Latest news with #HillbillyElegy
The South African
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The South African
Daniel Craig returns as Benoit Blanc in 'Wake Up Dead Man'
Netflix has officially announced the premiere date for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery . This is the highly anticipated third film in the beloved mystery franchise. Fans in South Africa and around the world can prepare to stream the film from 12 December 2025 on Netflix. Daniel Craig returns as the sharp-witted detective Benoit Blanc. He dives into what director and writer Rian Johnson describes as Blanc's 'most dangerous case yet'. The new film promises a darker, more intense mystery, with stakes higher than ever before, according to Deadline . As Craig's Blanc ominously intones in the teaser, 'In the beginning, the knives came out. Then, behold, the glass was shattered. But my most dangerous case yet… is about to begin'. The star-studded Netflix film cast reads like a who's who of Hollywood's finest, featuring Josh O'Connor (known for The Crown ), Glenn Close ( Hillbilly Elegy ), and Josh Brolin ( Dune ). They wil be joined by Mila Kunis ( Luckiest Girl Alive ), Jeremy Renner ( Hawkeye ), and Kerry Washington ( Scandal ). Andrew Scott ( Fleabag ), Cailee Spaeny ( Priscilla ), Daryl McCormack ( Bad Sisters ), and Thomas Haden Church ( Spider-Man 3 ). This ensemble ensures a captivating array of suspects and characters, each adding layers to the intricate puzzle Benoit Blanc must solve. Filming wrapped in August 2024, with Johnson not only directing but also writing and producing alongside Ram Bergman. Netflix unveiled a cryptic noir-style teaser at their Tudum fan event in Los Angeles, teasing the film's shadowy tone and gripping narrative. Rian Johnson commented on the film, saying, 'We wanted to push Benoit Blanc into darker territory. This case challenges him like never before, and the stakes are personal'. Daniel Craig added, 'Returning as Blanc feels like coming home. This story is intense, thrilling, and full of surprises. I can't wait for audiences to see it'. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery follows the success of Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022). Both films reinvented the classic murder mystery for modern audiences. This third instalment promises to continue that tradition with fresh twists and a gripping new case. Mark your calendars for 12 December 2025, as Benoit Blanc's most perilous mystery yet is coming to Netflix. Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1. Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Vance rode Middletown pride to the White House. Will he help its schools?
The U.S. Department of Education is recalling millions of promised federal dollars from 18 Ohio school districts, including $5.6 million from Middletown City Schools. I wonder if Vice President J.D. Vance will step up and save the day for his hometown school district, considering that 62% of Middletown voters cast their ballots for him and Donald Trump in the 2024 election. It remains to be seen if Vance is as committed to Middletown. As a Middletown native, count me among the skeptics. Unlike so many of my Middletown brethren, I never fully bought into Vance's pretense about his love for our town. I always felt Middletown was nothing more than a prop Vance used to further his personal and political goals. He trashed Middletown in the selling of his book "Hillbilly Elegy," something many proud residents took exception to. He played up his Appalachian roots and connection to the Butler County steel-mill town during the presidential campaign to make himself seem more Middle America, despite more recently being a Silicon Valley tech guy. More: JD Vance's Middletown: What really went wrong In the end, I saw Vance as little more than an opportunist preying on Middletown's sense of community pride. That's the thing about my hometown; the people there are very proud of their own. Middletonians who achieve great success are celebrated, revered, and, most of all, strongly supported and promoted. So, I wasn't surprised when Middletown went all out backing the Trump-Vance ticket. I won't say politics wasn't the main decider, but Middie pride was a big factor in how people there voted, too. Heck, the city put up road signs honoring Vance just a couple of weeks after he was sworn in as vice president. Middletonians stand up for each other that way. More: JD Vance blames local deputy's death on leaders who make police officers 'to be enemies' Now, Vance has the chance to do the same − a chance to show that I'm wrong about him. At least on this one thing. Deliver for all those Middletonians who believed in you enough to give you their votes. Who believed that you could help fix the town's "bad rap." Who believed that not only could you and Trump "Make America Great Again," but that, together, you might also help bring about the resurgence of a once All-American City. Make sure Middletown schools — the district you attended — get to keep that $5.6 million, Mr. Vice President. Pull whatever levers you need to; talk to Trump directly if you have to. Selecting Middletown High School's marching band to perform at the Inaugural Parade in Washington, D.C. was nice for those students, but securing nearly $6 million for a new transportation center would benefit Middletown students districtwide. The community is counting on that money, and it is counting on you. You've certainly profited from our hometown. Now it's time to return the favor. Opinion and Engagement Editor Kevin S. Aldridge can be reached at kaldridge@ On X: @kevaldrid. This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Middletown's loyalty to Vance meets federal abandonment | Opinion
Epoch Times
6 days ago
- Business
- Epoch Times
Freshman Congressman Dave Taylor of Ohio Focuses on Appalachia
WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance painted a vivid picture of Appalachia in his 2016 memoir 'Hillbilly Elegy.' One of rural poverty mired in a substance-abuse epidemic, but also one centered on family and the resilience of the human spirit. Now, freshman congressman, Rep. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio) aims to fix the region's problems. 'You would be absolutely shocked if you rode around my district with me,' Taylor told The Epoch Times. 'And it's all the way people live, the things they do without.' Taylor also emphasizes: 'I call them 'the make-do people.' They make do with whatever they got to make the best of it. They're not going to complain a lot, and it makes it easy for them to get left behind. So we're hoping to see an end to that.' When Taylor took the oath of office in January to represent Ohio's 2nd Congressional District he turned his focus to the part of his district that, while characterized by rolling hills, forests, and coal-mining culture, also had more than 14 percent of its residents living in According to the commission, the median annual household income in Appalachia was $61,688 between 2018 and 2022, far below the median household income across the United States, which was $75,149. Related Stories 10/16/2024 8/13/2023 Taylor has his work cut out for him, eight of his district's 15 counties are deemed 'distressed' or 'at-risk.' The 'distressed' label applies to 'the most economically depressed counties,' and those counties 'rank in the most economically depressed 10 percent of the nation's counties,' according to a commission An example of the hardships faced by the district's residents can be found in Vinton County where 1,700 of about 5,000 'They have a fouled water table due to a mine in the area,' Taylor said. Taylor describes the region as a place where jobs are scarce, grocery prices are high, and there's a dearth of quality health care. A 'big bunch' of his district doesn't have a reliable connection to the internet, which means no access to telehealth in an area with few medical facilities and personnel, and being disconnected from 'the modern economy,' Taylor said. There is another insidious and tragic epidemic raging across the region: Suicide. Appalachian Ohio's suicide rate is 19 percent above the national average, and mortality rates are double-digit percentages above the average in the United States, 'It's really sort of despicable conditions that these folks have been left to,' Taylor said. 'So any way we can change that will be worth the fact that I had to come to a big city.' Appalachian Roots Taylor, 55, grew up in a suburban neighborhood in Appalachia. His mother, who taught kindergarten for more than 30 years, comes from West Virginia coal mining stock, and his father's side includes Kentucky tobacco farmers. After earning a law degree, Taylor worked as an assistant prosecutor before taking over the family's concrete business. When Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) decided not to run for re-election in 2024, Taylor found he had a 'surprising' new goal. Despite never aspiring to run for Congress, Taylor said, 'I saw that as an opportunity to work on something I really care about, which is the terrible living conditions of way too many people in the Second District.'. Another pressing issue Taylor wants to improve is the high level of food insecurity in the region. According to High grocery prices are also an issue in the region:'Appalachian families are paying far more to put food on their dinner tables than they were a few short years ago,' he said. Part of the Solution Taylor said he believes Washington can be part of the solution for the people of Appalachia. With the region's internet connectivity issues for instance. Congress has allocated In late March, Taylor introduced a He hopes the bill will prompt the Appalachian Regional Commission to pass along federal funding to use Starlink to provide internet access in the area. Rep. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio) wears a Make Agriculture Great Again hat in his office on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 6, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times Starlink, owned by Elon Musk's SpaceX, provides internet access by connecting to a network of satellites. It allows for service in remote locations or other places without reliable internet. Because part of Taylor's district is so hilly, it's not suitable for underground fiber-optic cables, the congressman said. 'Among other groups, I've met with SpaceX to discuss their services and learn how they may be able to provide internet services to rural families,' Taylor said. 'I'm willing to work with anyone who is serious about delivering broadband to our rural communities.' Better internet connectivity can lead to solving other issues, such as boosting education and workforce opportunities, Taylor said. He also introduced a Though Ohio may be far from the southern border, the crisis at the border has resulted in drug overdoses among Taylor's constituents. The district has the highest rate of unintentional drug overdoses in Ohio. Illicit drugs, such as fentanyl, have poured into the United States from Mexico through cartels who source the building blocks of their product from China and other places. . 'I'll Do as Much Good as I Can' Taylor calls Ohio's Clermont County home, where he and his wife of 28 years, Charity, raise their three daughters, aged 27, 26, and 21. Taylor says he's always held conservative views: 'I live in a very conservative district [with] people who set out to take care of themselves, people who believe in independence. People [who] believe in limited government, lower taxes, getting out of the private sector's way.' These views run in the family. 'My grandfather said that the private sector does more on a bad day to make people's lives better than the government does in a good year,' he said. 'And that's probably true.' Taylor supports term limits, and he's pledged to serve in Congress for no more than 10 years. 'I see no reason that I need to be here for 20 years,' he said. 'I'll do as much good as I can.' Taylor's predecessor, a doctor, is said to have saved the life of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) in 2017 when he was shot on a baseball field during a practice one day before the annual Congressional Baseball Game for charity. Taylor recalled meeting Scalise, who now serves as House majority leader:'When I met Leader Scalise, I said, 'Well, I hope you like me. But you're not going to like me as much as you like Brad Wenstrup. My best chance of saving your life is getting in front of the bullet, not trying to save you after you're shot.'' Taylor knows he is one of the fortunate ones in Appalachia. 'I went to good schools,' he said. 'And I enjoyed them all. But I wish I would have taken it a little bit more seriously then. ... I didn't do all I could back then. But I don't have a lot of regrets in that regard. My life turned out way better than I could have ever expected.'
