philosopher Zeno, and one of his four paradoxes described by Aristotle in the treatise Physics. The paradox concerns a race between the fleet-footed Achilles and a slow-moving tortoise. The two start moving at the same moment, but if the tortoise is initially given a head start and continues to move ahead, Achilles can run at any speed and will never catch up with it. Zeno’s argument rests on the presumption that Achilles must first reach the point where the tortoise started, by which time the tortoise will have moved ahead, even if but a small distance, to another point; by the time Achilles traverses the distance to this latter point, the tortoise will have moved ahead to another, and so on.

This is, of course, absurd. The link continues.

Aristotle’s solution to it involved treating the segments of Achilles’ motion as only potential and not actual, since he never actualizes them by stopping. In an anticipation of modern measure theory, Aristotle argued that an infinity of subdivisions of a distance that is finite does not preclude the possibility of traversing that distance, since the subdivisions do not have actual existence unless something is done to them, in this case stopping at them.

But the conventional take on the presidential race is that Trump, as Achilles, can only come closer and closer to Harris, the tortoise, but he can never pass her:

A dead heat is getting even hotter for Kamala Harris. . . . The polls say the race is tightening slightly. According to RealClearPolitics’ Sept. 29 average of national polling in a two-way race, Harris leads Trump 49.1 percent to 47.1 percent. That 2-point spread is down slightly from Harris’ 2.2-point advantage a week earlier.

The problem is that Achilles is gaining on the tortoise. As Mark Halperin's Democrat advocate on his 2Way stream, Dan Turrentine, put it the other day,

If you just go back now for the last three to four weeks in Michigan and in Wisconsin, not that Harris was up seven and it went down to four, down to one. It's gone from three, to two, to one, to tied. And at the same time, those Senate candidates, Casey, Slotkin, and Baldwin are seeing the same deadlock.

Halperin himself sums things up later in the same podcast:

[Trump's people] don't necessarily think they're the favorite in Michigan and Wisconsin, but they're not worried about losing it. You don't hear from them, oh my goodness. What you hear is we're moving up, what the three of us are hearing.

We're moving up in those two. We're going to win the three Sunbelt states and we're stronger in Pennsylvania than she is. That to me, if the whole thing's about the Electoral College, you take any of the Rust Belt states away from her, it's very difficult for her to win.

Very difficult. It's not mathematically impossible, but it probably won't happen if she loses any of them. She can replace Pennsylvania with either Georgia, North Carolina, and then one other of the Sunbelt states.

If she loses Pennsylvania and she wins either Georgia or North Carolina, then she just needs one of the other three. That's not impossible, but what I'm telling you today is things are not moving right for her.

The race is "tighter than ever" only if you accept the Achilles Paradox.

UPDATE:

Former President Donald Trump has caught up to Vice President Kamala Harris in a new NBC poll released Sunday. Trump is tied with Harris at 48%, and leads by 47%-46% in an “expanded ballot” with third party candidates.

The poll also shows that Trump’s popularity is increasing, as Harris’s declines, with three weeks until Election Day.

The Michigan Bishops Collectively Grow A Pair

I wasn't sure I was going to post on Bossgirl Gretchen Whitmer's skit with the Doritos and the kneeling influencer, but the response of Michigan's bishops set me to do it. For most of my life, Catholics, especially the bishops, have basically apologized for being Catholic, and they've never really objected to even the most offensive portrayals, like Tom Lehrer's "The Vatican Rag" (1965):

A spoken introduction describes the song as a response to the "Vatican II" council—which, among other things, broadened the range of music that could be used in services—and humorously proposes this rag as a more accessible alternative to traditional liturgical music. The song begins:

First you get down on your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

The lyrics mockingly list a number of Catholic rituals such as confession, the Eucharist, and Rosaries, and suggest the irony of modernizing an age-old institution like the church.

. . . Some Catholics criticized "The Vatican Rag" as blasphemous. After one show at the Hungry I, Lehrer's performance of the song led to a confrontation with the actor Ricardo Montalbán, who happened to be in the audience. According to a former Hungry I bouncer, Montalbán approached Lehrer in a fit of rage, yelling, "I love my religion! I will die for my religion!" to which Lehrer responded: "Hey, no problem, as long as you don't fight for your religion." In May 1967, a Putnam County, New York, schoolteacher used Lehrer's "Vatican Rag" and "National Brotherhood Week" as examples of modern satire for her seventh-grade class; the outcry was such that the school board banned the songs and censured the teacher, and she quit three months later and left the area.

