Before we get to Vance, here’s a bit of relevant personal history. My grandparents on my father’s side had a family farm in the Rio Grande Valley. On my mother’s side, my grandparents started out as sharecroppers until World War II gave my Grandfather the opportunity to find work as a carpenter.
I was born in Texas, but when I was five, my family moved to a small town in the Ozarks and I stayed in the region until I was in my thirties. I taught high school and college there before making the jump to the corporate world and the East Coast before ending up in California.
I mention this to give you some idea why the transparent fraud of J.D. Vance pissed me off so much, and why I’m so angry with the national press and particularly (as always) the NYT for their role in the sham.
2022 has been a rough year for conventional wisdom which means a rough year for the NYT and journalists like Weisman. Not only was his framing inappropriate; it was wildly off base. Vance has taken what was supposed to be a safe seat and made it into a tight (an for the GOP, expensive) race.
But it’s not just Vance’s competence as a candidate that the press got wrong; it was his sham persona, and no publication bought into the lie more than the New York Times.
Take a look at Jennifer Senior’s 2016 review of Hillbilly Elegy.
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