Mint
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
How the left and J.D. Vance learnt to despise each other
(This story was originally published on 15 September 2022) Did J.D. Vance betray America's progressive elite, or is it the other way around? Not long ago Mr Vance was celebrated in left-of-centre columns and salons as a heartland Jeremiah, a prophet of working-class despair who could demystify Donald Trump's popularity. His bestselling memoir, 'Hillbilly Elegy', was 'a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion', declared the New York Times. Mr Vance, the review said, was brave to blame fellow hillbillies, not structural forces, for their dismal choices: 'Whether you agree with Mr Vance or not, you must admire him for his head-on confrontation with a taboo subject.' There are no exhortations from the left to admire Mr Vance nowadays. And as he runs as a Republican to represent Ohio in the Senate, Mr Vance scorns the elites whose admiration he once courted. He sees the press, in particular, as benighted. 'I think the four years of the Trump administration broke the brains of a lot of people in the media,' Mr Vance says, pausing to chat recently after visiting a cattle auction at the Morgan County Fair in McConnelsville, Ohio. Reporters obsessed over what Mr Trump said but ignored his successes on taxes and tariffs: 'There was just the sense that I had that, look, the press has gone completely insane. And if you want their approval, you're going to have to say a bunch of stuff that you don't actually believe in.' It is true that, as Mr Trump's term wore on, the progressive elite came to ascribe his popularity to bigotry, rather than economic despair; many commentators began mocking Mr Vance's message of empathy for poor white people. Yet the conservative elite also changed, as did Mr Vance's ideas and public persona. Coinciding as it has with the Trump era, and conducted, as it necessarily was, out loud, his rapid evolution from public intellectual to venture capitalist to politician charts how Mr Trump's style and positions penetrated the right's intellectual class. Back when he expected Mr Trump to lose the 2016 election, Mr Vance credited him with raising important questions but worried that his rhetoric was divisive and his answers too simple, that his promises were 'the needle in America's collective vein', as he wrote in the Atlantic. Two years on, at a conference on national conservatism, he decried the choices not of hillbillies but of policymakers, to embrace globalisation and consumerism at the cost of good jobs. Within two more years he had advanced to conspiracy-fearmongering, noting that Jeff Bezos of Amazon supported Black Lives Matter, and that riots following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 destroyed small businesses. 'Now who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed?' he asked. 'There is a direct connection between woke capital and the plunder that's happening in society today.' His concerns about simplistic explanations and provoking rhetoric had melted away. By last July he was warning that Democrats had seized control of all national institutions and were waging culture war to take away 'our very sense of national pride and national purpose'. Citing Vice-President Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he wondered: 'Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don't have children?' That meant 'not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country'. (Lack of children also explained the 'obsessive, weird, almost humiliating, aggressive posture of our media'.) It may not surprise you that Mr Vance has proved better at 'head-on confrontation with a taboo subject' than running for office. His embrace of Mr Trump, and money from a venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, helped him win the primary. But Mr Thiel stopped writing him cheques, and Mr Vance ran a pallid campaign through the summer, while his Democratic opponent, Representative Tim Ryan of Youngstown, raised money hand over fist, touted his agreement with Mr Trump on trade, and battered Mr Vance. Ohio has become so Republican that The Economist's forecast still gives Mr Vance a 50% chance of winning. A Super pac with ties to Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, is reportedly planning to spend $28m on ads for him. Mr Trump is to appear with him at a rally on September 17th. Mr Vance is busily attacking Mr Ryan on crime and inflation. He is an affable retail candidate, the kind with the brains and confidence to approach his 'tracker'—the operative dispatched by Democrats to record his every move in hopes of a gaffe—and say a warm hello. ('My bosses said he'd be crazy to do that,' the startled tracker mumbled.) The day before Mr Vance visited the Morgan County Fair, President Joe Biden spoke a county away in Licking, at the ground-breaking of a new Intel semiconductor plant that he, and local television news, celebrated as the beginning of the 'Silicon Heartland'. Mr Biden praised Senator Rob Portman, the Republican whose retirement is opening the seat for which Mr Vance and Mr Ryan are vying. Mr Portman helped pass bipartisan legislation, called the chips Act, to subsidise the semiconductor industry. 'You're leaving a hell of a legacy,' Mr Biden said. Partisan culture war seemed an abstraction compared with the Intel plant and its thousands of jobs, steps towards confronting the problems that preoccupy Mr Vance. When asked about the chips Act, he calls it 'a good thing' and cites it as the kind of bipartisan action he would pursue. J.D. Vance, at 38, is no Rob Portman. He may irrevocably yoke himself to Mr Trump and his election lies. Still, in this dizzying time, it seems too soon to say what sort of member of the elite he will ultimately become. Like everyone else, and maybe more than most, he is a work in progress: from hillbilly to intellectual, evangelical to atheist to Catholic, cultural conservative to libertarian to Trumpist, pundit to politician. That creates ground for suspicion of opportunism—but also, maybe, for a little hope.
Atlantic
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Talented Mr. Vance
J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America's social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump's first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J.D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition. Both versions suggest the protagonist of a 19th-century novel—Pip in Dickens's Great Expectations, Lucien in Balzac's Lost Illusions. A novelist who set out to narrate the decline of the American empire in the 21st century might invent a protagonist like J. D. Vance. He turns up in all the key places, embodying every important theme. He's the product of an insular subculture (the Scots-Irish of Appalachian Kentucky) and grows up amid the ills (poverty, addiction, family collapse) of a dying Ohio steel town ravaged by deindustrialization. He escapes into the Marine Corps in time for the Iraq War, and then into the dubious embrace of the cognitive meritocracy (Yale Law School, West Coast venture capital, East Coast media). At a turning point in his life and the country's—in 2016, with the surprise success of Hillbilly Elegy and then the surprise victory of Trump—Vance becomes a celebrity, the anointed spokesman for the 40 percent of the country that comprises the white working class, which has sudden political power and cultural interest. He's tasked with explaining the world he