Although the Wikipedia entry at the link makes it plain that many rank-and-file Catholics found the song blasphemous and offensive, there's no reference to any Catholic bishops speaking out about it -- and as far as I'm aware, neither did any Kennedy. A web search on "Fulton Sheen Vatican Rag" comes up empty. If you think about it, prominent Catholics at the time were probably more willing to seem aligned with the Berrigan brothers, and objecting to "The Vatican Rag" wouldn't fit the program.

This is a far cry from the days when every Hollywood script had to be run by the Hays Office.

So it's maybe nothing new that an alt right Catholic would condemn the silence of both the media and prominent Catholics at Gov Whitmer's skit -- that's dog-bites-man:

Here's a question: Where are all the supposedly uber-Catholic Democrats like, say, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi? Why aren't they condemning this disgraceful depiction of the most sacred part of their religion? Biden is play-acting that he's in charge of hurricane relief efforts, while Pelosi is off promoting her new book. Their silence is shameful.

But Pelosi and Biden are both octogenarians and part of the Catholic generation that wanted to be hip like the Berrigan brothers. What's man-bites-dog here is that younger, hipper Catholics, now including a lot of the US bishops, are starting to speak up. From the Diocese of Lansing's web site:

The Bishops of Michigan have expressed their “profound disappointment and offense taken” with Governor Gretchen Whitmer for posting a video skit on social media showing the state's Governor feeding a Dorito corn chip to a kneeling podcaster in a manner that is widely being perceived as a mockery of the Holy Eucharist.

“The skit goes further than the viral online trend that inspired it, specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist, in which we believe that Jesus Christ is truly present,” said Paul A. Long, President and CEO of the Michigan Catholic Conference which represents the seven dioceses of the state, October 11.

Whitmer issued the usual non-apology:

There ZERO serious people who believe this. Whitmer “denigrate[s]” the Catholic faith every day with how demonically pro-abortion she is. Has the @MICatholicConf talked to her about THAT?! Besides, such a post is an admission of guilt! May Kamala lose MI and lose it badly! https://t.co/eYT9aT68Lr

— Rebecca Downs🇺🇸🟦🇮🇱 (@RebeccaRoseGold) October 12, 2024

But the public complaint from the Michigan bishops is part of a trend, with the Archbishops of Los Angeles and San Francisco beginning to take public positions on political issues that affect Catholics, as well as the Archbishop of San Francisco and the Bishop of Santa Rosa denying Nancy Pelosi communion on the basis of her public support for abortion, the Bishop of Springfield, IL denying Sen Durbin communion on the same basis, and Cardinal Gregory of Washington calling President Biden a "cafeteria Catholic".

So far, I'm not aware that Bp Barron has commented on the Whitmer skit, but I'm sure he will if he finds it appropriate. These are not your grandfather's Catholics, nor their bishops.

Nobody Believes The Real Clear Politics Averages

*TRUMP INTERNAL POLLING: TRUMP LEADS IN ALL BATTLEGROUND STATES pic.twitter.com/PPQnSsryDp

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) October 10, 2024

A few people are starting tgo say it: Election tilts toward Trump as suspicions grow that some polls may be masking true size of his lead,

Harris currently leads Trump by 2.0% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, with 49.1% support to his 47.1%. That figure includes a Rasmussen Reports survey showing Trump with a two-point lead, a Reuters/Ipsos survey showing Harris up two, a Morning Consult poll with Harris up five, a Yahoo News poll with the race tied, and a number of other surveys. A New York Times/Siena College survey showed Harris up three points.

Actually, as of this morning, Harris's RCP lead is down to 1.8%, having been at 2% or more for many weeks. But as I've been saying all along, the national average is meaningless, since it's the Electoral College that casts presidential votes. And Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics would be the first to agree -- so why do they keep publishing this as though it means anythihg? The piece goes on:

But pollsters have pointed to an apparent disconnect between state and national level polls, with state-level surveys increasingly shifting toward Trump while Harris seemingly holds steady at the national level. They have further observed two consistent patterns of national polling that appear to vary widely due to methodology.

. . . Polling averages currently show Trump poised to take Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona. Harris, for her part, holds narrow leads in Minnesota and Nevada. Should such results hold, Trump would handily carry the Electoral College, barring major upsets. The campaign released its own internal polling in a Thursday memo, showing Trump winning all seven of the key battleground states it tracked.

