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Like other military veterans of the First Iraq War, McVeigh did not believe that the U.S. should become entangled in foreign wars at a time when his white-working class buddies back in Buffalo, NY, were suffering from the earliest waves of deindustrialization in America.

They represent the people left behind by deindustrialization and the disappearance or automation of the dirty, distasteful jobs that were the backbone of the U.S. economy.

And the early stages of American deindustrialization were already underway: Jobs were starting to vanish.

Rather than blame Haitians or any other immigrant group for these structural issues, it is essential not to cower to these fears but to shine the light on institutions that make life difficult—such as the decades of corporate deindustrialization—and the people who should remedy it: the government.

Chuck Pascal, Democratic chair of Armstrong County, located next to Butler, credits the shift from “traditional Republican red” to “MAGA red” with the deindustrialization of the region during the early 1980s.