came from to the world he recently joined. With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country's conflicting strands together. They had combined to make him, and he knew them deeply—their flaws, their possibilities, their entwined fate. Instead, he took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump. Vance became a scourge of the elites among whom he'd found refuge, a kingpin of a new elite, avenging wrongs done to his native tribe. At every step the reader wonders: Is our hero motivated by conviction, or is he the creature of a corrupt society? Does he deserve our admiration, our sympathy, or our contempt? Still only 40, Vance is likelier than anyone to be the next president. (The biggest obstacle, for several reasons, is Trump himself.) His rise has been so dramatic and self-dramatized that he calls to mind those emblematic figures from history who seem both out of a storybook and all too human, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Huey Long. In the end, the question of Vance's character—whether his about-face was 'authentic'—is probably unanswerable. Few people are capable of conscious, persistent self-betrayal. A change that begins in opportunism can become more passionate than a lifelong belief, especially when it's rewarded. Ventriloquize long enough and your voice alters; the mask becomes your face. What's more important than Vance's motive is the meaning of the story in which he's the protagonist. More than any other public figure of this century, including Barack Obama (to whom his career bears some similarities), and even Trump, Vance illuminates the larger subject of contemporary America's character. In another age, his rise might have been taken as proof that the American dream was alive and mostly well. But our age has no simply inspiring and unifying tales, and each chapter of Vance's success is part of a national failure: the abandonment of American workers under global neoliberalism; the cultural collapse of the working class; the unwinnable forever war; a dominant elite that combines ruthless competition with a rigid orthodoxy of identity; a reaction of populist authoritarianism. What seems like Vance's tragic wrong turn, the loss of real promise, was probably inevitable—it's hard to imagine a more hopeful plot. After all, the novel is about a society in which something has gone deeply wrong, all the isms have run dry, and neither the elites nor the people can escape blame. The power of Vance's story depends on the image of a hick struggling to survive and escape, then navigating the temptations and bruises of ascent. At the start of his memoir he describes himself as an ordinary person of no real accomplishment who avoided becoming a grim statistic only by the grace of his family's love. This self-portrait shows the early appearance of Vance the politician, and it's belied by the testimony of people who knew him. Friends from the Marine Corps and Yale described to me an avid reader, confident and well-spoken, socially adept, almost universally liked—an extraordinary young man clearly headed for big things. (Vance himself declined to be interviewed for this article.) As an enlisted Marine, Vance worked in public affairs, which meant that he saw no combat in Iraq during some of the most violent years of the war. Instead, he acquired a sense of discipline and purpose in a fairly cloistered milieu. He was already interested in political philosophy, and on the sprawling Al-Asad air base, in Anbar province, Vance and a close friend discussed Jefferson and Lincoln, Ayn Rand, Christopher Hitchens and the 'new atheists,' even Locke and Hobbes. He was also a conservative who revered John McCain and was, the close friend joked, the only one on the base who wasn't disappointed when a mystery visitor turned out to be Dick Cheney rather than Jessica Simpson. But Vance began to have doubts about the war before he ever set foot in Iraq. In a chow hall in Kuwait, officers on their way home to the States described the pointless frustration of clearing Iraqi cities that immediately fell again to insurgents. The ghost of Vietnam had not been vanquished by the global War on Terror. 'I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,' Vance wrote years later. 'I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.' Whether that ideology was called neoconservatism or liberal interventionism, its failure in Iraq led in a straight line to a new ideology that was also old: 'America First.' On foreign policy Vance has been pretty consistent for two decades. When, while running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, he remarked, 'I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,' you could hear the working-class Iraq vet taking a shot at elites who send others to bleed for abstractions and are indifferent to the human collapse of Middletown, Ohio. 'America First' wasn't the only available response to disillusionment with Iraq. Other veterans who'd entered politics—Dan Crenshaw, Jason Crow, Tammy Duckworth, Seth Moulton—continued to be concerned about human suffering and the fate of democracy abroad. Nor have they abandoned liberal democracy for blood-and-soil nationalism. Vance is a politician with an unusual interest in ideas and a combative nature fed by an old wound. The combination makes him capable of going a long way down an ideological road without paying attention to the casualties around him. Raised loosely evangelical, Vance became a libertarian atheist in his 20s—the stance of many smart, self-taught young men of the aughts in search of totalizing positions that could win mostly online arguments. 'I prided myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with my logic,' he wrote years later. 'There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually.' Both Rand and Hitchens took him away from the community of his upbringing—from a poor white culture of non-churchgoing Christians whose identification with the Republican Party had nothing to do with tax cuts. Libertarianism and atheism were respectable worldviews of the new culture that Vance badly wanted to enter. 'I became interested in secularism just as my attention turned to my separation from the Marines and my impending transition to college. I knew how the educated tended to feel about religion: at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil,' he would write in 2020, after his conversion to Catholicism. 'Secularism may not have been a prerequisite to join the elites, but it sure made things easier.' This ability to socialize himself into new beliefs set a pattern for his career. Vance took just two years to graduate from Ohio State, and in 2010 he was accepted by Yale Law School. Entering the Ivy League put him through what the sociologist J. M. Cuddihy called 'the ordeal of civility'—repression of one's class or ethnic background in the effort to assimilate to the ways of a dominant culture. As Vance later wrote, he had to get used to the taste of sparkling water, to learn that white wine comes in more than one variety. In an earlier time, the dominant group would have been the WASPs. In the early 21st century, it was a liberal multiethnic meritocracy for which a Yale law degree opened the way to power. In this world, there was nothing odd about a descendant of several centuries of native-born white Christian Americans taking as his 'Yale spirit guide' the daughter of Hindu immigrants from India. The route to New Haven is in some ways shorter from Andhra Pradesh than from the hills of eastern Kentucky. What counts is class, and class is largely a matter of education and credentials. Usha Chilukuri had all the right qualities to civilize Vance: raised in a stable, high-achieving family of California academics; Phi Beta Kappa at Yale College; master's degree from Cambridge University; even-tempered, politically opaque, hyper-organized, mapping out her work and life with Vance on Post-it notes, whiteboards, and spreadsheets. When Vance's friend from the Marines visited New Haven, Usha told them both that they'd done a good job of 'course correcting' their lives. In Vance's memoir she's a kind of life coach, counseling him to unlearn hillbilly codes and habits—helping him talk through difficult subjects without losing his temper or withdrawing, expressing pride when he resists going after another driver who flips him off in traffic. Hillbilly Elegy —both book and film—makes much of a scene in which Vance is so baffled by the complicated tableware at a Yale dinner with recruiters from a white-shoe law firm that he has to leave the room and call Usha for guidance. 