Which is jusst another way of saying the RCP average is meaningless. But the corporate media consensus for weeks has nevertheless been been that the race is a "stalemate", "razor thin", "essentially tied", "margin of error", and so forth. Here's the standard narrative at The Hill:

Vice President Harris’s slim national lead over former President Trump narrowed after the vice presidential debate last week, a survey published Monday found.

Harris is leading Trump by 2 percentage points, 48 percent to 46 percent, in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted after the debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

Yet again, the national lead, slim or fat, is meaningless, but the narrative keeps putting it in the lede. The piece goes on,

Polling after the Sept. 10 presidential debate, by comparison, suggested Harris was the winner, and her campaign has since pushed for a second debate against Trump. The former president has rejected the idea.

Her sharp performance, though, fell short of moving the needle in the key swing states needed to win in November. Nationally, Harris currently holds a 3.4 percentage point lead over Trump, according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ aggregate polling, which has grown just slightly since the day before their debate, when she had a 3.2 percentage point lead.

So Harris is in the lead in a chimerical narional average, but she "fell short of moving the needle", another cliche. The Debate: Did It Move the Needle? Can a VP Candidate Actually Move the Needle? Bill O'Reilly: Did Kamala Harris Move The Needle? And so forth.

So we have the logical problem that the race is "deadlocked" in Kamala's favor, but she needs to "move the needle". Why, if she's ahead? We'll get sone sort of answer along the line that well, the polls had Clinton ahead by x in 2016, but Trump actually won by y, so we need to add a fudge factor to Trump's numbers, so the race isn't really "deadlocked" the way you might think it is if we use that word. So why do they use that word? Why do we need to add a fudge factor? That's when the professor decides he needs to answer some other student's urgent question, and we move on.

The first link at the top of this post cites contrarian pollster Richard Baris's objections to the consensus view:

“More polls today showing Harris down in keys states but also running way behind Clinton and Biden in another blue state. To the point I made yesterday, it's simply not possible for her to win the [popular vote] if she is running this poorly in NY, MD, NJ, CA, etc. Not possible math,” he wrote.

“I'm watching this being covered as a good thing for Harris. It's an absolute catastrophe for her,” Baris wrote, in response to Mason-Dixon/Telemundo data showing Harris leading Trump among California Hispanics 55% to 35%. Biden, by contrast, won that bloc 75% to 23%. Those figures mark a 32% swing in one of the state’s largest voting blocs toward Trump.

In other words, if Harris is losing so many of key Democrat constiutuencies -- labor, ethnics, Catholics, Jews, Latins, black men, and so forth, especially in populous blue states, but "the polls" say she's still getting a national majority, there's soething seriously wrong with "the polls", or as Baris puts it, "not possiblle math".

I'm increasingly convinced Trump is going to outperform significantly in this election.

Tim & Doug's Excellent Adventure

Tampon Tim and Doug went to a coffee shop, walked away from the counter without paying, and left Tim's daughter to inform the cashiers that a handler will be coming to pay with a credit card.

Just like every middle class person does lmfao.pic.twitter.com/a95EK7gyU0

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 9, 2024

A number of aggregators picked up the story yesterday of Second Dude Doug Emhoff and Tampon Tim Walz on some kind of joint campaign stop at the Otro Cafe in Phoenix, AZ. The focus was mostly on how they ordered drinks, didn't pay, and didn't leave a tip, with Walz's daughter forced to reassure the people at the counter that "someone" would soon make good the bill.

The whole context, though, had me scratching my head. The Otro Cafe is referred to in some of the stories as a "pastry shop". I looked it up on Tripadvisor, which says it supports Vegetarian friendly, Vegan options, and Gluten free. Is this a bro thing? I asked Wikipedia:

Bro culture is not defined consistently or concretely, but refers to a type of "fratty masculinity", predominantly white, associated with frayed-brim baseball hats, oxford shirts, sports team T-shirts, and boat shoes or sandals. NPR noted that bros could include people of color and women,

NPR identified four types of bros: dudely, jockish, preppy, and stoner-ish. In their description, dudely bros form close homosocial friendships in a group, jockish bros are defined by ability at team sports tempered by interest in alcohol, preppy bros wear "conservatively casual" clothes such as Abercrombie and Fitch and flaunt "social privilege", and stoner-ish bros may or may not use cannabis but speak in a relaxed fashion and exude the air of surfers.

. . . Oxford Dictionaries identify bros as those who use the word to refer to others, such as in the example of "don't tase me, bro", in which the taserer is not a bro, but the tased is.

