Here Comes the Appalachian Lore Hustler

Let them fight!

J.D. Vance (right) portrayed in Hillbilly Elegy, a movie about a venture capitalist from Ohio lying about his Appalachian roots.

The Republican Primary to replace the retiring Rob Portman already features Josh Mandel and Jane Timken in a fight to see which one can suck Donald Trump’s three-inch penis harder in attempt to win his coveted endorsement.

Timken and Mandel are both awful in their own ways. Timken is a Harvard-educated lawyer who married into money and will attempt to put a Suburban Mom face on her atrocious policies that will funnel more money into the coffers of corporations and their executives. Josh Mandel is an aggrieved racist sperm with no actual policy ideas and for whom no lie is too big if he thinks it will finally get him into the Senate.

I figured this would be the 15-month cage match would be entertaining albeit terrifying glimpse into the id of the average Ohio voter. Maybe Cleveland investment banker Bob Gibbs would join the fracas and spend millions of dollars to finish third?

But no, yesterday The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that venture capitalist J.D. Vance would likely enter the contest after receiving a $10 million payment from Peter Thiel into a SuperPAC devoted to backing him for Senate.

It’s cool to live in a country where a Supreme Court of shitty old people decided that money equals speech, so now a billionaire like Peter Thiel, a PayPal Mafia fink who thinks women’s suffrage was a mistake and lawless floating nations are a good way to get around business regulations, can jet around the country looking to elevate his minions into the already reactionary Senate. Thankfully for us, he seems bad at picking his ponies.

From Theodore Schleifer of vox.com:

Vance is the latest Thiel ally to start testing the waters, thanks in part to the expected backing from the Silicon Valley billionaire. One of Thiel’s closest aides, Blake Masters, considered running for the US Senate in Arizona in the last cycle and ultimately decided against it. But Masters once again is reportedly weighing a Senate bid in the state in the 2022 cycle.

And last year, Thiel focused his political energy on supporting Kris Kobach, the immigration hardliner who failed to win a GOP Senate primary in the state of Kansas. Thiel ended up donating over $2 million to a group financing Kobach’s bid.

That was more than Thiel spent on behalf of his previous big political bet, Trump. Thiel was one of the only prominent Silicon Valley leaders to publicly back Donald Trump when he ran for president in 2016, contributing a little over $1 million to a super PAC that backed his bid. But Thiel did not cut a check to Trump or any Trump-backing groups during Trump’s reelection campaign and is increasingly looking past him.

J.D. Vance rose to fame by publishing Hillbilly Elegy, which is impressive because he lived in Middletown, a town 35 miles north of Cincinnati. Of course in America’s psychotic political discourse, the book got presented as some searing analysis into whats plaguing Appalachia and how most of its problems can be solved by pulling yourself up by your boot straps when you sell a book of misrepresentations to Netflix.

You might think Vance seeing his mother struggle with poverty and substance addiction might make him realize how his life might be different if he didn’t have the stability of his grandparents to fall back on. You might even assume he would be sympathetic to an expanded social safety net or government spending to help kids stuck in his situation that don’t have grandparents like he did.

But no! Much like how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has spent his life attacking the socialized medicine that produced the polio vaccine that saved his life, Vance’s politics look to pull the ladder up behind him. Fuck those kids, he says. They’re their meemaw’s problem, not mine.

A man who did not get bullied enough in school.

Vance is a self-identified nationalist who all but posted the 14 words in a since-deleted tweet back in November:

"As a parent of young children and a nationalist who worries about America's low fertility I can say with confidence that daylight savings time reduces fertility by at least 10 percent.”

To be clear, Vance is talking about the white fertility rate. And again, he offers no introspection why fertility rates have dropped as he and his rich cronies spent the last four decades attacking the New Deal and stacking the American government in their favor and what that has done to the price of raising a kid.

His tweeting has only gotten worse in recent months as he’s inched closer to declaring his Senate campaign:

J.D. Vance @JDVance1

We should eliminate the university degree requirement from the officer corps. It’s dumb to make people get a BA before becoming officers anyway, and it may just make the military leadership less woke.

Ah, yes, the famously woke bastion that is West Point, the sexual assault factory that booted a student for wearing a Ché Guevera shirt to his graduation. When I think of woke, I definitely think of some four-star general overseeing a drone assassination program in some far-flung region of the world to maintain the military-industrial complex’s profit margins or “our freedoms” as they’re colloquially known in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Vance is an Ivy League-educated multimillionaire venture capitalist who is going to use the poverty of his grandparents to cloak himself in the schtick of an everyman. It’s a trick powerful politicians love to do, presenting themselves as “the son of a milkman and bar maid” or whatever — as if their parents’ humble occupations are who they are today.

I have no idea who emerges from this primary. Mandel leads in the polls but that’s only because he’s a known entity as a former Treasurer and twice-failed Senate candidate. I do know thanks to Ohio’s lack of ranked choice voting, we’re looking at a scenario where 33% of Republican primary voters could foist Vance, Timken or Mandel on the rest of us. It honestly could come down to who Trump endorses, because the hogs of this state can’t get enough of the former criminal president who smears bronzer on his face every morning before eating a well-balanced McDonald’s breakfast with a Coke.

Republican-on-Republican violence is one of my favorite genres of pornography. I can’t wait to watch these wealthy gremlins to each other to shreds while debasing themselves to curry favor with Trump, as if they’re running to represent him and not millions of Ohioans.

None of them seem to have any platform that will improve the lives of everyday people other than corporate tax cuts and whining about “cancel culture” or whatever other nonsense they’ve raised to feed into their voters’ fears about America’s changing demographics.

The hilarity will end as soon as a winner is declared and it becomes extremely possible that one of these three ghouls could become one of the most powerful politicians in the country.

Save us, Dr. Amy Acton, you’re our only hope.

THOSE WMDs. U.S. Special Forces are almost everywhere… At 93, she waged war on JPMorgan — and her own grandsons… Private schools have become obscene… Dear Fuck-Up: Must I keep watching my friend self-sabotage?… What happened to pick-up trucks?