Wearing poverty like a designer suit

JD Vance has been “creating stories” as a career advancement strategy for a long time:

AFTER HAVING HIS racist claims about Haitian immigrants challenged as lies, J.D. Vance made a shocking admission on live TV to CNN’s Dana Bash: He was happy “to create stories,” he said, in order to drive media attention to what he described as “the suffering of the American people.”

It was a remarkable confession of dishonesty from a politician. But it was even more shocking coming from Vance — a man who was catapulted into national prominence on the strength, and supposed credibility, of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which purports to shine a spotlight on hidden American suffering. Was Vance also “creating stories” back in 2016 in his bestseller? 

In light of Vance’s admission, a close re-reading of Hillbilly Elegy by Rolling Stone uncovers a hollow claim at the center of the book. Namely that J.D. Vance “grew up poor.” 

Vance frames the book as a chronicle of overcoming severe economic disadvantage. But the details of Vance’s own writing don’t point to a childhood of material deprivation. Instead — despite the myriad troubles faced by his mother with substance abuse — Vance was raised in middle-class comfort. At one point, his parents enjoyed a six-figure income. And he was spared economic distress by a broad safety net of extended family that provided him with frequent out-of-state vacations, golf lessons, a modeling audition, and therapy. Most importantly, he benefited from a buffer of generational wealth created by his “Papaw,” who retired with a “lucrative pension” from his union job at the local steel plant. 

From making up a fake-Appalachian fake-poverty story. to advance tired right-wing bullshit to “they’re eating the cats” is not a very long path, even if most assholes who exaggerate what they’ve overcome to impress the Amys Chua of the world end up as legal associates helping firms employ child slave labor or something rather than as fascist politicians.

There’s also a reason Republicans worked the refs to ensure that none of Vance’s lies would be corrected by moderators tomorrow:

It’s insane and seriously pathetic how easy it is for Trump to bully major news outlets to say, in essence, well, guess we’re not in the truth business anymore. https://t.co/iRICAiKyWR— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) September 29, 2024