This is an IST public service announcement (PSA)……

Since Trump named JD Vance his running mate last week the author’s book has been flying off the shelves both on-line and brick and mortar bookstores.

Since I refuse to waste money on a book written by a racist blowhard I have to depend on other sources for the review.

After extensive research I found a review that might help any fence sitters decide whether this guy has a place in our nation’s leadership.

I’m no fan of Hillbilly Elegy, the 2020 movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, but when I picked up the book it’s based on recently, in light of rumors that its author, J.D. Vance, would be Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, I expected it to feel more substantive than its screen adaptation.

At one time, liberal and conservative centrists alike hailed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir of making it out of rural, poverty-stricken Appalachia, transforming himself from a tempestuous teen into a successful Yale law school grad.

Yet years on, Vance has undergone a transformation of a different sort, remolding himself from a fairly moderate professed conservative who once compared Trump to Hitler and wrote with disdain about the outer edges of the party into a would-be authoritarian.

That’s not to say Vance doesn’t have some nuanced and even appealing positions. His populist economic instincts are a running theme of Elegy, and today he makes deals across the aisle with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But to understand his larger worldview, you have to look past his economic ideas to his social ideas — and to what Vance actually displays about himself throughout the book.

Perhaps readers in 2016 were eager to look past the book’s highly loaded subtext and overt classism, as the promise of a sympathetic conservative who could unlock Trumplandia for liberals was just too appealing. It also seems likely that readers loved the book because it confirmed all of the negative stereotypes they already held about country hicks. As a read on Vance himself, though, in the context of his subsequent embrace of Trump and far-right ideology, Hillbilly Elegy paints a portrait of a man obsessed with status — and brimming with contempt for just about everyone he meets.

https://www.vox.com/culture/360909/jd-vance-how-true-is-hillbilly-elegy-classism

Nothing about this ‘person’ would lead me to vote for him or any party that would have him as second to the presidential candidate.

I even posted a piece written by someone who knows the man’s story…..

Will The Real JD Vance Stand Up?

Paul Krugman put it right….”this is the man that put ‘con’ in conservatism”.

I hope this was helpful in some small way.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”