[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I never do this, but I should — and far more often, too! I want to take a moment to thank every TomDispatch reader who’s become a “recurring donor” to this website — who, that is, has decided to give a set sum monthly, quarterly, or yearly to TD.
read the complete article:
https://ift.tt/2V2Y6Qx
March 31, 2019 at 06:08AM
CLEAR LAKE, Iowa — Chris Petersen, a third-generation hog farmer who says “I bleed rural” and tears up at the fate of family and friends, has found a way to keep his small holding going, and avoid the exodus that so many are making. His grown son and daughter have, too.
read the complete article:
https://ift.tt/2V5Pvwx
March 31, 2019 at 06:00AM
Thanks to US Attorney General William Barr’s “summary” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, President Donald Trump and most of the Republican Party can implant the idea in the mind of much of the public that Trump did nothing wrong.
read the complete article:
https://ift.tt/2ustiNw
March 31, 2019 at 05:21AM
The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America by Ben Bradlee Jr. The people of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania voted Democratic for decades, until Donald Trump flipped it in 2016. What happened?
Named one of the "juiciest political books to come in 2018" by Entertainment Weekly.
In The Forgotten, Ben Bradlee Jr. reports on how voters in Luzerne County, a pivotal county in a crucial swing state, came to feel like strangers in their own land - marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and a liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism. Fundamentally rural and struggling with changing demographics and limited opportunity, Luzerne County can be seen as a microcosm of the nation. In The Forgotten, Trump voters speak for themselves, explaining how they felt others were 'cutting in line' and that the federal government was taking too much money from the employed and giving it to the idle. The loss of breadwinner status, and more importantly, the loss of dignity, primed them for a candidate like Donald Trump. The political facts of a divided America are stark, but the stories of the men, women and families in The Forgotten offer a kaleidoscopic and fascinating portrait of the complex on-the-ground political reality of America today.
