It’s been said that public discourse in America has deteriorated to the point where people aren’t able to agree even upon basic verifiable facts. And, of course, that’s due mostly to politics and political viewpoints. But an idea put forth by Bret Weinstein in a recent podcast suggests that this is a new and even historic development that signals a turning away from a core principle of the Enlightenment. That core principle would be logic.

As Weinstein’s thinking goes, when people can’t agree on basic facts then logic goes out the window as we can no longer apply logic to any question or issue we humans face.

So, for instance, I consider it to be a basic fact that a decline in Joe Biden’s mental capacity, his mental energy, all the things that become ‘at issue’ for so many of our elderly citizens at some point in their later years, is evident now with the president.

I’m not going to say what it is specifically that leads me to that conclusion. Because, for me, none of it needs to be stated. It’s simply an obvious observable reality.

The point here being that no matter what specifics are presented, enough of us will invariably continue to claim not to see the president’s mental decline and, for purely reasons of political affiliation, refuse to admit that it’s happening at all, with the end result being that those on either side of the political chasm can no longer move forward together in reality.

My own political affiliation until the last few years has been Democrat. But I now see my party as being the more powerful half of the duopoly that controls our entire political system. And our American duopoly is an essential tool of a frightening global elite that has been consolidating its control over western nations for decades now.

And so I’ve come to believe that the only answer to this situation and maybe our last hope to break the grip that our party and the duopoly and the globalist forces have on our country is to elect Robert F. Kennedy Jr. president.

RFK Jr. has articulated, and continues to speak to, the realities facing Americans, as well as the profound changes to American lives that have been wrought by a predatory elite now for many decades. And he’s doing so in an election year when no other candidate is even remotely speaking to these same concerns.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is in an obvious state of physical and mental decline. And the nation he presides over is in a state of social and economic decline. Are these facts or just opinions? Can words and their meanings be used and manipulated to deflect from what seem to be basic observable realities?

I would consider all of these statements to be irrefutable facts.

We know, however, that there are many who would disagree. But as Bret Weinstein has suggested, we are living in an era wherein even highly intelligent and educated people are not in agreement about what would seem to be basic and easily observable facts.

So I might suggest that the quality of life in this country has deteriorated greatly over the last half century for all but the more affluent who live in the most affluent regions of the country.

I would offer that the working and lower middle classes have been bled dry by the affluent through decades of wage stagnation, loss of health benefits, the busting of unions, and the disappearance of complete employment sectors of the economy accompanied by a simultaneous ever-increasing cost of living.

But somehow this perspective has come to be disputed by those who say it is merely the tendency of older Americans to look back at past eras in their lives through rose-colored glasses.

This is a very common claim that has evolved into powerful politically weaponized propaganda.

We’ve all heard it. It asserts that our recollection of how this country used to be is simply boomer nostalgia. Just a vague longing for a better past that never actually existed. Not good for minorities or gay people. It ignores our nation’s darker past. Kind of racist, actually. At the very least, not to be taken seriously. Just poor old codgers who are incapable of remembering the past accurately.

So, for instance, it would follow that I’m simply not remembering accurately being hired into the steel mill in 1977 at $5.29 an hour (which is about $25 an hour today) with full benefits like comprehensive medical and dental insurance and two weeks paid vacation.

I’m not actually recalling correctly being a member of one of the most powerful labor unions in American history, the United Steelworkers of America. I guess I should finally just accept the fact that none of these very significant moments in my life ever really happened.

So I must also be misremembering my thriving hometown of Aliquippa, PA, you know, actually thriving.

The teaming downtown full of locally owned businesses. A ballpark with stadium lighting and, in the summer, softball leagues of grown men playing under those lights till long after dark. The Sheffield Lanes filled with bowling leagues every night of the week, just like every other bowling alley in every surrounding rust belt state. The packed bars everywhere. The parades down Main St. or through downtown. The annual 4th of July celebrations and fireworks. Neighbors sitting on each other’s front porches all summer long. The yearly Italian San Rocco Festival attended by thousands. The incredible ethnic diversity of the entire region.

So it would also naturally follow that I simply don’t remember correctly working in the mill with almost as many blacks as whites.

I’m somehow misremembering how almost right out of high school anyone hired into the mill was able to buy a house. As RFK Jr. has accurately stated, there was a time when you could get married, have kids, buy a new car every few years, take your family on vacations, all on one salary. And no matter how many children you chose to have, they all enjoyed full comprehensive health and dental coverage, quite unlike the restrictive health insurance plans we have today.

The full-employment Aliquippa I remember was not a wealthy place, but it was a place where very few suffered the kind of financial insecurities that are so common today.

Today, in a bleak contrast to the past as I remember it, the blue-collar unionized working-class manufacturing base in this country has been replaced by low-wage non-union service jobs and a gig employment economy with neither providing health insurance or other benefits once enjoyed by vast sectors of the American workforce.

