XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.atheism, alt.global-warming   
   XPost: alt.politics.trump   
   From: mail-a-long@hmn.com   
      
   Who Does J.D. Vance Think He’s Fooling?   
      
   I am a fan of “Hillbilly Elegy”—even the movie!—but I can no longer admire   
   the plutocratic fraud that its author has become.   
      
      
   There’s an arresting scene in J.D. Vance’s moving 2016 memoir, Hillbilly   
   Elegy, in which Vance, a second-year student at Yale Law School, attends a   
   dinner hosted by the white-shoe law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, in what   
   he describes as the most expensive restaurant in which he’s ever eaten.   
      
   Vance is stricken with social anxiety when asked whether he’d prefer the   
   Sauvignon Blanc or the Chardonnay, the sparkling water or the tap. After   
   sitting down to a place setting with nine bewildering utensils, he makes a   
   beeline for the men’s room to phone his girlfriend (and future wife), Usha,   
   for advice. “Go from outside to inside,” she explains, “and don’t use the   
   same utensil for separate dishes.”   
      
   Vance evoked powerfully the sense that his hardscrabble upbringing in   
   Ohio’s Rust Belt and Kentucky’s Appalachian hollows had left him without   
   the social capital necessary to move up in the world. But move up he did,   
   with the help of powerful mentors (Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua, David Frum) and an   
   adaptability that may have surprised even him.   
      
   Now Vance is proving a quick study yet again as he prepares to enter next   
   year’s primary to replace retiring Ohio Senator Rob Portman. He’s found   
   some new mentors—Tucker Carlson (who Vance insists is “the only powerful   
   figure who consistently challenges elite dogma”) and Sens. Josh Hawley and   
   Tom Cotton—and, with characteristic discipline, he’s remaking himself into   
   a Donald Trump Mini-Me. That’s a pretty neat trick for a guy who, in 2016,   
   sounded very convincing when he said, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that   
   he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”   
      
   Hillbilly Elegy, which cited liberals like Raj Chetty and William Julius   
   Wilson respectfully, was about promoting understanding between a deeply   
   alienated white working class and the book-buying cultural elite. But that   
   was the old Vance. The new Vance is about politics as total war. “We really   
   need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” Vance   
   said last week on The Federalist Radio Hour.   
      
   Conservatives, Vance said, “have lost every major powerful institution in   
   the country except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of   
   course are weaker now than they have ever been. We have lost big business,   
   we have lost finance. We have lost the culture, we have lost the academy.”   
      
   An admiring reader of Hillbilly Elegy might interpret this as a prelude to   
   a lengthy consideration of where conservatives went astray. That admiring   
   reader would be wrong. “If we’re going to actually really effect real   
   change in the country,” Vance said, “it will require us completely   
   replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class.… Unless we   
   overthrow them in some way, we’re gonna keep losing.” It wasn’t even clear   
   Vance was talking only about Democrats and liberals.   
      
   This is, of course, the Trump culture-war playbook. Vance carps on Twitter   
   about the phrases “woman of color,” “cisgender,” and “intersectional,” and   
   about critical race theory. None of this has any salience to the 2022   
   Senate election in Ohio. Vance decries college athletes who wear masks   
   (“totally insane”) and then, after an Ohio reporter tweets about it, calls   
   it “fake news.” Vance is even mimicking Trump’s weird use of capital   
   letters (the New York attorney general’s prosecution of the former   
   president, for instance, is “a threat to Our Democracy”).   
      
   At his most hypocritical, Vance, a millionaire banker who’s been affiliated   
   with at least three venture capital firms, is aligning himself with the   
   GOP’s war on woke capitalism. “Establishment Republican apologies for our   
   oligarchy,” Vance tweeted in April, “should always come with the following   
   disclaimer: “Big Tech pays my salary.” Never mind that Vance has worked for   
   tech moguls Steve Case and Peter Thiel, and that one month earlier, Thiel   
   put $10 million into a SuperPac supporting Vance’s yet-unannounced Senate   
   candidacy. (The Mercers have also reportedly contributed.)   
      
   A principal target for GOP opponents of woke capital, Vance suggests,   
   should be capital held by nonprofits like Harvard and the Ford Foundation   
   “that are destroying our country.” In a speech earlier this month before   
   the conservative Claremont Institute, Vance said, “All across the country   
   we have nonprofits, big foundations, that are effectively social justice   
   hedge funds.” They should be forced to pay tax and to pay down more of   
   their endowments, he said. Vance probably meant Yale, too, but mentioning   
   Old Eli would risk reminding people that in 2013 Yale handed him a Juris   
   Doctor.   
      
   Will working-class Ohio voters fall for this? They fell for Trump, twice,   
   and the 2022 primary is already shaping up into a competition for who can   
   show the greatest devotion to the Trump cult. If he wins the primary, Vance   
   may find some crossover appeal among people who remember the book fondly,   
   or the 2020 film adaptation (which, while no masterpiece, was better than   
   its terrible reviews). As late as April 9, Clarence Page of The Chicago   
   Tribune, an alumnus of the same Ohio high school as Vance, wrote that he   
   wished Vance well. Five years ago, I might have said the same. But Vance’s   
   latest transformation is more than I can stomach. He’s become an   
   Appalachian Sammy Glick.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)