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Cambria County fights population loss in little, big ways
By Salena Zito
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Reggie Canal began the process of moving from New York City to this Cambria County city this past July. The Queens native is a financial adviser who has spent much of his life working in the five boroughs as well as various places abroad. He was lured here for a number of reasons, including quality of life, affordability and the ability to start his own business in the main business district of a city, without breaking the bank.
The kicker, though, was the remote worker incentive, a pilot program that offered a cash motivation — $2,500 to be exact — to attract people to move to the county and take up residence.
The brainchild of local civic and business leaders with a boost from the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies, the program required applicants to agree to live here for a year. “I have been to Taiwan, Hong Kong and France, and really none of them compares in terms of being a deeply connected community that is dedicated to making sure everyone is successful, not just the newcomers,” Mr. Canal said. “My friends ask me why I did it, then when they come visit, they get it.” Amy Bradley, president and CEO of the Cambria Regional Chamber of Commerce, said the response for the grants from people like Mr. Canal — from all across the country — was so overwhelming that they had to cut off the application process when they received 40 within days: “Our objective was to see if we could attract people who either grew up here and were thinking about coming back or, even better, someone who never even heard of Cambria County but was ready for something new,” she said.
Turned out they could.
“That is not only a good thing, it is a much-needed breakthrough in how to help solve our declining population problem,” said Ms. Bradley, who is working with other local civic leaders to reverse Cambria County’s misfortune as one of Pennsylvania’s fastest-shrinking counties. She said she knew her home county was headed in the wrong direction even before the recent census numbers came out, showing Cambria’s population had declined by 7.1% from 2010 to 2020. The numbers weren’t quite as bad as the Census Bureau had projected the year before, but Cambria still ranked eighth among counties in the state that saw the greatest rate of population decline.
“Our job as civic leaders is not to manage a decline, but to give people a compelling reason to come,” said Ms. Bradley. “And those reasons always include telling the story of the high quality of life and deep sense of community we have here.”
She said that part tells itself: “There are several colleges here, including University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown, St. Aloysius and St. Francis; our outdoor life is rich with fishing, hiking, skiing, kayaking and snowshoeing; we have a minor league baseball team; the housing is affordable; the local school districts are great, and the people here really have each other’s backs.”
The worker incentive program so far has drawn eight people, with more on the way, but Johnstown is relying on something much larger to stave the shrinkage. Thanks to the late Rep. John Murtha, once the powerful chair of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, there is a path forward — one similar to what made small- and medium-size towns flourish in the golden era of railroads: a transportation hub.
To attract economic development — and the people who naturally follow jobs and opportunities — you have to have a transportation hub for a business of any type to want to locate here, explained Rick McQuaide, chair of the Johnstown-Cambria County Airport Authority.
“Whether moving people or commerce, the positive economic impact is no different than the presence of a railroad in a small town 100 years ago,” Mr. McQuaide said. “A train stop in your town meant prosperity; it shaped the very growth of the town and the eventual growth of their suburbs.”
When the railroad stations closed, many of those towns did as well. “The ability to transport not just people, but goods to surrounding areas was cut off and their vitality shrunk. The same thing happens when a smaller city either does not have a regional airport or it loses its carrier.”
Last month, United Airlines dropped a total of 12 destinations in small city regional airports in the Midwest and the South, cutting off those cities’ ability to grow. But things are different in Cambria County.
The airport in Johnstown, Cambria’s largest population center, has been so busy in the past 11 months that enplanements are at levels not seen for more than a dozen years.
“We’re now achieving between 1,200 and 2,000 enplanements a month — a significant improvement over our annual enplanements with the smaller carriers that were between 3,500 and 4,500 a year,” Mr. McQuaide explained. A new airline with twin-engine jets recently took over what had been single-engine air service at the hub, which is now on track to exceed 10,000 enplanements a year.
Flying in and out is a breeze. There’s no crazy maze of parking lots to navigate; you just pull up and walk in the front door. The check-in and TSA security service is quick. The flights to Chicago and Washington, D.C., are fast. The 50-passenger aircraft have been operating at capacity on weekends, a little less so during the week, which allows passengers to bring on multiple bags and transfer them easily to their next flight .
On Tuesday afternoon, the Andrew family was unloading their family of six — two parents, a grandmother and three children — as well as all of their luggage and car seats at the front entrance of the airport en route to catch a flight to Chicago. The Madison, Wis., family has relatives in Cambria County. They’ve found that, especially when traveling with the children — 6, 3 and 1 years old — the local airport offers ease and flexibility over a larger one.
In 2009, an ABC News reporter infamously called the airport named for Mr. Murtha the “Airport for Nobody.” In penning a piece on politics, the reporter missed the economic vitality the airport provides this community.
