“J.D. is the pick,” you emailed me yesterday. “The Hillbilly [Elegy] was a great read that you wrote about, and I read. This is a man that came from nothing, wound up going to Yale. Hear, hear to route 23.
All is well,” J.W.
Hear, hear is right. Because for me, it was a local democrat, a columnist for the Newport Daily News, in Rhode Island, that recommended the book The Hillbilly Elegy. I took his advice, and it was one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read.
This was way before J.D. Vance was a politician. He was a kid from Appalachia from a broken family in the holler, but it didn’t break him or the tough love from his grandmother, Mamaw, who helped him get out. Who made sure he got his ass out of bed and out the door.
After graduating from high school, he joined the Marines and served in Iraq. Vance then went to Yale Law School where his professor Amy Chua, of Tiger Mom fame, encouraged him to write a book telling his story. His book put him on the map, and after a stint at Peter Thiel’s investment fund in California, Vance moved back to Ohio and began his journey in politics. It was not a straight line for Vance in embracing Donald Trump’s politics, but it was Trump who put Vance over the top and into the U.S. Senate.
You can get a feel for who J.D. Vance is from his interview with Megyn Kelly, years before he was a politician. But let’s go back to Saturday with the attempted assassination of former President Trump. In an instant, the door closed on expanding the Republican Party’s tent. It is now about building up the America First brand and letting the chips fall as they may.
On Saturday night, hours after the shooting, it was J.D. Vance who wrote on X: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
It’s not the time to negotiate core beliefs when you’re supposed to be dead.
J.D. Vance’s interview with Megyn Kelly back in 2017:
Originally posted on Your Survival Guy.
