"[W]hile emptying the pockets of working people, the #DOGE crew are lining their own. Even as #Musk claimed that DOGE was slashing government spending, his own firms received billions in government contracts."

#SocialSecurity Is Not a Ponzi Scheme

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/social-security-is-not-a-ponzi-scheme/
#USpol #USpolitics #neoliberalism #cronyism #CronyCapitalism #PoorBashing #inequality #DOGEbags #MAGA #MoveFastAndLootThings

"The narrator of #HillbillyElegy doesn’t sound like someone who’s intending to run for office – otherwise, presumably, #Vance would have cut all those sentences about the laziness of poor white people and added some about being called to public service. [..] The billionaire investor #PeterThiel [..] doesn’t appear in the book, though he’s listed in the acknowledgments."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/deborah-friedell/short-cuts

#JDVance #2024election #USpol #USpolitics #GOP #NewRight #bootstrapism #PoorBashing #Trump

#books

Deborah Friedell · Short Cuts: Reading J.D. Vance

The narrator of Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t sound like someone who’s intending to run for office – otherwise,...

London Review of Books

"#Vance’s willingness to radically revise and overwrite the lessons of his life story is by now a well-documented reflex; what’s more pivotal to his odyssey through public life is the voyeuristic liberal fascination with the tale of heroic uplift he spun in his reputation-making memoir."

#ChrisLehmann : How the Liberal #Media Gave Us #JDVance

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jd-vance-cnn-liberal-media/
#2024election #USpol #USpolitics #USmedia #bootstrapism #PoorBashing #Appalachia #poverty #prolowashing #HillbillyElegy #books

The Liberal Media Gave Us JD Vance

The months-long romance between Vance and an easily duped press in 2016 led directly to his sordid political rise.

The Nation

"So eager were critics and pundits to find an apologist for the White working class who was not blatantly racist that they overlooked #Vance’s fatuousness, his willingness to play up his hokeyness for the benefit of his liberal audience and the ultimate banality of his message."

#BeccaRothfeld on how #JDVance gulled liberals about #Appalachia with #HillbillyElegy, and on his Faustian bargain with Trumpism

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/07/23/hillbilly-elegy-jd-vance-vice-president-nominee-review/
#USpol #USpolitics #bootstrapism #PoorBashing #poverty #books

‘Hillbilly Elegy’ and J.D. Vance’s art of having it both ways

In his memoir and for some time after, Vance told liberals what they wanted to hear — but then he wanted power.

The Washington Post

"Vance’s argument that white rural poverty stemmed from a culture of laziness and welfare dependency simply took age-old racialized tropes about Black and brown people and redirected them to poor whites."

#DavidAustinWalsh on establishment liberals' early boosting and prolowashing of #JDVance

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/liberals-are-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-j-d-vance/
#2024election #GOP #USpolitics #USpol #FarRight #NewRight #bootstrapism #PoorBashing

Liberals Are to Blame for the Rise of J. D. Vance - Boston Review

Their long embrace of “responsible conservatives” has always been dangerous.

Boston Review
The Mythical Whiteness of Trump Country - Boston Review

J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has been held up as a guidebook for understanding the 2016 election, but it’s rooted in a dangerous myth.

Boston Review