'Go from outside to inside, and don't use the same utensil for separate dishes,' she tells him. 'Oh, and use the fat spoon for soup.' The picture of a raw youth going from outside to inside with the help of his super-striver girlfriend is a little misleading. 'I never got the sense that he was worse off because he hadn't gone to Yale or Harvard, just because he was so well-spoken,' a law-school friend of Vance's and Chilukuri's told me. 'He was intriguing to Usha, and to the rest of us too.' Being a chubby-faced working-class Marine from the Midwest might have brought cultural disadvantages, but it also conferred the buoyant charisma of a young man who made it out. Regardless of place settings, Vance quickly mastered the essential Ivy League art of networking. Classmates picked him out early on as a political leader. The earnest, sensitive narrator of Hillbilly Elegy sounds nothing like the powerful politician who sneers at 'childless cat ladies,' peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine, and gets into profane fights with random critics on X. Everyone who met Vance in those years seems to have been impressed. He didn't have to put on Ivy League airs, or wave a hillbilly flag, or win sympathy by reciting the saddest chapters of his childhood. He kept stories of his abusive mother and her checked-out partners almost entirely to himself—a close friend was surprised by the dark details of his memoir—but he didn't cut himself off from his past. He watched Ohio State football every Saturday with another Buckeye at Yale, and he remained close to his sister, Lindsay, and to friends from his hometown and the Marine Corps. In the early 2010s, when he began to publish short articles on David Frum's website FrumForum and in National Review, they were mainly concerned with the lack of social mobility in the working class. His voice was perfectly tuned to a moderate conservatism, strengthened by his authentic origin in heartland hardship—skeptical of government programs for the poor, but with a sense of responsibility to the place he came from. I'm making it, he said, and so can they if they get the right support. In an early essay, from 2010, he defended institutions like Yale Law School against a rising right-wing populism that saw a country 'ruled by perniciously alien elites.' This burn-it-down politics was a luxury that poor people couldn't afford. His 'political hero,' according to Hillbilly Elegy, was Mitch Daniels, the centrist Republican governor of Indiana. His choice for president in 2012 was Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and ambassador to China, who made Mitt Romney seem a bit extreme. David Frum: The J. D. Vance I knew Vance planned to write a policy book about the problems of the white working class. But when he came under the wing of the professor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, who fostered his relationship with Usha and recommended him for coveted jobs, she urged him to write the story of his life. At the end of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes a recurring nightmare, going back to childhood, in which he's pursued by a terrifying antagonist, a 'monster'—in at least one dream his unstable mother. While he was at Yale she became addicted to heroin, and he later had to drive to Ohio to keep her from ending up homeless. The nightmare returned just after he graduated—but this time the creature being chased is his dog, Casper, and the enraged pursuer is Vance. At the last moment he stops himself from hurting his beloved pet, saved by his own capacity for self-reflection. The dreamer wakes to a bedroom filled with all the signs of his happy new life. But the past is still alive, and the nightmare leaves a haunting insight: 'I was the monster.' Reading the book today is like the reversal of roles in Vance's dream. The earnest, sensitive narrator of Hillbilly Elegy sounds nothing like the powerful politician who sneers at ' childless cat ladies,' peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine, and gets into profane fights with random critics on X. Vice President Vance is the pursuer. So it's a little disorienting to return to Hillbilly Elegy and spend a few hours in the presence of a narrator who can say: 'I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people portrayed. For there are no villains in this story.' In an essay for this magazine in 2016, Vance called Trump 'cultural heroin'—the most apt metaphor possible. Trump is a drug that has led the white working class to resentment, bigotry, coarseness, delusional hope. As a writer, Vance passes the most important test in a work of this kind: He's honest enough to show himself in an unfavorable light—hotheaded, cowardly, often just sad. He's wary of any simple lessons or wholly satisfying emotions. He loves his family and community, but he is unsparing about their self-destructive tendencies. He rejects the politics of tribal grievance and ostentatious piety that now defines the populist right. If the book has a message, it's the need to take responsibility for your own life while understanding the obstacles and traps that blight the lives of others—to acknowledge the complex causes of failure without giving in to rage, self-pity, or despair. 'There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government,' Vance warned, 'and that movement gains adherents by the day.' From the January/February 2024 issue: George Packer on what the working class really wants It's not a message to impress the MAGA mind. The author's nuanced analysis and policy ideas might well make Vice President Vance retch. In countless interviews and talks related to his New York Times No. 1 best seller, Vance spoke movingly about his childhood, criticized the low standards that both right and left impose on his people, and offered no easy answers for their desperate lives, only a kind of moral appeal to self-betterment and community that sounded like the centrist commentary of David Brooks. In his open-collar shirt and blazer, with smooth cheeks and boyish blue eyes, a fluent delivery and respectful responses, Vance appeared to be living proof that the meritocracy could take a self-described hillbilly and make him one of its own, creating an appealing celebrity with an important message for comfortable audiences about those left behind. So Hillbilly Elegy is a problem for right-wing populists—and also for Trump opponents who now loathe Vance, because