. . . Since 2013, the term has been adopted by feminists and the media to refer to a misogynist culture within an organization or community. In a New York Magazine article in September 2013, Ann Friedman wrote: "Bro once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men."

So it looks to me as though Tim and Doug's trip to the vegan-friendly pastry shop was in fact an example of bro-bonding, except that both Tim and Doug are exceptionally cheesy buffoons who are so uncomfortable in their own skins that they'd be incapable of manifesting any authentic frat-lodge preppy, dudely, jockizsh, or stoner-ish confidence or ease. They're both wannabes pure and simple.

In fact they're in Arizona, a place where there are many dude ranches. But this is some sort of a campaign stop in a battleground state -- the best I can conclude is that the Harris campaign has sent the two bro-wannabes out to get the dude ranch vote. And there seems to be a growing recognition that Kamala has a problem with men:

MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell said on Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris is struggling to resonate with White and Black male voters.

. . . "She's got such a big problem with men," Mitchell said, adding that support for Trump among that demographic could be underestimated.

, , , "I think is a great thing [sic]," said former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. "At this point, when everything matters, you have to take risks and people may make mistakes. It's worth it. Put them out there and have them doing a bunch of stuff."

So OK, Walz has been a disaster ever since his debate with Vance, while Dougie is turning out not to be the sort of modern male role model everyone thought he was. Gutfeld has been doing pregnant nanny jokes every night for weeks, and he's even begun to sneak in quick, sly references to slapping women in his latest monologues -- looks like they finally got those past Fox's lawyers.

But as Jen Psaki says, you have to take risks at this point. Put them out there and have them doing a bunch of stuff.

As the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump inches closer to decision day, Aspen continues to be a popular stopping point on the campaign fundraising trail.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is slated to arrive in Aspen on Friday, Harris’ campaign announced Tuesday.

The 59-year-old husband of Harris is also set to make appearances this week in Idaho and California. The Harris campaign confirmed Emhoff will make a reception stop in San Francisco on Friday before coming to Aspen later that day.

Well, I guess Dougie's still good for the vegan-friendly circuit, San Francisco and Aspen, maybe OK for the folks at the pastry shop, not so much for the male demographic, though. Not sure what the bossgirl will have Tim doing next.

More Allegations Surface Against Second Dude Doug Emhoff

Last week I looked at Second Dude Doug Emhoff's legal career and began to match it up with Kamala's rise in politics. One thing stood out. According to Wikipedia,

He opened his own firm with Ben Whitwell in 2000, which was acquired by Venable LLP in 2006. Emhoff became managing director of Venable's West Coast offices. . . . Emhoff joined DLA Piper as a partner in 2017, working at its Washington, D.C., and California offices. He earned $1.2 million per year as a partner of the law firm. Following the announcement that his wife would be Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 United States presidential election, Emhoff took a leave of absence from the firm. After the Biden–Harris ticket won, the campaign announced Emhoff would permanently leave DLA Piper before Inauguration Day to avoid conflict of interest concerns.

He married his second wife, Kamala, in 2014, while she was Attorney General of California. In 2016,she was elected to the US Senate as a senator from California. She assumed office in 2017, the same year Emhoff left Venable LLP and went to DLA Piper, where he stayed making $1.2 million a year until his marriage to Kamala became uncomfortable to that firm; he left permanently when Kamala was elected vice president in 2020.

Several things occurred to me last week. One was that DLA Piper didn't see any conflict when Kamala was a US senator -- in fact, they paid him $1.2 million a year precisely because he was married to a US senator. According to Wikipedia,

A 2012 survey by Major, Lindsey & Africa found that law firm partners' average annual compensation was $681,000 ($896,000 for equity partners, $335,000 for non-equity partners) and tended to go up based on number of years in the partnership[.]

So Emhoff, as best anyhone can tell, was a new partner at DLA Piper but earning at the top of the scale. Wikipedia prefaces its discussion of law firm partners with the statement, "In law firms, partners are primarily those senior lawyers who are responsible for generating the firm's revenue." It sounds as if DLA Piper was expecting Emhoff's connection with Kamala to pay off big, at least until, a few years later, it apparently started to make them nervous.

This brings us to the latest allegations against Emhoff, which date from his time at Venable LLP between 2006 and 2017. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Attorneys who worked with Doug Emhoff at his former firm Venable say he yelled expletives, held a men-only cocktail hour in the office, revoked work perks from women who didn't flirt with him, and took only young, attractive associates in a limousine to a ball.