“Before, anyone who lived here or owned a business here had to waste their entire day driving to Pittsburgh or to Baltimore to get somewhere,” Mr. McQuaide explained. “Knowing that you can get in and get out efficiently and affordably” is important for anybody wanting to locate here, he said. “As simple as that sounds, it really is what makes or breaks a small county in terms of offering that one more thing that no other county has.”
Mr. Canal said he hasn’t used the airport yet, but “I definitely will be.” Most importantly for business purposes: “I know I can get clients, investors and friends here with ease.”
Click here for the full story.
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More attempt to inflame a sad event.
Terror in the Capitol Tunnel
The D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office concluded Rosanne Boyland died of a drug overdose but that autopsy result is highly suspicious.
By Julie Kelly
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What's fair is considered fiction by radical liberals:
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For The Wall Street Journal, Garry Kasparov looks at the pejorative use of the word “woke” as it’s being used to describe a set of progressive identitarian ideologies surrounding issues of “Social Justice,” and why he believes the word may be “overused and abused.”
According to Kasparov, something is “woke” if it utilizes “the abuse of power—mostly social, not yet governmental—to silence debate and paralyze the spread of any ideas that challenge the prevailing ideological dogma.” While this behavior is all-too-human and not exclusive to one side of the political spectrum, many have noticed a sudden rise in this tendency throughout our culture.
While these impulses are understandable in terms of human nature, history has shown that the costs of such intimidation tactics falls predominantly on the societies least powerful and most oppressed.
Destroying the mechanisms of democracy to preserve democracy won’t work. We can’t promote marginalized voices by telling them what is acceptable to say. We must fight to preserve the free flow of ideas, of debate and an open society, however uncomfortable it makes us. Democracy has never been a safe space.
Read the full article here.
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On her Substack, The Truth Fairy, FAIR Advisor Abigail Shrier broke a story about activism-minded teachers in California schools pushing conformist and illiberal views of “gender ideology” on students without parents’ knowledge.
Citing low student turnout to LGBTQ+ clubs, teachers began targeting students for recruitment by “stalking” their Google search history, observing their classroom behavior, and eavesdropping on their hallway conversations. The clubs were also unsanctioned, by design, in order to avoid record-keeping requirements for student attendance and keep parents in the dark about their childrens’ activities.
For decades, gay Americans lived under the shadow of a vicious calumny that—if granted full inclusion in society—they would ‘recruit’ children. This was, and remains, a lie—one that was used to justify bigotry, even violence. But taking advantage of Americans’ current desire for LGBTQ inclusiveness, California’s largest teachers’ union seems, perversely, to have perceived the opportunity to coach teachers in student-recruiting tactics.
Since the publication of her piece, Spreckels Union School District has responded positively, and announced plans for "immediate steps to address” parents’ concerns.
Read her original piece here, and her update here.
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For Spiked, Paddy Hannam reached out to FAIR Advisor Peter Boghossian to get his thoughts on the newly launched University of Austin (UATX), where Boghossian is one of three Founding Faculty Fellows.
Dr. Boghossian says he is hopeful that UATX will pave the way for a new model of higher education that celebrates tolerance of disagreement, fosters viewpoint diversity, and is committed to the unfettered pursuit of truth, because “when you think you have the truth already, you do not seek it.”
Most universities in the United States, according to Boghossian, are stifling freethought and have become environments of socially enforced ideological conformity, and that many professors are behaving more like activists instead of educators.
Boghossian believes students ought to be exposed to ideas that challenge and inspire them. They should hear other viewpoints and be encouraged to think for themselves, because “every time you remove debate, you encourage unscientific thinking, because there is no way to falsify ideas.”
Read the full interview here.
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For City Journal, FAIR Advisor Zaid Jilani wrote a piece about why immigrants to the United States, contrary to popular belief, do not necessarily vote for progressive candidates.
“The late conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton once wrote of encountering a ‘peculiar frame of mind’ across the Western world that ‘felt the need to denigrate the customs, culture, and institutions that are identifiably ours.’” Scruton coined a word to describe this cultural self-loathing: oikophobia. While xenophobia indicates a distrust and disdain of foreigners, oikophobia refers to being fearful of one’s own native land.
According to Jilani, we’ve seen a surge of oikophobia among America’s opinion-making institutions in the past several years. Politicians, the news media, the creative class, and even heads of major corporations, frequently describe America as a dark place beset with backward, racist, and sexist inhabitants who lack the enlightened attitudes of our peers in the developed world. Jilani states:
The conservative response to such left-wing disdain for America has often been “love it or leave it.” But conservatives have been less keen to adopt the flip side of this strategy: perhaps we should welcome those around the world who want to come here precisely because they love this country so much.
Read the full article here.
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This week, FAIR Advisor Michael Shermer announced that he has revived his old Scientific American ‘Skeptic’ column on Substack. For his inaugural piece, Shermer took aim at Scientific American for focusing on unscientific issues relating to “Social Justice” instead of their tyical popular scientific reporting.
