GOP vice presidential nominee shocks CNN interviewer

Just about every time J.D. Vance — the most unpopular vice presidential nominee in American history — opens his mouth, he ignites a firestorm of criticism and likely shaves another point off the Republican presidential ticket’s polling numbers.

On Sunday, in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance admitted that he and Donald Trump made up a baseless and racist story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually has to pay attention to the suffering of American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” said Vance, a U.S. Senator representing Ohio.

Ironically, Vance’s attempt to point out imagined “suffering” has led to actual suffering by his own constituents.

  • @schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    8•3 months ago

    Didn’t he write a book about his life growing up, and the suffering of the American people near him? And then leverage that into a political career?

    Wonder how much bullshit was in there, too. (If you haven’t, the answer is “pretty much most of it”.)

    • Flying Squid
      7•3 months ago

      Not near him. In Appalachia, where he did not grow up.

      He also used a ton of insulting stereotypes about Appalachians.

      I read it as soon as it came out, even before it had become just a huge book, because I was raised really close to where his grandparents are from. And as soon as I read it, my antenna’s going up all over the place, because we’re not even three or four pages in and he’s already generalizing. For instance, there’s a scene where he talks about his uncles, who are these drunks who fight everybody and they beat their wives, and then he calls them the embodiment of the Appalachian man. Well, as an Appalachian man, that’s deeply troubling to me, because that doesn’t embody Appalachian masculinity as I know it. It does embody the stereotypes of Appalachian masculinity over the last 150 years of media. And that’s sort of what I mean. It just sort of presses the buttons that are already there and made people feel really satisfied, in that it’s sort of like, “Oh, well, I knew this all along, and now somebody is solidifying it for me.”

      https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/06/jd-vance-book-dangerous-00030374

      (That’s from an academic who studies Appalachian culture, incidentally)

      • @schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        2•3 months ago

        Interesting read, thanks.

        I’ve grown cynical and assume any hard luck life “memoir” is bullshit and propaganda for whatever political slant the author wants to use other people (or at least the socially accepted stereotype of) to try to justify so I skipped reading it.

        Sounds like I didn’t miss much.