The Michael Fanone Show
My Grandfather Escaped Fascism to Work America's Steel Mills. That Path Is Gone Now.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] My grandfather Tony came to this country from Italy to escape fascism. He worked the steel mills of western Pennsylvania for decades. When the mills closed, he opened a restaurant. When that wound down, he started a landscaping business. My father worked those same mills in the summers before going on to become a prominent Washington attorney. That is the American story. You arrive with nothing. You work. You adapt. You climb. And the next generation goes further than you did. I want to tell you what that town looks like today. Sharon, Pennsylvania Sharon has more fentanyl rehabilitation facilities than 7-Elevens, more patrol cars than kids playing outside, and a row of half-empty churches Tony’s generation built with their own hands. The schools are underfunded. The unspoken promise that if you show up and work hard you’ll be okay has stopped operating there in any meaningful way. In my twenty years as a law enforcement official, I watched up close what happens when the economic structure of a community collapses and nothing replaces it. Sharon is the late stage of that process. That is what happens when the floor drops out and nobody builds a new one. That is what we let happen. And I’m writing about it now because yesterday Pope Leo XIV released the most important document on artificial intelligence most Americans will never read, and it is a direct warning that we are about to do this again on a scale that makes what happened to Sharon look like a preview, including to people who spent their whole lives believing they were too educated, too credentialed, too valuable to end up in that story. The document is called Magnifica Humanitas. It came out on May 25, 2026. I was raised Catholic but I haven’t been to Mass in years, and this isn’t a religious pitch. It’s a diagnosis of something this country is actively failing at right now, and Tony’s story is the case study in both what we used to get right and what we have stopped bothering to protect. Why a Pope Named Leo Wrote This Document Pope Leo XIV is an American, the first in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. He chose the name Leo deliberately. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical called Rerum Novarum in direct response to the first Industrial Revolution. Factories were replacing human labor. Workers were being treated as interchangeable parts. Wages were set to extract maximum output at minimum human cost. Rerum Novarum said stop. Workers are people. Capital must serve human labor, not the other way around. Tony was exactly the person that document was written for. He came here because this country, at its best, had a floor: a legal and moral structure that said your effort means something, that you could not simply be discarded when you became inconvenient to the people profiting from your labor. The mills closed anyway. Politicians on both sides told us the market would sort it out. It didn’t. You can measure exactly how badly it didn’t by standing in Sharon today and counting the rehab centers. What’s Different This Time Here is what I need you to understand. Tony’s path — work the mill, build a small business, grind your way to stability through sheer determination — still existed when the mills closed because there was enough economic room left for a resourceful person to find a foothold. There were sectors to move into. There were services to provide. There was still a country that, however imperfectly, maintained enough structure that individual resilience could find purchase. That room is closing. AI is not just automating the mill floor. It is automating the restaurant, the landscaping business, the law practice, the accounting firm, the medical office. Every sector Tony or his children could have pivoted to is now facing simultaneous disruption, and it is happening faster than any policy response is being built to meet it. For the first time, blue-collar and white-collar disruption are happening at the same time, in the same communities, on the same timeline. My father worked the mills in the summers and built a career at the top of his profession. His life spanned the whole ladder, from the mill floor to a law office in Washington, and that distance was the proof that the country worked. AI is now cutting through both ends of that ladder at once, and nobody is building a new one. The Argument America Forgot At the core of what Leo XIV is arguing is something this country used to believe about itself. America is supposed to stand for two things at once: the value of the individual, and the responsibility of the community to protect that value. The tension between personal freedom and collective obligation is the founding argument. It is what made Tony’s choice to come here make sense. The individual had room to build. The country had a responsibility to keep that room open. We have abandoned both sides of that equation. We let the floor drop out of communities like Sharon without intervention. We are letting the people who control the technology shaping the next economy operate without any accountability to the common good. Individual dignity and the common good have been abandoned together, in the same towns, on the same timeline. The Pope names the logic driving this with precision. He writes that when efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings begin to see themselves as projects to be optimized rather than as people with inherent worth. He calls it an anti-human vision. Tony left a country where a version of that vision had taken over the government. He came here because the alternative existed here. That alternative is now under pressure from a different direction, not from the state, but from concentrated private power that is accountable to no one. The Pope is also direct about who benefits and who pays. AI amplifies the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise, and data. Then he says this: a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. The people building these systems are not going to protect the floor. They never have. It has always required legal intervention, organized political will, and public pressure. Always. Leo XIV sat next to a co-founder of one of the most powerful AI companies in the world to release this document. That is more substantive engagement with AI accountability than Congress has produced in two years. What We Actually Do Three things, starting now. Mandate labor impact assessments before large-scale AI deployment. We require environmental impact assessments before you build something that could poison a community. Require the same before you deploy something that can eliminate one. If a company is about to wipe out a category of work, the public has a right to know what that looks like before it happens, not after. Build a worker transition program on the scale of the GI Bill. Real income support, real education access, real runway, for the warehouse worker and the paralegal and the radiologist together, because this disruption is not sorted by income or credential. It is coming for all of it. Enforce antitrust on AI infrastructure concentration. A handful of companies now control the foundational models, the computing capacity, and the data pipelines the entire economy is becoming dependent on. That is a level of concentrated power over essential infrastructure this country has never permitted in any other sector without legal intervention. It cannot be permitted now. What Tony Came Here For Tony didn’t cross an ocean and work those mills for decades so his grandchildren could grow up in a country that stopped believing it owed people a fighting chance. Sharon is the answer to what happens when we stop believing that. The market doesn’t build floors. People build them, through laws and through organized political will. AI is the most powerful economic force this generation will face. We can build something with it that honors what Tony came here for, or we can run the same play the mill owners ran and then act surprised when the next Sharon shows up, this time in neighborhoods that thought they were insulated from that story. The full encyclical is linked below. Read it. Then ask the people who want your vote what their plan is. Because we have already seen what happens when there isn’t one. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!
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