Shermer believes the shift may have occurred in part due to the fundamental differences between Left- and Right-wing political philosophies and behavioral tendencies:
Perhaps some insight might be gleaned from the British historian and Sovietologist Robert Conquest, who observed in what became an eponymous law that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” The reason, I surmise, is straight out of John Stuart Mill: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” Conservatives wish to conserve traditional institutions, so unless an organization or publication is avowedly conservative it will inevitably drift Leftward...
Read the full article here.
This week on The Glenn Show, FAIR Advisors Glenn Loury and John McWhorter had an amicable cross-partisan conversation with Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy about policing, affirmative action, and Dr. Kennedy’s new book Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture.
The three discussed why Kennedy, a progressive, feels “torn” and “bewildered” about the current discourse on “race” in America. Loury exlplains why he believes we must “deracialize” the conversation around policing. And McWhorter wonders why there isn’t more conversation about the power of cultural differences to explain group-level disparities.
Kennedy explains that he has always considered it a good philosophy to judge whether or not an action is racist by asking himself whether it would still appear so “if the shoe were on the other foot.”
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For the Institute for Family Studies, FAIR Advisor Ian Rowe discussed how Terry McAuliffe’s focus on the racial makeup of teachers relative to their students, instead of prioritizing teacher excellence regardless of race, was likely a significant contributing factor in his recent gubenatorial loss to Glenn Youngkin in Virginia.
Rowe believes McAuiliffe’s statements reflect the “perverse demands” of so-called “critical race theory,” which requires elected officials to “see the world solely through the prism of skin color.” According to Rowe, this narrow focus on race-based intervention to any and all problems in education must be roundly rejected by governor-elect Youngkin if he is to be a successful governor.
[T]he governor-elect should implement a different approach that will empower parents to choose schools that offers the kind of high-quality teaching faculty, comprehensive curriculum, and culture of excellence that they think is best for their child—regardless of race.
Read the full article here.
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On her Substack Common Sense, FAIR Advisor Bari Weiss discussed the poor mainstream media coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. For claim after claim, the media narrative reliably presented either dishonest or grossly misleading accounts of the events.
Weiss studied the narratives that emerged—that Rittenhouse was a “White supremacist” with no connection to Kenosha, that he brought his gun to Kenosha over state lines, that him having the gun was illegal per se, etc.—and shows one-by-one how the media had misled the public on each point. According to Weiss:
This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.
Read the full article here.
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Regarding the Rittenhouse Case, the American Way is seek justice based on facts. That is what the jury did to their credit.
The way of BLM, CNN, MSNBC, radical liberals, some Democrat Party members and Biden - Harris is seek equity, pit race against race, perpetuate hate by tagging white's as supremacists and keep the nation vided.
This is what all Americans, who want to keep our republic, face and must defend against by speaking out, being active and rejecting this garbage.
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Remember on Thanksgiving, the turkey you eat could have voted for Biden and, most certainly, is a Democrat. How do I now? Because he gobbled up everything he read in The NYT's and watched CNN.
More Democrats Wave The White Flag Ahead Of 2022 Midterms
The Democrat Party, since taking power in the 2020 presidential election, has not played the long game.
When the left took back control of the federal government, they immediately rushed to implement one radical measure after the other. It’s almost as if the Democrats’ game plan is to push through as many socialist policies as possible before they inevitably lose Congress to the GOP.
This approach is now beginning to backfire on the political left. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, virtually every poll and election points to the reality Republicans are going to sweep Democrats next November.
For this reason, more Democrat lawmakers are waving the white flag ahead of next year’s midterm races, as Life Site News confirms.
As of right now, there are 17 Democrats in Congress who are planning to retire or seek positions as mayors, governors, senators, etc.
With Democrats having historically narrow majorities in the House and Senate, it speaks volumes that so many lawmakers in their party are declining to stick around after next year. It sends a clear message that many Democrats believe their party will not emerge victoriously come next year’s midterm races.
On top of this, redistricting is another element of the 2022 midterm elections working against the political left. Republicans are targeting areas and districts where Democrats are vulnerable. It also comes on top of generic midterm ballots where Republicans hold double-digit leads over their Democratic counterparts.
The writing is very clear on the wall here. Republicans’ comeback in the Virginia state elections only further solidifies the message that next year’s midterm races belong to Republicans.
Many Republicans had stated next year’s midterm elections would repeat what happened in 2010 when Democrats took back power, got too big for their britches, and then lost Congress.
In 2021, Democrats have a president sinking in approval ratings every time a new poll comes out. The outcome of Virginia’s state elections earlier this month proved that Biden’s low approval numbers are, in fact, a liability to Democrats in other races.
These factors are why Democrats are waving the white flag and getting out of Congress while the getting is good. Their party overplayed their hand (just as they did in 2010), and come next year, voters will make their voices heard accordingly.
The good news about the impending red wave, however, is that it’s the very first step to getting this nation back on the right track.
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