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"White Trash" Historian Nancy Isenberg on J.D. Vance
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"White Trash" Historian Nancy Isenberg on J.D. Vance, "Hillbilly Elegy" & Class in America
Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de... American historian and the author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg, calls Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance a peddler of the "self-made man myth." Isenberg criticizes Hilbilly Elegy, the memoir that propelled him to fame, as a deceptive way of selling this myth and the conservative politics it comes with. "Much of what his memoir says tells us nothing about real class conditions," Isenberg says, pointing to her own historical and sociological research on the rural poor in the United States.
Democracy Now!As Donald Trump selected Ohio Senator J.D. Vance to be his vice-presidential candidate Monday, we look at the record of the 39-year-old political rookie, who rose to fame after writing the memoir Hillbilly Elegy and who once compared Trump to Hitler and called him unfit for the presidency. He was elected to the Senate in 2022 with backing from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, and he has since embraced the MAGA movement and become one of Trump’s most loyal supporters. For more on Vance’s rise and his appeal to the Republican base, we go to Pikeville, Kentucky, to speak with famed sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who has been speaking with Trump supporters for her forthcoming book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, which is a follow-up to her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, described as “a Rosetta stone” for understanding the rise of Donald Trump.
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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