In this disgusting election, dominated by the personal and the petty, the importance of the nation’s economic geography has been widely ignored.

Yet if you look at the Electoral College map, the correlation between politics and economics is quite stark, with one economy tilting decisively toward Trump and more generally to Republicans, the other toward Hillary Clinton and her Democrat allies.

This reflects an increasingly stark conflict between two very different American economies.

Ephemeral vs. Heartland

One, the “Ephemeral Zone” concentrated on the coasts, runs largely on digits and images, the movement of software, media and financial transactions. It produces increasingly little in the way of food, fiber, energy and fewer and fewer manufactured goods.

The Ephemeral sectors dominate ultra-blue states such as New York, California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut.

The other America constitutes, as economic historian Michael Lind notes in a forthcoming paper for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, the “New Heartland.” Extending from the Appalachians to the Rockies, this heartland economy relies on tangible goods production.

It now encompasses both the traditional Midwest manufacturing regions, and the new industrial areas of Texas, the Southeast and the Intermountain West. 

Contrary to the notions of the Ephemerals, the New Heartland is not populated by Neanderthals. This region employs much of the nation’s engineering talent, but does so in conjunction with the creation of real goods rather than clicks.

The greatest put-down in the history of presidential debates

Last night, at the lowest point in the second presidential debate Hillary Clinton tried to blame her compulsive lying on Abraham Lincoln. Not the real Lincoln, but the fictional version depicted in the Spielberg movie.

“She lied. Now she's blaming the lie on the late great Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said in exasperation. “Honest Abe never lied.”

The only thing Hillary and Lincoln have in common is Illinois.

It’s not just that Hillary is a liar and a crook. Plenty of politicians are. It’s that her dishonesty and corruption are so blatant as to be insulting to the intelligence of even the dimmest voter.

There she was stumbling around on stage, haggard and still laughing her horrifying brittle laugh and reciting canned applause lines in the hope that someone would cheer.

And to complete the pairing, Martha Raddatz was there as her doppelganger, berating Trump the way that Hillary would have liked to if she weren’t still delusional enough to think someone out there might still be fooled by her current act.

Jail is where Hillary belongs.

Last Tuesday (9/27), I visited Maassluis. It is town near Rotterdam, where the indigenous Dutch inhabitants have become the victims of immigrant youths of Moroccan descent.

Cars have been demolished, houses vandalized, people threatened. The Dutch no longer feel free and safe in their own city. When the local radio station interviewed some of the victims and referred to the perpetrators as Moroccans, it received an anonymous letter: “You are racists! Your time will come! I won’t take care of it because I am too old. But our boys are the new soldiers.”

Maassluis. It is just one of the many Dutch towns and neighborhoods terrorized by Moroccan or Turkish youth gangs. Others are Schilderswijk, Oosterwei, Kanaleneiland, Zaandam, Helmond… Not surprisingly, a poll shows that 43% of the Dutch people want fewer Moroccan immigrants in our country. These people are not racists; they are decent people, patriots who love their country and do not want to lose it.

The great Ronald Reagan once said that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” These wise words are more true today than ever before. We are the free men and women of the West.

Freedom is our birthright. But if we fail to defend it, we are bound to lose it. And, sadly, that is exactly what is happening today.

Keith Lamont Scott was scum.

He had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in two different states and convicted of assault in three states. He had been hit with “assault with intent to kill” charges in the 90s. His record of virtue included “assault on a child under 12” and “assault on a female.”

The media spin; “Family and neighbors call Scott a quiet ‘family man’.”

This vicious monster’s career of crime ended when he was shot by Brentley Vinson, an African-American police officer, protecting himself from the latest rampage by this “quiet family man.”

Brentley Vinson is everything that Scott isn’t. The son of a police officer, Brentley dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps. He used to organize his football team’s bible studies and mentored younger players. His former coach calls him a “natural leader” and says that, “We need more Brent Vinsons… in our communities.”

Except that Obama, Black Lives Matter, the media, the NAACP and everyone else going after this bright and decent African-American officer has decided that what we really need are more Keith Lamont Scotts, not Brentley Vinsons.

James Lovelock, inventor of Gaia Theory and godfather of the modern environmental movement, has finally renounced the green religion.

Climate alarmism, he says, is not “remotely scientific”; one volcano could make more difference to global warming than humans ever could; the computer models are “unreliable”; greens have behaved “deplorably”; and anyone who tries to “predict more than five to ten years is a bit of an idiot.”

Though this is not the first time Lovelock has rowed back on his earlier climate catastrophism – in 2012 he was already admitting “I made a mistake” – it’s his most emphatic rejection yet of the green litany.

Lovelock ascribes the dramatic change in his once fervently alarmist beliefs to the fact that he has “grown up.”

Only ten years ago – when the inventor, scientist and environmentalist was a mere spring chicken of 87 – Lovelock argued in his book The Revenge of Gaia that mankind was doomed.

Not any more.  What’s doomed are the computer models on which the religion of climate change are based:  “It’s only got to take one sizable volcano to erupt and all the models, everything else, is right off the board.”

Prime Minister Theresa May wants Britain to be “the most passionate, most consistent, most convincing advocate for free trade.”

With world trade stagnating, Britain has both a vital duty and a golden opportunity. It worked for us before.

Next year sees the 200th anniversary of David Ricardo’s insight of “comparative advantage” — the counterintuitive idea that trade benefits “uncompetitive” countries as much as efficient ones. If one country is better at making both cloth and wine than another, it can still pay it to get its wine, for example,  by making extra cloth to swap for the other’s wine.

Or, as somebody once put it, even if Winston Churchill is a very good bricklayer (he was), it still makes sense for him to write books or run governments, and pay somebody else to build his walls.

So the government’s view of trade should be: the more the better, the freer the better, and unilateral is fine.

There is no episode in history of a country opening itself more to world trade without getting richer. The Phoenicians, Athens,  Gujarat and Bengal,  Venice, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Victorian British, America, Singapore, Hong Kong, China after Deng Xiaoping — in every single case, countries that opened to trade got much richer very fast. 

The wave of Moslem refugee terror began with a bomb targeting a U.S. Marine charity run in New Jersey. By evening a pressure cooker full of shrapnel has exploded outside a Manhattan building for the blind.

An hour later, a rampaging Moslem terrorist began stabbing people inside a Macy’s in Minnesota, asking them if they were Moslem and shouting the name of “Allah,” the genocidal Islamic deity of mass murder.

And that was one Saturday (9/24), two Moslem refugees and a wave of national terror 1,200 miles apart.

What did Elizabeth, New Jersey and St. Cloud, Minnesota have in common?

New Jersey is a map of Moslem terror plots because of its huge Moslem population.  Minnesota has suffered from the presence of the largest Somali migrant population in the country. And so a state which used to be known for its Swedish and German immigrants instead became a recruiting ground for ISIS and Al-Shabab.