Forgotten Town
1st October 2024
“America doesn’t need this place, doesn’t care about this place… It’s just a place that time forgot.” Tom Altmiller is sitting across from me at a paint-chipped picnic table. It looks like it was bright red once, but the years have faded it to a sort of grayish maroon. He’s in his late 50s, with square glasses, a graying goatee, and a short ponytail, and speaks with a stubborn, matter-of-fact stoicism that’s common among the locals. “My standard joke about this place is that if the world ended tomorrow, we’d get ten more years, because we’re roughly that far behind the curve here,” he says. “In terms of everything.”
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Beginning around 2021, Charleroi began to be flooded by thousands of immigrants, largely, (though not exclusively) from Haiti. A local CBS report from March reported that “the immigrant population in Charleroi has grown by more than 2,000% in the last two years.” Earlier this month, PolitiFact admitted that the number of non-English speaking students in the Charleroi school district had skyrocketed by an unbelievable 1,800 percent over the past five years.
Two weeks ago, my organization America 2100 spent five days on the ground in Charleroi, documenting and reporting on the crisis. Our coverage went viral, and within 48 hours of our first public interview, President Trump mentioned Charleroi at a rally. Then again, one week and a half later, this time at some length, during a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania. That kicked off a media feeding frenzy, replete with a flood of authoritative “fact checks” and reports on Trump’s “debunked claims” about the Pennsylvania town, an NBC News segment, a cacophony of garment-rending legacy media write-ups about “hateful rants”, “dangerous conspiracy theories,” “anti-immigrant lies”, and a statement from Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro slamming Trump’s criticism as “complete and utter bullshit.”