it takes an effort not to sympathize with the book's young hero and admire the eloquence of its author. By 2020, when Ron Howard's movie was released, at the end of Trump's first term, critics who might have turned to the book for insight had soured on the white working class, and they excoriated the film. (Tellingly, it was far more popular with the general public.) By then it was no longer possible to have an honest response to a book or movie across political battle lines. Hillbilly Elegy, published four months before the 2016 election, came out at the last possible moment to shape a national conversation. It belongs to an era that no longer exists. Other than learning how elites get ahead, Vance made little use of his law degree. He spent a year clerking for a Kentucky judge, and less than a year at a corporate firm in D.C. Even at Yale he knew that practicing law didn't interest him. What he later called 'the most significant moment' of his law-school years was a talk in 2011 by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. I spent time with Thiel for a magazine profile that year, so I'm familiar with the pessimism of his thinking: America is going through a period of prolonged stagnation; supposedly revolutionary digital technologies like the iPhone and social media have turned out to be trivial, while chronic problems in the physical world—transportation, energy, bioscience—haven't improved; and this lack of dynamism drives elites like the ones in Thiel's audience to compete furiously for a dwindling number of prestigious but ultimately meaningless jobs. This analysis of a soulless meritocracy in a decadent society held more than intellectual interest for Vance. Thiel was describing what Vance had already begun to feel about his new life among the credentialed: 'I had prioritized striving over character,' Vance later wrote. 'I looked to the future, and realized that I'd been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.' The talk gave an abstract framework for the psychological conflicts besetting a refugee from decline: burning ambition, and the char of guilt it leaves; longing for elite acceptance and resentment of elite disdain (the professor who scoffed at state-school education, the classmate who assumed that Marines must be brutes); what Vance called the 'reverse snobbery' that a poor boy from flyover country feels toward the Yale snobs who know about butter knives while he alone confronts a belligerent drunk at the next table in a New Haven bar. In an interview with Rod Dreher of The American Conservative upon the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance said, 'It's the great privilege of my life that I'm deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.' He added, 'But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.' Elite anti-elitism—contempt from a position of strength, the ability to say 'Thanks but fuck you'—offered a way out of the conflicts. This was the first of many gifts from Thiel, and Vance would go on to indulge it every bit as destructively as his new mentor could wish. But not yet. He was still hard at work earning his credentials and preparing to enjoy their fruits. The author of Hillbilly Elegy could only have a complex view of Donald Trump: an intuitive grasp of his appeal for people in Middletown, and horror at his effect on them. In an essay for this magazine published just a few weeks after the memoir, in the summer of 2016, Vance called Trump ' cultural heroin '—the most apt metaphor possible. Trump was an overwhelmingly tempting drug that brought relief from pain but inevitably led to self-destruction, enabling all the ills—resentment, bigotry, coarseness, delusional hope—of a white working class in rapid decay. Shortly before the election, Vance warned that a refusal by Trump to accept its results would further alienate his supporters from politics, saying he hoped Trump 'acts magnanimous.' Late on Election Night, when Trump's shocking victory appeared imminent, ABC News, suddenly in need of an authority on Trump voters, pulled Vance from Yahoo News into its main studio as a native informant. 'What are they looking for from Donald Trump?' George Stephanopoulos asked. 'What do they want tangibly?' Vance replied that they wanted a change in direction, and that if Trump failed to bring one, there would be 'a period of reckoning.' Then he added with a slight smile: 'I do think that folks feel very vindicated now, right? They believed in their man. They felt like the media didn't believe in their man.' What did Vance believe in? Trump's win brought the author of Hillbilly Elegy to new prominence as a national voice. It also placed a roadblock directly in the path of his ambitions. He had identified himself as a Never Trump conservative, privately wondered if Trump was 'America's Hitler,' and voted for neither major-party candidate. Suddenly the establishment that had embraced him and elevated him beyond his dreams could no longer offer means of ascent. Just about everyone who knew Vance assumed he intended to enter politics, but the Daniels-Huntsman-Romney species of Republican was halfway to extinction. In January 2017, a week after Trump's inauguration, a group of about a dozen conservatives—adherents of 'reform conservatism,' a modernizing, more inclusive strain that took seriously issues such as inequality and the environment—gathered with Vance at the Washington offices of the Hoover Institution to advise him on his political future. These were policy intellectuals who had encouraged and validated young Vance. They discussed what their agenda should be now that a Republican few, if any, of them had supported was president. Were there positive aspects to be gleaned from Trump's populism on issues like immigration? How far should Vance go to accommodate himself to the cultural-heroin president? One thing was certain: The people in the room were already losing their value to Vance. A week later, on February 3, he spoke about Hillbilly Elegy and Trump at David Axelrod's Institute of Politics, in Chicago. He gave one of his most thoughtful performances, trying to tie the unraveling threads of the country back together, urging his audience to see the common ground between working-class Black and white Americans, arguing that both the cultural left and the racist alt‑right represented a small number of mostly coastal elites. But he also made a startling claim about Trump that he would return to in the coming months and years: 'If you go to one of his rallies, it's maybe 5 percent him being really outrageous and offensive, and 95 percent him talking about 'Here are all the things that are wrong in your community, here's why they're wrong, and I'm going to bring back jobs.' That was the core thesis of Trump's entire argument.' Never mind the tone, Vance was saying, it's trivial—pay attention to the content. But his percentages weren't remotely accurate, and he was ignoring the inextricable bond between inflammatory language and extreme policies that held Trump's speeches together and thrilled his crowds: What's wrong in your community is them. Vance, too intelligent not to sense the hollow core of his claim, was taking a step toward Trump. He also informed his audience that he was moving back to Ohio. It's hard to see the hand of Catholic humility in Vance's public life. His conversion anticipated a sharp turn in how he went about pursuing power. According to a classmate, while still in law school Vance had gotten in touch with Thiel, who extended an