Our country’s political, corporate, and tech elite have fallen in step behind Donald Trump in his second administration, proof that the ruling class will let bygones be bygones when power and profit are on the line. Too bad such grace doesn’t extend to the rest of us. Baffler no. 80, “American Vendetta,” catalogs our domestic animosities, from broadsides to blood feuds.
Lauren Fadiman looks back on the century-and-a-half-old war between the Hatfields and McCoys—subject of museums and romance novels, now settled in a document announcing a truce in the star-spangled aftermath of 9/11. Equally historical is the labor unrest at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Tadhg Larabee reports from Steel City on the newspaper workers carrying out the longest ongoing strike in the United States.
Journalists may be on the scoreboard of this country’s resentments, but the nearly fifty million immigrants in residence seem to have taken first place. Belén Fernández leads readers into the Darién Gap, that treacherous stretch of jungle traversed by many recent arrivals, where smugglers serve as de facto U.S. border guards. Nick Tabor describes how Denver attempted to navigate these surges of immigration with little assistance from the Biden administration and open hostility from its successor—a vehemence Trump has extended toward the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio. As Pooja Bhatia reports, it was immigrants who brought the city back from the brink. Now, racist panic pits neighbor against neighbor.
“A lot can happen in two and a half years. Strikers have gotten married, bought houses, battled cancer, and sent their kids to college. Multiple workers had taken up—and then quit—smoking on the picket lines before I met them.”
“The U.S. border today persists in its long habit of extending itself wherever it pleases; U.S. Customs and Border Protection, for example, maintains a presence in no fewer than twenty-six countries.”
“Although Denver was not among the first cities singled out by Abbott, it seems in hindsight like an obvious target. Over the last twenty years, the city has done a lot to earn the designation of a sanctuary.”
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