I always enjoy the optimism of an early campaign effort, and Bernie Moreno’s is undoubtedly one of those good ones, early on. He’s running for the Ohio Senate seat against Sharrod Brown, but first, he has to win a primary, so he and J.D. Vance were at Lori’s Roadhouse in West Chester, Ohio to make a pitch, and it was full of optimism and an approach to politics that is full of more than empty promises. I like seeing people like Bernie getting into politics, people who have been personally successful and know what it looks like, and who want to do good things for all the right reasons. So, I was enthusiastic about seeing the two of them together, a current senator, and the one who would be his partner representing Ohio in the Swamp we want to drain. We are looking for MAGA Republicans who can work with a Trump administration, unlike the last time. If there has been anything good about losing Trump to exile for a while, it has been that it gave us a chance to knock out the firewall that the Congress and Senate had in preserving the Swamp. If you want to drain it, there must be cooperation from the other branches of government. Otherwise, it just won’t happen. And things are shaping up in a very positive way. I am pretty excited about the future, for a lot of reasons, and one of them was a book I had been reading that very day when I was going to see J.D. Vance again. It was Johan Norberg’s Capitalist Manifesto and it was strange to read a quote in it about J.D. Vance, from a Swedish perspective. Norberg’s book is not an American outlook on capitalism. Instead, it’s a European globalist view and a fascinating process to watch. But he was using J.D. Vance and an example about Middletown, Ohio to make a point that I thought was well made. So, it was weird to have all those elements come together in one Friday morning spectacle.
The point made was haunting me a bit because I am a bit older than J.D. Vance, and I watched Middletown, Ohio, go through its transition from a wonderful blue-collar town that ran off of an Armco economy, a steel mill that told a similar story to those in Pittsburg up the road. They were the centerpieces of the town, and it’s where everyone worked. But through lots of influences, particularly communist globalism, the steel mill lost its power, and the economy of Middletown tanked, and never recovered. It went from a thriving town to something that looked like a third-world hell hole within a few decades. By the time J.D. Vance came along and was a young person, his experience was captured nicely in the book The Hillbilly Elegy and the movie of the same name by Ron Howard. That popularity and the association that J.D. Vance now has in the Trump MAGA movement, which Bernie Moreno was now a part of, got Johan’s attention to make a point about globalism in general. J.D. Vance had said, which Norberg quoted, that neither he nor his friends wanted to have a blue-collar job. They were all told to grow up and move away to some white-collar job, and that America was going to move to a kind of service-oriented economy. I remember hearing my dad’s speech, “Do you want to grow up and dig ditches?” Blue-collar work was frowned upon, even discouraged. So, no wonder so many of those good jobs picked up and moved to places like China. It wasn’t so much bad policy that moved them, but the education system, the entertainment culture, and political priorities that had it all wrong, or right if you consider that they were all in on a scheme to destroy America, that caused so many young people to grow up and not want to work.
If you want to destroy America, convince their young people to grow up and be lazy. This wasn’t the point of Johan Norberg, and indeed not where J.D. Vance was politically. But it was the underlying reason all the steel mills picked up and moved to other places through globalism. It was getting harder and harder to find good employees to do these jobs; the labor unions certainly didn’t make it any easier, so those corporations moved to places with better workers and more of them. And the natural poison pill to cultures like Middletown, Ohio, was that nobody wanted to grow up and work as hard as they had to watch their parents’ work. Those kinds of blue-collar jobs were looked down upon as if they were part of a lower class. It wasn’t enough to own a home, a few cars, and a bass boat. Kids watched their parents be put down by culture in general for working in a steel mill, so they grew up wanting nothing to do with any of it. And now that America doesn’t make much anymore, people are seeing firsthand how valuable manufacturing is to a culture and rethinking how they value those jobs. That is the primary driver of the MAGA political movement. People were told many things over the years; now that they see where it has all been going, they don’t like it. And they want to improve the situation dramatically.
I would offer that for those who profess that they want to make America Great Again, the best place to start would be to make Hard Work a Priority Again. It is not so much a throwback to how things used to be, but to look at the grandparents and their parents who made up towns like Middletown, Ohio, promising to begin with and value what they did and to emulate that hard work in the future. Americans were suckered by globalism into being lazy; they were told that they could grow up and make lots of money in a useless white-collar job where they ordered pizza at 9 am for lunch three hours later, doing very little in between. And that everything would be great. And it hasn’t been. Americans need to get back to working hard and working often. We need to stop listening to the rest of the world that wants more socialism, which consists of more breaks, more government handouts, and much less freedom. The globalism we have experienced was a disaster and has been terrible for places like Middletown, Ohio. Not because globalism was evil in itself, where capitalism would have an opportunity to lift everyone to a higher living level. However, what globalism turned out to be was an attack on the American way of life toward conversion to global communism; that attack came in the form of convincing an entire nation that hard work was beneath them and that whole generations would grow up to be lazy, entitled, and dependent on globalism for their necessities. The kind of MAGA movement politics that J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno were pitching and the type of globalism Johan Norberg was trying to sell to the world involved an appreciation for hard work at its core. Something that would undoubtedly make Middletown, Ohio, Great Again. We want the future J.D. Vance kids and their friends not to grow up and sleep on the couch but to go to work and do great things with a lot of ambition through their actions. And through that embrace of values, America and the world can be great again because it all starts with hard work and people willing to do it for the betterment of humanity.
Rich Hoffman
The Overmanwarrior 