The news that Peter Thiel-funded and Trump-endorsed JD Vance won the Republican primary for Senate in Ohio invited me to revisit one of my favorite denunciations of his terrible memoir.

My friend Martin McClellan, writing in The Seattle Review of Books:

There are two kinds of poor people, JD Vance informs us. The first is the righteous poor — people who killed the cow to tan the leather to cobble the boots to add the straps by which to pull themselves up. His grandparents, for example. They were imperfect, but struggled, and their sense of self-reliance and gumption redeemed their (wholly excusable) lesser points. Namely, that they were “scary hillbillies” whose lineage traced back to the infamous Hatfields.

The other is type of poor person is the good-for-nothing, welfare-abusing, no-direction, lazy ungrateful poor. They don’t pull themselves up, they lie about their income to buy cellphones with welfare dollars, and hustle penny-stakes by reselling those illicit items not covered by the moral authority of food stamps. They’d rather hustle than work. They watch big TVs and isolate themselves from good Americans of good standing who, by nature of their ethical centers, only want to rise.

Here are your two poor Americas. Now, reader of Hillbilly Elegy, which do you have empathy for?

It was so obvious from the moment Vance sleazed on the scene that the story he spun was an artless grift, that his book wasn’t so much a decoding of forgotten America but a justification for Trumpian white grievance. And then Ron Howard made a movie out of that schlock because so-called liberals need to believe themselves to be better angels.

Vance, who has only leaned further into the culture wars and embraced the demagogue he once rightly called an “idiot” before obsequiously begging for his endorsement, will likely become a U.S. Senator because it was more important to pretend he had something to say than to defend against what he truly believes.