Field of Delusions . . . Build It and They Will Come . . . .

Jeebus - they are exhaustively hopeless:

WAYNESBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - When Mike Sylvester entered a career training center earlier this year in southwestern Pennsylvania, he found more than one hundred federally funded courses covering everything from computer programming to nursing.

He settled instead on something familiar: a coal mining course.

”I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner.

Despite broad consensus about coal’s bleak future, a years-long effort to diversify the economy of this hard-hit region away from mining is stumbling, with Obama-era jobs retraining classes undersubscribed and future programs at risk under President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget.

Trump has promised to revive coal by rolling back environmental regulations and moved to repeal Obama-era curbs on carbon emissions from power plants.

“I have a lot of faith in President Trump,” Sylvester said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-coal-retraining-insight/awaiting-trumps-coal-comeback-miners-reject-retraining-idUSKBN1D14G0

What a depressing peek into the window of a closed-minded, reality-denying segment of American society.  These are people who have actually convinced themselves that Donald J. Trump, the P.T. Barnum of leisure-class real estate, the Elmer Gantry of populist poppycock . . . is  the great white savior of God's chosen hoi polloi, who with a simple wave of his stubby fingered hands, is going to magically revitalize one of the dirtiest, most environmentally damaging, slowly and deservedly dying, industries on the planet, and create oodles of jobs that will keep them all gainfully employed and economically sustain their families and communities for decades to come.

This is what a cult of mass delusion looks like dear readers.

It's what made this picture so terrifying to The Gadfly when he saw it the very first time during last years GOP primary campaign:

The Gadfly had seen the looks on those people's faces before.

When The Gadfly first saw that picture the summer of 2016, it sent an unpleasant shiver down his spine.  It reminded The Gadfly of some 1930's documentary news reels he'd seen long ago which revisited the history of another great Anglo Saxon savior who was going to deliver his beloved people and divine nation from the hordes of filthy immigrants, pointy-head liberal elites and impure bloodlines.

We know how that turned out - don't we?



----TFG