A 2019 lawsuit also claimed sex discrimination by other partners in the LA office Emhoff ran, and that while engaged to Harris, he hired an 'unqualified' part-time model as a legal secretary 'because she was young, attractive and friendly with the powerful men in the office'.

. . . One senior former staffer claimed Emhoff 'bragged' about yelling 'get the f*** out of my office' to a female partner at the firm, later telling his top male colleagues that he had 'put her in her place'.

. . . 'What's worse was he bragged about it to the management at Venable and they were aghast. He's an a**hole. He told them how he "put her in her place". A misogynist, that's who does that.'

Although the story says Emhoff was promoted from Partner-in-Charge of Venable's LA office to West Coast Managing Director in 2015 after he married Kamala, then state attorney general, there seem to have been reasons for Emhoff to leave Venable two years later in 2017. On top of what are reported to have been continuing complaints of harassment and inappropriate behavior, I have a sense that even as the husband of the state attorney general and then a US senator, Emhoff wasn't bringing in the revenue the firm expected -- and this may have happened at DLA Piper as well, since all of a sudden, they saw a potential conflict of interest in his marriage to Kamala, when they hadn't seen one when they hired him, even though she was a US senator.

For starters, I suspect certain of Emhoff's senior colleagues were in fact "aghast" at his various escapades. Emhoff's apparent enabling of sexual harassment by his subordinates at the firm got them sued for it in 2019, after Emhoff had left. But I'll bet Emhoff had been wearing out his welcome at Venable for years, and his marriage to Kamala was, if anything, an attempt to maintain his standing there -- except I have a feeling that even his marrying the ditzy state attorney general never quite resulted in a windfall to the firm, and he was eased out notwithstanding. All of a sudden, his former colleagues are spilling the dirt. They couldn't turn down the opportunity, I would think, and they were happy to see him leave when he finally did.

I would guess the same applied to his brief tenure at DLA Piper: he led them to expect big things from his connection to Sen Harris that never quite paid out, and they suddenly discovered a conmflict of interest, even though they themselves had had great expectations from just the conflict Emhoff tried to sell them.

This just confirms my first impression of the guy -- above all, he's cheesy.

Yet More On Charleroi

An article in yesterday's City Journal fleshes out a litrtle more on the coordination between the federal government, NGOs, staffing agencies, and local power players that's behind the sudden migration of quasi-legal immigrants to places like Charleroi, PA, but it really doesn't add much that's new. First, there's the federal government:

[T]he White House has admitted more than 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 article then immediately skips to NGOs while only briefly recognizing that it's the federal government that's using the NGOs to pass through funding (less their skim), as well as to funnel the immigrants into federal programs:

The next link in the web [sic] 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.

I'd feel much more comfortable with pieces like this if the writers could avoid phrases like "link in the web". What other elementary defects are in their thought processes? But this does echo the questions other observers have had about who's paying for what in Springfield and Charleroi -- the immigrants somehow drive new cars, for instance, although they don't know how to drive. I think if I were the reporters writing this story, it would bother me a lot more than it bothers these.

Next are the staffing agencies:

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. . . . 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.

The agencies work closely with local sweatshop employers and slumlords, who often turn out to be the same people:

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. . . . 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.

The final link is housing. And here, too, Fourth Street Foods has an organized interest. . . . 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.”

The piece omits other issues, especially occupancy laws. A dozen people in a two-bedroom home seems out of line, but the reporters here didn't follow up. What are the occupancy limits in Charleroi? Has anyone tried to report the situation? What was the result? This isn't much different from the problem of Haitians driving cars they don't know how to drive in Springfield, with local law enforcement looking the other way. Who's behind this? City Journal talks about it only in general terms:

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.

. . . 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.

I don't understand the fatalism here. On one hand, Charleroi somehow can't revitalize itself on its own, but on the other, traffic laws, occupancy limits, and other local ordinances apparently aren't enforced, while federal laws on immigration either aren't enforced or bypassed by fiat -- and the writers at City Journal throw up their hands and say there's nothing they can do. Nothing, apparently, but blame Trump:

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.”

It's all Trump's fault for bringing the whole thing up. Of course, that was something the journalists should have been doing before now, except they wouldn't have paid attention unless Trump brought it up. The thing I notice here, though, is how little actual effort the City Journal writers have put in to document much beyond what several amateur and part-time investigators have already revealed.

Who enforces the occupancy laws in Charleroi? Did the reporters try to interview anyone? How about the traffic laws? What does the police chief have to say? The mayor? I'd be ashamed to have my byline on this piece.