open invitation to come see him in Silicon Valley. After graduation, marriage to Usha, and short stints in the legal profession, he moved to San Francisco and, in 2016, started working at Thiel's venture-capital firm Mithril. But technology investing seemed to hold little more interest for him than corporate law. What excited him was politics and ideas. Thiel was preparing to endorse Trump and was mounting a radical attack on America's sclerotic and corrupt institutions—universities, media, corporations, the regulatory state. His rhetoric became extreme, but his goals remained vague. Trump was an experiment: Thiel wanted to blow things up and see what happened, and if it all went wrong he could move to New Zealand, where he'd invested millions of dollars and acquired citizenship. The alliance between Thiel (monopoly advocate, cognitive elitist, believer in supermen, admirer of the antidemocratic thinkers Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss) and Vance (son of the common people, who get screwed when things go wrong and have no way out) shows that reactionary populism is capacious enough to appeal to every resentment of the liberal status quo. With prolonged exposure to the master class—the junkets in Aspen and Sun Valley—Vance collected disillusioning stories that would later help justify his political transformation: the tech CEO whose answer for the loss of purpose among displaced workers was 'digital, fully immersive gaming'; the hotel mogul who complained that Trump's anti-immigrant policy made it harder for him to find low-wage workers. One feels that these clueless capitalists, like the condescending Yalies of half a decade earlier, played a genuine role in Vance's turn away from the establishment, but that he enlisted them disproportionately. Incidents like these provided a kind of indulgence that allowed him to feel that he wasn't with the elites after all, wasn't betraying his own people while explaining their pathologies over dinner to the superrich—a role that was becoming more and more distasteful—and under the table he and Usha could quietly signal to each other: We have to get the hell out of here. These people are crazy. The Vances moved first to Columbus in 2017, then bought a mansion in Cincinnati the following year and filled it with children while they both pursued the extremely busy careers of the meritocracy. Vance explained his return to Ohio as a desire to give back to his troubled home region and help reverse its brain drain; his political ambitions went unmentioned. He announced the creation of a nonprofit to combat the opioid epidemic, but the group, Our Ohio Renewal, raised almost no money and folded before it had achieved much more than placing a couple of op-eds. He put more effort into funding regional start-ups with venture capital, but one of his biggest bets, an indoor-agriculture company in Appalachia, went bankrupt. With seed money from Thiel, in 2019 Vance co-founded his own firm, Narya Capital, and invested in the right-wing video-sharing platform Rumble and a prayer app called Hallow. Like Thiel's Mithril Capital and big-data company, Palantir, the name Narya comes from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings —a novel that obsesses a certain type of brainy conservative, particularly younger religious ones, with its hierarchical social order and apocalyptic battle between good and evil. As Vance turned away from classical liberalism, Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers gave way to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. That same year, he became a Roman Catholic. Around Easter 2020 Vance published an essay about his conversion in the Catholic journal The Lamp. It describes a largely intellectual experience, informed by reading Saint Augustine and the literary critic René Girard, driven by disenchantment with the scramble for credentials and consumer goods, and slowed by his reluctance to embrace a form of Christianity that would have been alien to Mamaw, his late grandmother. He finally made up his mind when he 'began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims.' Vance hoped that Catholicism would help him to care less about professional prestige, 'let go of grudges, and forgive even those who wronged me.' However he is doing in private, it's hard to see the hand of Catholic humility at work in his public life. His conversion anticipated a sharp turn in how he went about pursuing power, and it coincided with a wave of high-profile conservatives turning to religion. The essay was titled 'How I Joined the Resistance.' Vance didn't give up his former beliefs all at once. It took him four years, from 2017 until 2021, to abandon one politics for another—to go from Never Trump to Only Trump. Compared with the overnight conversion experiences of innumerable Republicans, this pace seems admirably slow, and it probably reflects Vance's seriousness about political ideas. He took time to make them intellectually coherent; then the moral descent was swift and total. A close friend of Vance's, another Ohioan, gave the most generous explanation of his political conversion. 'His views have always been kind of rooted toward doing good for the working-class segment of America,' the friend told me. Progressives embraced an identity politics that placed Vance's people somewhere near the bottom, and standard conservative policies hadn't worked for them, especially on trade. In Ohio, Vance found that his people had become big Trump supporters. By 2018, the friend told me, Vance believed that Trump 'was committed at least to doing the things he said and fixing the problems that J.D. also identified as problems'—the loss of jobs and decline of communities. In 2017 Vance had said that manufacturing jobs had been lost mainly to automation, and that protectionism wouldn't bring them back. Before long he was blaming globalization, China, and the Republican donor class. 'At that point J.D. realized he was very aligned with Trump on the issues,' the friend said. In 2018, Vance told an acquaintance that he was thinking of voting for Trump in 2020. Onstage with Amy Chua that same year at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he said that people he knew in Ohio were angrier at Wall Street and Silicon Valley types than at ethnic- or religious-minority groups, and that Trump's speeches, though 'tinged with criticisms of Mexican immigrants or Muslims,' directed 85 percent of their vitriol at 'coastal elites.' Another doubtful calculation—but it allowed Vance to align Trump's more acceptable hostilities with those of his people and, by implication, his own. He wasn't going to insult Mexicans and Muslims in front of an Aspen crowd, but the crowd itself was more than fair game. The next year, at a pair of conservative conferences, Vance argued that libertarianism didn't have the answer for what ails American parents and children, workers and communities. He championed a 'pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American-nation conservatism,' and he said: 'In my own life, I've felt the demons that come from a traumatic childhood melt away in the laughter and the love of my own son.' The policy implications weren't entirely clear. He was against abortion, Facebook apps designed to addict children, pointless wars that got his Marine buddies killed, and CEOs who didn't care about American workers and families; he was for mothers and kids. He ended one speech by saying, 'Donald Trump has really opened up the debate on a lot of these