Vice President JD Vance said the future of America will be built in places like Middletown in his hometown speech on Friday. Vance called out The Wall Street Journal directly over their long-standing support for open borders and the policies which led to the hollowing of American manufacturing in the Midwest.
“The Wall Street Journal, the voice of big business in the United States of America, proposed, and I quote, a five-word constitutional amendment: ‘There shall be open borders.’ They weren’t joking, they weren’t being tongue-in-cheek. If you look at what they tried to do over the next 40 years, they told you back then exactly what they were trying to do,” said Vance about the New York City publication.
Vance vividly detailed being in high school and how often classmates would talk about their father being laid off and suffering the indignity of training a foreign replacement.
“Being replaced by foreign workers wasn’t an accident. It was a desired outcome of a generation of American elites,” Vance said.
He talked about the story of Kevin Flanagan, who was told he would only receive his severance package if he trained his replacement. He did so – and took his own life on his last day.
Vance talked about his grandfather, who worked for nearly 40 years at Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works, now known as Armco Steel, as a welder and described him as a faithful voter who didn’t care for politics.
“My papaw hated the politicians who ignored this place, he hated the people who saw this as a place of the past. He hated the people who forgot about this town, why they should’ve been fightin’ for this town,” the Vice President said. “The unfortunate reality is they came from both political parties. They spent the last 40 years telling you it didn’t matter if we made things right here or in overseas countries. They said it was irrational, sentimental to preserve the things that made the United States special.”
In one of his toughest lines of the speech, Vance linked the job losses in manufacturing communities to the drug and fentanyl crisis that hit those areas.
“The blood of those people, in my view, it pools at the feet of those who sell out their country for a cheap bottom line,” Vance said. “Our politicians and frankly, the cronies in the private sector. People in the private sector who didn’t want to build in America like Cleveland Cliffs but were happy to build overseas they got rich and communities like this one got poor.”
Vance continued:
Politicians who came to Washington with a few thousand dollars in their bank account left with millions in stock portfolios. And did all of you get? What did we get? If you were lucky, your neighbor’s job got shipped to a foreign country while your tax dollars got shipped to fraudsters. If you were unlucky, and I know many of you were, you were left raising a grandchild while you were mourning a child killed by the poison that came across that open border.
The Vice President called the era of globalization a policy choice and that the people of America made a choice to end that decline by electing President Trump in November 2024.
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