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There are an awful lot of forgotten little towns in this country and Braddock, Pennsylvania, is definitely one of them. It’s only 11 miles outside Pittsburgh, but Braddock is basically empty at this point. Only 1,700 people live there — that’s down from a population of more than 18,000 during the Second World War.
Braddock is now so underpopulated that you can buy a four-bedroom home there with a two-car garage right in the middle of town for $3,000. Don’t believe it? Check it out yourself on Realtor.com. So, you know the story: For decades, the biggest employer in Braddock was manufacturing something called the Edgar Thomson Steelworks. In fact, Andrew Carnegie built it there along with his first stone public library, which still stands.
For generations, Braddock, Pennsylvania, was a real place and then inevitably the steel plant closed and the usual disasters arrived — unemployment, hopelessness, drugs. People left by the thousands, but one man saw an opportunity in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Not an opportunity for the town, but an opportunity for himself. That man’s name was John Fetterman. Fetterman was 35 years old and had never in his life had a real job. Fetterman was not from Braddock, hardly. He grew up in an affluent neighborhood four hours away.
Fetterman had spent his adult life going to school — first to business school, then to Harvard for a so-called Masters of Public Policy, which for the uninitiated, is an utterly meaningless document that you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get in order to tell people that you went to Harvard. But in Fetterman’s case, it wasn’t expensive at all. It was free. His dad paid for it and paid for everything else. As the Philadelphia Inquirer put it, “For a long stretch, lasting well into his 40s, deep into middle-age, Fetterman’s main source of income came from his parents. They gave him and his family $54,000 in 2015 alone.”
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In other words, John Fetterman was a classic trustafarian, a flaky, middle-aged man looking for a purpose in life and in Braddock, Pennsylvania, he found one. In 2005, a year after arriving in Braddock, Fetterman announced he was running for mayor and amazingly, boldly, given that he was a professional student living off his rich family, John Fetterman decided to run as a blue-collar populist — but the media asked no questions. They loved it.
In John Fetterman, the media saw themselves. He was just like them. So, Fetterman narrowly won the race and then the campaign to boost John Fetterman’s career began in earnest. The Guardian newspaper described John Fetterman as the “coolest mayor” in the country. The New York Times told its readers, who didn’t know any better, that John Fetterman had “turned the busted town of Braddock, PA, into a national symbol of hope, hard work and authentic blue jeans.”
How inspiring. Fetterman thought it was. He went on a national tour to brag about how he was single-handedly saving this benighted mill town in western Pennsylvania. He gave a TED talk — of course, he did — about how he was running Braddock using the lessons that he learned at Harvard. In 2011, he went — of course he did — to the Aspen Ideas Festival to further brag. Here’s what he said: “We created the first art gallery in the four-town region with artists’ studios. We did public art installations. And I don’t know if you consider it art exactly, but I consider growing organic vegetables in the shadow of a steel mill an art, and that has attracted homesteading.”
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It’s so perfect:…
Read More: Tucker Carlson: John Fetterman has a long list of documented failures