issues, from foreign policy to health care to trade to immigration.' By 2020 Vance had publicly turned away from the residue of Reaganism toward what came to be called 'the new right,' 'national conservatism,' or simply 'populism.' In a sense, he was following the well-trod path of his generation of conservatives. The Republican establishment had failed, the reformers hadn't amounted to much, the Never Trumpers had lost—here was the obvious alternative. But what had Trump actually done for people in the postindustrial heartland? The fentanyl crisis raged on, manufacturing job growth remained anemic, and the president's main achievement—a tax cut—benefited corporations and billionaires far more than the working class. Vance knew all of this, and in early 2020 he wrote to one correspondent: 'Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).' But the political winds had turned, and now he massaged his public remarks about Trump into vague approval while keeping his criticism private. Vance was getting ready to enter politics. The generous account of Vance's political conversion contains some truth. It still fails to explain what followed. A change in his view of tariffs didn't require Vance to go to Mar-a-Lago with Peter Thiel in early 2021 to seek the disgraced ex-president's forgiveness, then start and never stop repeating the very lie about a stolen election that he had warned against in 2016. In moving away from the Enlightenment and globalist neoliberalism, he could have stopped at the reactionary writer Christopher Caldwell or the post-liberal scholar Patrick Deneen. He didn't need to spend 90 minutes schmoozing with an alt-right podcaster and rape apologist who goes by Jack Murphy (his real name is John Goldman), insisting ominously: 'We are in a late-republican period. If we're going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.' Vance could have run for the Senate as a populist without maligning half his compatriots—liberals, immigrants, women without children—as hostile to America. He could have become a father without devoting a speech to mocking the 'childless left.' The Catholic Church didn't command him to stop caring about human beings in other countries, or to value Israel more than Ukraine because most Americans are Christian and Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not Kyiv. He could have turned away from his Ivy League credentials after they stopped being useful without declaring war on higher education and calling professors 'the enemy.' He could have put aside his law degree and still held on to what it taught him about judicial independence and due process. After 2020 the prevailing politics on the right was apocalyptic, vituperative, and very online. Vance, ever skilled at adaptation, went with it all the way. If, as his patron Thiel argued, the country was under the control of a totalitarian, brain-dead left, almost any form of resistance was justified. When Vance argued that 'the culture war is class warfare,' he was giving himself license to stigmatize large groups of Americans and flout the rule of law as long as he did it in the name of an abstraction called the working class. But Vance never got away from elites. He simply exchanged one set of benefactors for another—traded Yale professors and TED audiences and progressive Silicon Valley CEOs for the money and influence that came with Peter Thiel, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. One elite elevated him to justify their contempt for the working class; the other championed him in order to burn down the first. Vance is interesting not only because he changed camps and was talented enough to thrive in both, but because the camps themselves, out of the lesser sin of decadence or the greater sin of nihilism, have so little to offer the country. Vance transformed himself into the fullest incarnation of the Trump reaction—fuller than Trump himself, because Vance is more intelligent and disciplined, less likely to wander and stop making sense. He willed this change on himself because he had a lot to atone for and he was in a hurry. It won him Trump's blessing in 2022 in a U.S. Senate race that Vance was losing, which gave him the Republican nomination and the election, leading to his choice as vice president in 2024, which could make him Trump's 44-year-old successor in 2028. Vance's political transformation is so complete that it's also physical. In the film adaptation of the Vance novel, imagine a scene in which the protagonist's features in 2016 dissolve into a very different face circa 2025. The round cheeks and pudgy chin are now hidden by the growth of a Trump Jr. beard. The blue eyes, no longer boyish, are flatter, and they smile less. And the voice, which used to have an almost apologetic tone, as if he wasn't sure of his right to hold the stage, now carries a constant edge, a kind of taunt. He's more handsome but less appealing, and the loss of appeal comes from the fact that, like the movement that now runs the country, he's animated by what he hates. Like Trump, Vance shows no interest in governing on behalf of anyone outside MAGA. But the various phases of his life story make him—and him alone—the embodiment of all the movement's parts. In a speech in March at a business conference, he called himself a 'proud member of both tribes' of the ruling coalition—meaning of the populists like Steve Bannon, and of the techno-futurists like Elon Musk. He discounted the likelihood that they'll fall out, and he insisted that innovations such as artificial intelligence will benefit ordinary Americans, because—despite the evidence of the past half century—'it's technology that increases the value of labor.' MAGA can't breathe without an enemy, and workers and innovators have 'the same enemy': the government. But MAGA is now the government, and the contradictions between its populists and its oligarchs are obvious. Vance's transformation has another advantage besides the obvious one for his political prospects. When he grins slyly and says, 'I'm gonna get in trouble for this' before launching an attack on some despised group, you can feel him shucking off constraints that he's had to impose on himself since that recruitment dinner at Yale—or even earlier, since he was a boy in Middletown surviving the violence of adults. This more aggressive Vance has drawn closer to that hillbilly culture he long ago escaped. The vice president of the United States doesn't let a challenge to his honor pass. He's quick to anger, ready with a jibe, picks fights on social media, and brandishes insults such as 'moralistic garbage' and 'smug, self-assured bullshit.' He divides the world into kinfolk and enemies, with steadfast loyalty for those in the first category and suspicion or hostility for the great majority consigned to the second. He justifies every cruel policy, blatant falsehood, and constitutional breach by aligning himself with the unfairly treated people he grew up with, whether or not his administration is doing them any actual good. His idea of American identity has gone hard and narrow—not the encompassing creed of the founding documents, but the Appalachian dirt of the graveyard where his ancestors lie buried. To succeed in the world of elites, Vance had to let himself be civilized, at a psychological cost. When that world no longer offered what he wanted, he found a new world of different elites. They lifted him to unimagined heights of power, and at the same time they brought him full circle, to a return of the repressed.
