Former President Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate has led to a surge in sales for “Hillbilly Elegy,” his best-selling memoir that came out in 2016
All the people I can think of who might buy that book now aren’t exactly the type that, you know, read.
Is this yet another case of laundering campaign money via ghostwritten Republican books that exist only to be bought in bulk with said campaign money and given out as gifts at events? Because that’s what it seems like.
Historian Bob Hutton wrote in Jacobin that Vance’s argument relied on circular logic and eugenics, ignored existing scholarship on Appalachian poverty, and was “primarily a work of self-congratulation.” Sarah Smarsh with The Guardian noted that “most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia” and called into question Vance’s generalizations about the white working class from his personal upbringing.
All the people I can think of who might buy that book now aren’t exactly the type that, you know, read.
Is this yet another case of laundering campaign money via ghostwritten Republican books that exist only to be bought in bulk with said campaign money and given out as gifts at events? Because that’s what it seems like.
exactly what i was thinking, too