JD Vance Catch-all | “we have to destroy the universities in this country”

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The Story That “Hillbilly Elegy” Doesn’t Tell

Like many memoirs, J. D. Vance’s book misses a few details, some of which complicate the story upon which he has based much of his politics.
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Pretty interesting and nuanced fact-check of JD Vance’s version of his grandparents marriage, which he says is the basis of his strenuous objection to divorce.

Turns out, according to public records, his grandparents were in divorce proceedings twice (which goes unmentioned in his book — maybe he was unaware since it happened before he was born), and the second time, in 1981, resulting in a legal separation with alimony and everything but without dissolving their marriage. They lived apart after that, though still spent time together (most of their time per Vance).

He also seems to have misrepresented the help they got moving to Ohio and support after they got there from his grandfather’s mom and step-father, who already lived there. Again, though, this could be a function of time. He was born after his grandparents permanently legally separated and so it is not surprising that by then his grandmother didn’t get along with her mother-in-law in his memory (if she ever really did).

I’ve been aware for some time of how different my grandparents as I knew them were from the lives I later learned they lived before I was born and before my parents were born. It’s almost like JD Vance didn’t investigate his grandparent’s lives beyond how he remembered them, which is his right, but given that he wants to impose his new moral code on Americans based on his version of their lives and his adopted religion (his grandparents were Christian but not Catholic), it bears further consideration whether he is correctly representing the marital history that he describes as formative to his world view.
 
“I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” JD Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview. “Replace them with our people, and when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
 
There’s no way his nice white shirt makes it through the eating process unscathed.
 
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