2024 Archives

Vance's career and his life story are a grift. Just like most all of Donald Trump's businesses. Republican policies, in fact, have been one long grift for more than half a century… Minnesota Governor Tim Walz yesterday blasted JD Vance for being a "grifter," because Vance claimed he was some sort of a hillbilly who grew up in rural Appalachia when, in fact, he grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. Governor Walz, on the other hand, grew up in a town of 400 people with "24 kids in my graduating class" where "12 were cousins." In Vance's autobiography Hillbilly Elegy he trash-talks his poor relatives, essentially accusing them of not being successful in life because of moral defects like laziness and addiction; he doubled down on these memes in his RNC speech, pointing out his own mother's drug use. In fact, they're victims of Republican policies that make the rich richer and keep poor people poor; his mother's addiction is a symptom, not a cause. Vance, of course, "nobly" rose above it all with the help of our socialist GI Bill (which Republicans opposed) paying his way through Yale, and with help from rightwing billionaires who took Vance under their wings and helped him set up a hedge fund that made him fabulously rich.