American Vendetta

Gauche, in my opinion, to settle a grudge worthy of the name with money. (Did you not nurse that grievance? Would you sell your child?) But when the payoff grows big enough, cooler heads prevail, or just ones more venal. From Sam Altman to Ted Cruz, political, corporate, and tech elites have put aside previous objections—Trump’s resemblance to past dictators, his willingness to insult your wife—to profit and empower themselves.

The arc of domestic animosity bends toward dollars and nationalism. The Hatfields and McCoys have museums, romance novels, and a document announcing a truce to their century-and-a-half-old feud in the star-spangled aftermath of 9/11, as Lauren Fadiman writes in “American Vendetta,” our issue on domestic grudgery. Equally historical is the labor unrest at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Tadhg Larabee reports from Steel City on the newspaper workers carrying out the longest ongoing strike in the United States.

Journalists are on the scoreboard of this country’s resentments, but the nearly fifty million immigrants in residence seem to have taken first place. Belén Fernández leads readers into the Darién Gap, that treacherous stretch of jungle traversed by many recent arrivals, where smugglers serve as de facto U.S. border guards. Nick Tabor describes how Denver attempted to navigate these surges of immigration with little assistance from the Biden administration and open hostility from its successor—a vehemence Trump has extended toward the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, as Pooja Bhatia reports. And Nicolás Medina Mora writes on the cultural legacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which devastated Mexico such that both farmers and fiction writers sought a new life north of the border.

Elsewhere in the issue, contributors consider a feud old as time: man against nature or, increasingly, its replacement. Piper French asks whether RICO lawsuits against OnlyFans creators or the automation of pretending to be a nubile all-American natural blonde will put low-paid “chatters” on the platform out of a job. Facing a future of employment made uncertain for all by artificial intelligence, Jennifer C. Berkshire ponders why the idea that our schools might teach values besides corporate growth has been ceded to right-wingers. Those touting “patriotic education” have included Pete Hegseth, whose long-running war against women inside the military and out is chronicled by Jasper Craven.

But what of the youth? They’d call me ancient for remembering Nas’s “Ether,” the song nearly a quarter-century old. (The homophobia remains silly and indefensible but accusing Jay-Z of being a man in his mid-thirties who takes karate holds up.) As Adrian Nathan West writes in his essay on drill music in Philadelphia, rap beef now can involve a degree of violence perhaps unimaginable to previous generations, conflicts stoked in impoverished environs between a select but vocal few dissing one another on Instagram Live and modifying Glocks to be capable of fully automatic fire. “All they soldiers getting touched,” rapped the scene’s figurehead and self-described “Mr. Disrespectful” YBC Dul, months before he was shot and killed at the age of twenty-five. Gauche is gauche, maybe, but one wishes there were a dollar amount that could have kept any of these men—some so young as to be in high school—alive.