Some have said that, starting out in life, without a college education, it’s perfectly fitting that people should be employed at low wage fast food jobs and that they should simply work their way up to better higher paying jobs as they get older. Okay. Fair enough. People are entitled to their own opinions.

But remember, we’re talking now about whether or not they are entitled to their own facts.

In a past we boomers are now told never existed, people like me were hired into high-paying union manufacturing jobs right out of high school and could get on with our lives being financially responsible individuals who could, in short order, get married, own a home, and raise a family.

That simply is not the current reality in America today and no one in this country with any credibility at all would dare suggest that it is.

The countless towns and small cities like Aliquippa all across the country with thriving and safe streets full of locally owned small businesses provided Americans with something we might call COMMUNITY. I come from one of those communities. One of so many. Like countless others in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and on and on.

Today, most of downtown Aliquippa has been bulldozed. The thriving community it once was, like a thousand others across this once great nation, is now ancient American history.

You can’t come from a place like that and not recognize how widespread this collapse of American small towns and communities has been as well as recognizing how the destruction of an all-important sector of the American economy and the societal base it supported has been repeated thousands of times across the country.

We see it maybe a lot clearer than others because we notice that something that was once there is gone. It was the reality of the times many of us lived in. We remember it because we were there. We know.

The fallout of this destruction of the American manufacturing base has been devastating to the health of what we might refer to as the once great American society. But you have to have a certain sensibility to recognize this fallout for what it is and what it has done to the people of this country.

The Aliquippa I grew up in was an incredible community. J&L Steel: Aliquippa Works, was the largest steel mill in the world for many decades. Nine miles long. At its peak, it employed somewhere between 10 and 20K workers.

My hometown is the birthplace of the United Steelworkers of America. It is the birthplace of the right of workers IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA to organize themselves and form a union via the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Wagner Act in 1937.

Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jones and Laughlin had a large plant in nearby Aliquippa that became [in 1937] the object of the National Labor Relations Board prosecution. Vertically integrated with 19 subsidiaries, it owned and operated ore, coal, and limestone properties; lake and river transportation facilities; and terminal railroads located at its manufacturing plants. The fourth largest steel and pig iron company in the nation, Jones and Laughlin employed 33,000 men mining ore, 44,000 men mining coal, 4,000 men quarrying limestone, 16,000 men manufacturing coke, 343,000 men manufacturing steel, and 83,000 men transporting its product. The company had about 10,000 employees in its Aliquippa plant, which was located in a community of about 30,000 persons. –

Encyclopedia.com

So, in the late 1930s, the fourth largest steel manufacturer in the United States employed over a half-million men. Point six percent of the nation’s total population at the time of 129 million. If half the country was female and twenty percent (rounding off current percentages) were children, that means a full one percent of the nation’s men were employed by just the fourth largest steel company in the country.

Now throw in the three even larger steel manufacturers and the countless foundries and finishing plants that lined the Ohio and rivers throughout the industrial northeast and Midwest and you can easily understand why the steel manufacturing industry was the largest employer in the United States for much of the 20th century.

Then, of course, it all disappeared. By the 1980s, you could look around Aliquippa as well as the rest of Western Pennsylvania and the good union jobs with full benefits were gone, the prosperity was gone, the excitement was gone, a massive sector of the American economy was gone, and, I would suggest, along with it, the economic security of the American working class.

In the country we live in today, the working class has no economic security. I state this as a cold and irrefutable fact. But we should know by now that facts only get us so far.

Because now, incredibly, people who think of themselves as progressive Democrats push back on the idea that things are really that bad in America today. And to do that with any shred of imagined credibility it is imperative that they push back even harder on the suggestion that things were ever better in some now distant yesterday that exists only in the deluded memories of us baby boomers.

Stand back for a moment and just look at the inherent political power that comes from simply denying someone else’s lived experiences. This is revisionist history at its most dangerous.

I often wonder if these so-called progressives don’t see how they’ve changed sides. They’re now not simply denying past historical realities. They’re glossing over and even mocking the current struggles of the working-class in 2024. This isn’t progressive or liberal or traditional Democratic Party politics. It’s the propaganda apparatus of predatory elitism, and it’s nothing less than ongoing class warfare being waged on working- and middle-class Americans.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the one candidate for president in 2024 who is not denying the past economic security of the working classes in America.

Far from it. He’s actually running his campaign on acknowledging it and promising to work to help restore some of the economic security once enjoyed by the working people of this country.

And, dare we hope, that through a President Kennedy’s efforts we might again see that certain level of prosperity that working Americans were allowed to believe they’d achieved when they were able to buy a home and raise a family on nothing more than the sweat of their backs and a high school diploma.