04/29/2026
In West Virginia, the same government that stood beside Hope Gas this March to celebrate a $250 million private pipeline investment in Mason County still lets McDowell County drink poisoned water. The town of Gary remains under investigation by the Public Service Commission after complaints of contamination, lead, corroded pipes, and a staggering 76% water loss. Some residents have been living under boil-water advisories for years. About 250,000 West Virginians rely on untreated water sources because the coal companies that used to run town water systems walked away and the state never stepped in to fill the gap.
None of this is dysfunction. It’s a deliberate war on poor, sick, rural, and abandoned people, because desperate people are easier to police, exploit, and disappear.
They’ll find $5 million in state funding for charter school buildings and push legislation to hand unused public buildings to charters, while 19 public schools face closure or consolidation this school year. They locked in a 14% PEIA premium hike for state employees, with out-of-pocket maximums jumping 40%, while Patrick Morrisey warns of a $400 million budget deficit. They’ll let Greenbrier Valley Medical Center announce it’s cutting labor and delivery services after April 2026, part of a wave that’s left just 18 hospitals in the state with maternity units, down from 26 a decade ago. Seven rural hospitals in West Virginia are now at risk of closure when the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” Medicaid cuts go through. And when floods tore through 14 counties in February 2025, FEMA denied individual assistance to seven of them, Boone, Cabell, Greenbrier, Kanawha, Lincoln, Monroe, and Summers, telling thousands of working people to figure it out themselves.
Meanwhile, the North Central Regional Jail in Marion County was built for 564 but now holds 825, costing the county nearly $300,000 a month to warehouse people. They’ll bleed counties dry to keep bodies in cages rather than fund the treatment and community care that would keep people out of them.
Fights Back exists because we refuse to let their engineered neglect be the final word. While the state starves communities to feed its cages and contractors, we stand up mutual aid networks, harms reduction, community defense, and political education that teaches people how the machine works and how to break it. We don’t wait for permission, and we don’t beg for scraps from the same hands that stole the whole dinner table. We train, feed, protect, and build what they refuse to provide. Register for our next FREE political boot camp starting June 3rd, because survival isn’t a handout, it’s a skill, and we’re done letting them decide who lives and who gets buried.
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