XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.socialist.nazi, alt.politics.trump   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns   
   From: zed@is.dead   
      
   VANCE MUST NEVER BE POTUS.   
      
   HE'S CLOSET LIBERAL HOMOSEXUAL WHO CHANGED STRIPES BECAUSE HE'S A POWER   
   HUNGRY COCKSUCKER WHO WOULD SAY ANYTHING TO BE IN THE WHITE HOUSE.   
      
   HE'S A WEAK, STUPID EXCUSE FOR MAN WHO WILL NO DOUBT END UP SHARING A CELL   
   WITH KEGBREATH OR MILLER.   
      
   DEEP DOWN WE ALL KNOW HE'S A TWO-FACED LIBERAL FAGGOT.   HE'S ALSO A BAD FIT   
   BECAUSE HE'S ONE OF THE FEW CLOSE TO TRUMP WHO'S NOT A CONVICTED CRIMINAL AND   
   SERVED TIME BEHIND BARS.   
      
   HE'S ALSO AGAINST THE SECOND AMENDMENT.  THE ONLY RIGHT THAT MATTERS.   
      
   Hillbilly Excuses   
      
   J. D. Vance champions the narrative he once attacked.   
      
   By Tom Nichols   
   Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, after only three years in politics, is now the   
   Republican nominee for vice president. I've written, and continue to believe,   
   that Vance is a hollow man, an opportunist driven by a strange melding of   
   self-admiration and insecurity, who has risen to great heights in the   
   Republican Party by saying things he does not believe, especially when it   
   comes to his new running mate, Donald Trump. But in his acceptance speech   
   Wednesday night, he attained new depths of cynical emptiness.   
      
   When the world first met Vance less than a decade ago, he was a relatively   
   clear-eyed critic of the dysfunction of the people around him during his   
   childhood in Ohio and Kentucky. In Hillbilly Elegy, a painful look at his own   
   past, he did not shy away from the kind of messages about personal   
   responsibility that long characterized conservative politics. But those   
   criticisms were leavened with a certain understanding that good people can   
   become trapped by bad circumstances.   
      
   Hillbilly Elegy gained added attention because it promised to explain the   
   white working class, which had helped propel Trump to the presidency in 2016.   
   Vance refused to make excuses for his own people, rejecting claims of   
   victimhood. He wrote of the self-defeating behavior of poor white people, and   
   of the limits of state intervention. And although he may not have had a lot   
   of solutions, he knew that Trump—the charlatan Vance once worried could   
   become a Hitler-esque figure—wasn't the answer.   
      
   The Ohioan was not a perfect messenger. He wrote Hillbilly Elegy after he   
   gained a Yale law degree and became a multimillionaire in Silicon Valley, and   
   the book has more than a whiff of self-satisfaction. His observations struck   
   some critics as the smugness of a man who escaped a shipwreck and now has   
   some thoughts about the swimming techniques of the people behind him who   
   drowned.   
      
   Stuart Stevens: I thought I understood the GOP. I was wrong   
      
   I didn't see it that way. Like Vance, I am a son of the working class who   
   could have taken some very bad turns but ended up an educated, white-collar   
   professional. People who have made such class transitions are sometimes   
   conflicted about the roles played by mentors, initiative, talent, and sheer   
   luck in switching the rails of a young life away from tragedy and toward   
   success. Transcending a childhood surrounded by abuse, economic hardship, and   
   addiction can be hard to explain to someone who's never had to do it.   
      
   Whatever lessons he once believed could be learned from his own life,   
   however, the senator on Wednesday night showed America that he now recommends   
   a different choice for others.   
      
   Vance's acceptance speech was flat and somewhat awkward. It was laced with   
   the groveling about Trump's incredible strength and manliness that can now be   
   found in every Republican speech; hearing them is like slogging through a   
   bland stew and then biting down into a stale peppercorn that shouldn't even   
   be in the recipe. But despite its dullness, the speech was shocking, at least   
   to anyone who can remember anything about Vance or the pre-Trump Republican   
   Party.   
      
      
   J. D. Vance has apparently discovered that capitalism hurts poor people. In a   
   speech that could have been lifted from almost any generic left-wing Democrat   
   of the past 50 years, Vance spoke about trade and big corporations and "out   
   of touch" politicians who hate the little guy. "Jobs were sent overseas, " he   
   said, "and our children were sent to war, " a line that could have been   
   chanted outside Richard Nixon's White House in 1972 by a hippie in a faded   
   Army jacket. Vance even went so far as to cast Trump—a man who has infamously   
   stiffed his own workers—as the hero of ordinary laborers. (I'd say this was   
   chutzpah, but from Vance it seemed more dutiful than brassy. )   
      
   Worse, Vance talked about working-class white people the way liberal   
   Democrats used to talk about Black communities in the early 1970s. At 39, he   
   is too young to remember those days, but Republicans back then charged   
   liberals with abetting the misery of Black communities by making excuses for   
   their challenges. And they had a point: Half a century ago, some liberals did   
   indulge in a kind of cringey, paternalistic excuse-making that depicted Black   
   people as mindless victims, unable to control themselves when faced with the   
   relentless forces of capitalism and consumerism.   
      
   Conservatives countered that the narrative of victimhood never serves anyone   
   except the political leaders who reap votes from convincing people that they   
   are merely hapless targets who need to be protected from a world full of   
   sinister conspirators. Those who genuinely cared about the collapse of the   
   cities (and there were more than a few who didn't, to be sure) stressed the   
   importance of personal choices and the power of individual responsibility.   
   They refused to accept policies that led, in their view, to permanent   
   dependence on the state. Perhaps most important, they sharply criticized the   
   language of victimhood. And Vance, until recently, seemed to embrace those   
   old-school, center-right views.   
      
   So it was particularly jarring to hear Vance talking down to Appalachians and   
   working-class households in ways that he himself likely would have found   
   insulting before ambition snuffed out his ability to feel shame. All his   
   previous talk of responsibility and initiative was gone, replaced by images   
   of a heartland full of victims, a Norman Rockwell world now inundated with   
   fentanyl and cheap Chinese electronics by Washington's scheming elites.   
      
   Through it all, you could almost hear the issuance of absolution and the call   
   for revenge: It's not your fault that your unemployed son lives at home,   
   staring at screens and getting high all day. Biden and Beijing and Wall   
   Street did that. We'll settle the score somehow. It was a night of messages   
   every bit as infantilizing and degrading as any Vance and the old GOP would   
   have once castigated had they been offered by the old left.   
      
   What accounts for Vance's reversal? Once he decided to make a run as a   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)