By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I come from a part of the country where people have become accustomed to getting played by elitist outsiders with name brand suitcases packed full of empty promises. Somewhere between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where the Rust Belt fades into Amish Country, you’ll find my bitter heart surrounded by junked cars and haunted steeples. Gummo Country, I often half-jokingly refer to it as, after Harmony Korine’s modern Vuadville arthouse masterpiece. Not exactly the easiest place to grow up stuck between genders but I don’t think I could breathe anywhere else.

Say what you will about my neighbors, I often do, but much like me, they are a people accustomed to getting fucked over and tired of putting up with the experience. These are the people who lost their jobs to NAFTA, lost their sons to bullshit wars in the Middle East, and lost pretty much everything else to Oxycontin. This is MAGA country, but these people didn’t vote for Donald Trump because they’re racist or sexist or xenophobic.

These people don’t vote for Republicans or Democrats. In fact, they don’t really vote for anyone at all. They vote against whichever Beltway rapist was the last one to fuck them up the ass without even spitting on their dick and Trump was just shrewd enough to get this. In 2016, that Wall Street con artist won over the Rust Belt by taking a ball bat to both of the partisan dynasties that fattened themselves more than most off of pillaging the holler, first the Bush Cartel in the primaries and then the Clintons under the big top.

Don’t get me wrong, many of my neighbors are hardcore bigots but they’re not fascists and they’re not imbeciles. They were well aware that Trump is a belligerent bologna salesman, but they cast their vote for that cunt like casting a brick through the White House window. You see, dearest motherfuckers, for Gummo Country, voting Trump was an act of revenge. But the results were more or less the same old song. The jobs didn’t come back from China, the Middle East kept on burning, and opioid addiction continued to provide the holler with its only growth industry aside from the local penitentiaries that it feeds.

But Donald Trump is a repeat offender who knows a good con when he sees one. Being seen seeing the forgotten Americans in these hills allowed him to hotwire the Electoral College once before and now he seems to think he can pull off this grift just one more time with a little help from “one of us” in his VP slot.

If you ask either side of the partisan divide who JD Vance is, political gripes aside, they are both likely to tell you the same story. The story of the son of Appalachian junkies who pulled himself up by the bootstraps and made something of his life, rising above the mud to become an inspiration to hillbillies and rednecks everywhere. A war hero and bestselling author turned working class populist crusader, storming the Senate and putting America, our America, first. There is just one problem with this narrative but it’s a pretty big one. It’s about 90% bullshit.

JD Vance is actually a middle-class Midwestern suburbanite raised by Appalachian grandparents on the outskirts of Cincinatti. His parents were dicks but his interactions with actual hillbillies growing up seem to be limited to random urchins he bumped into during part time jobs on the bad side of town. Vance spent his time in the Marines avoiding any real combat as a glorified PR rep for the public affairs section of the Aircraft Wing where he likely picked up the bullshitting skills that he would polish as the editor of the prestigious Yale Law Journal.

Vance wrote his bestselling tearjerker, Hillbilly Elegy, on the suggestion of one of his professors, Amy Chua, who used her fame as the bestselling child abuse apologist behind Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to get her pupil the New York Times Review of Books treatment right out of the gates. By the time Hillbilly Elegy hit the shelves, Vance was already living the high life in San Francisco, working as a corporate lawyer for Big Tech goons like AOL’s Steve Case and PayPal’s Peter Thiel.

The latter oligarch would bankroll JD’s 2022 Senate campaign to the tune of $13 million dollars, and it was during this telltale campaign that Vance shed his previous visage as a neocon Never Trumper like a serpent and embraced his new drag as a MAGA GI Joe, promising to put America first and use the full weight of the Federal Government to annihilate the scourge of transgenderism. Too put a long, gross story short; JD Vance is no Hillbilly hero. At best he’s a Redneck Uncle Tom, using his questionable heritage to fill his pockets with taxpayer dollars while he grows the government to lethal levels on culture war bullshit and shifts military industrial fun bucks from Ukraine to Israel.

Donald Trump picked JD Vance for his wingman for the same reason that Joe Biden picked another fraudulent representative of a fucked-over underclass for his VP. It’s a diversity hire that crassly tokenizes a marginalized section of the electoral map that another Northeastern country club racist needs to win. But much like Kamala the Cop, JD Vance’s most heinous crime isn’t simply pandering to poor people, it’s actively stoking the bigotry that keeps them desperate enough to vote for thuggish clowns like Trump.

Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made JD Vance a darling of the same liberal media that he now pretends to hate, is not a memoir about overcoming adversity. It is an openly elitist attack on the kind of people that I grew up with and Vance didn’t. Vance uses his deadbeat parents like hillbilly scarecrows and blames the woes of systemic disenfranchisement not on Wall Street poachers or Washington warmongers but on the very culture of the impoverished themselves, deriding rural rebellion against elitism as the “regressive” byproduct of a Celtic heritage that treats “poverty as the family tradition.”

JD’s suggested solution to our backwards backwoods ways is to escape our “socially isolated” environment and join the more mainstream conservative class of Ivy League corporate creeps who rob us blind with big government handouts in the city.

After all, it worked for JD Vance. Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller among upper-class liberal literati during the election season of 2016 for a reason. Every bougie, pearl-clutching, Beltway insider was looking for some way to explain how the Bush’s and Clinton’s lost control of their dupes in cousin-fucker country to a reality television shock jock and JD was their man, an Appalachian pedigreed deplorable-whisperer who could tell elitist fuckups from Bill Kristol to Wolf Blitzer that it wasn’t their fault that their abused pet electorate bit them. We were just born rabid.

And maybe he’s right. I may have spent my teens cursing redneck jocks for bashing me, but I stayed in this corner of the country for a reason. For all the bigotry that my neighbors all-too-often fall prey to, these people are still my people, and their culture makes sense to a genderfuck anarchist like me because it is one defined by resistance to mainstream American society. Whether you want to call them rednecks, hillbillies, or trailer trash, your average lower class rural white person hates war, taxes, sobriety, cops, and wage slavery every bit as much as your average unassimilated Queer or inner-city person of color. In fact, your average lower class rural white person isn’t really that white at all.

Most of our ancestors came to this country fleeing ethnic violence from the Celtic regions of the British Isles to work the farms and mines of Anglo-Saxon Protestants who considered us to be about as despicable as the Black folk toiling beside us. White wasn’t even a thing in this country until Celtic paupers and Black servants rose up together against our shared oppressors during Bacon’s Rebellion. Even then, most of us had to earn our white privilege the same way JD Vance earned his way into Washington, by assimilating to polite WASP culture and proving ourselves capable of slaughtering darker poor people.

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