By Clark Bailey

The Loyalist

Recent comments from President Trump concerning Democrat Representative Elijah Cummings and the state of decay and decadence in Baltimore (part of Cummings’ district) have drawn considerable ire from all of the usual suspects.

In an all too familiar fashion, the president has made outrageous claims about something, only to draw veracious criticism from the Democrats, and charges of racism and lies. Once again the Democrats make those claims only to see them fly back into their faces.

President Trump, who tweeted about the rampant crime, trash, disease and rodent infestation of Baltimore, has been proven correct on his claims from crime statistics from the Department of Justice, to PBS documentaries of Baltimore being one of the worst rat cities in the country. The claims from the president, the typical left wing reaction, and the eventual revelation of truth proving the president correct shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone now. The Democrats continue to fall for it though. Their failure to recognize the president’s baiting is connected to the greater problem of the Democrat’s immense failure to run the places where they have power.

Baltimore, like many of the major metropolitan areas in this country, has been run by Democrats for decades — some cities close to 100 years. Baltimore, also like many major metropolitan and urban areas, is riddled with crime, disease, poverty, drugs, homelessness and a general malaise hanging over them as thick as any fog. You can go from Baltimore to Seattle to Los Angeles to Detroit and many places in between and see the carnage that is Democrat rule.

This is one reason why the Democrats scramble, and why they throw their charge of racism when confronted with their failures. The reason being they have yet, after decade upon decade, to find a way to fix these problems. In fact, they only see them become worse. You see this as all Democrat candidates for president slide further and further left — offering no solutions to the mess they have created, only doubling down on decadence and decay.

We who have made our way to sanity in this apocalyptic American politics landscape however see through it. No longer will the prospect of no solutions, protecting corporatist who care nothing for the American worker or economy, or those who wish to destabilize and destroy our country from open borders, be an acceptable answer at the ballot box. The Democrats once claimed they stood for the common man in this country. That is a time long since passed, and the common people of America will reflect that, in the ballot box and in resistance to the insanity of American leftism.

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As of press time, there’s conflicting reports, both in legacy media and social media, of a train loaded with coal leaving Harlan County and former Blackjewell employees blocking said train. The reports echo the frustration of the miners and the continuation of not being paid by their former company. That, as a trainload of coal, pulled up from the belly of Harlan County, going elsewhere. Going elsewhere as it increases the stock portfolio of those still refusing to give these men here in Harlan County what they are due.

I’ll have to admit this action give me a glimpse into the past, albeit briefly and minutely, of the labor struggles of the 20s-40s and even up to the 1970s. That’s a time that few of us left alive can fully remember and most of us did not experience at all. That period in history, did however, shape much of what is known, to both us here, and the outside world, to be Harlan County. Harlan County as both reality and as myth.

It is that reality and myth which converge to create the ethos that is Harlan. We descend from a people from the earliest pioneers to the wave of immigrants in the early 20th century, which are as rough and jagged as the ridges which dot much of our landscape. A people that are deep and isolated like the most remote hollow. And a people as beautiful and fragile as are rivers, streams, and woodlands.

The people of Harlan County have survived and made a living off of coal, either directly or indirectly since 1911, when the first trainload carried dreams and hopes away from here, in hopes they would return. Living and sometimes dying with the coal industry, we’ve had an exodus to here and more often from here. The people remaining becoming a hearty mix of disillusionment juxtaposed against a resilience that hopes against all.

It is to those people who have stuck it out here, no matter how long it may be, that I give this shout out to, especially those still yanking the Black Diamond from deep dark holes. The people of Harlan County are with you. We’re here praying for you and here to stand with you. And once again to fight the excess of industrialism. An industrialism that though it has provided many a living and transformed Harlan County in too many ways, it is also an industrialism that at times has raped both the land and in a sense the people who were cogs in the wheel.

To all you Blackjewell miners, and all miners in Harlan County and across the coalfields, we have your back and are in your corner. If need be, we are ready to stand on the tracks with you. We applaud all that has been done to secure what is justly and rightly owed to the hard working men, and we call on even more to be done to make what is just and right a reality in people’s lives.