Part Two: The Messed-Up Reality of J.D. Vance
By Sensible Sue
When you hear the name J.D. Vance, you might recall the bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”, that rags-to-riches fairy tale of a boy from the hollers who made it out, polished his boots, and now lectures the rest of us on pulling ourselves up. But behind that neatly packaged American dream story lies something far messier, and far more revealing; especially for anyone who actually lives at the margins of power.
Yes, Vance grew up amid chaos, addiction, volatility, and poverty in Middletown, Ohio. His mother, gripped by addiction, once threatened to kill both herself and her son while speeding down the highway. He saw first-hand what the opioid crisis looked like long before it became a headline. In 2016, that pain turned into profit. “Hillbilly Elegy” hit the shelves and catapulted him into the national spotlight. The media dubbed him “the voice of the forgotten white working class,” and suddenly Vance was every political talk show’s favorite blue-collar confessor. According to The New Yorker, and Britannica, the book became Vance’s golden ticket to political relevance and cultural credibility.
But while the story reads like a survival epic, the message it pushed was far more problematic: “If I made it, so can you.”. Forget structural barriers, forget systemic inequities: success is simply a matter of personal grit. That bootstrap gospel became his brand, and it has since been used as a convenient talking point by those who’d rather moralize poverty than fix it.
The truth is, nobody gets to Yale Law and a Senate seat on sheer grit alone. After high school, Vance joined the Marines and served as a combat correspondent in Iraq. Later, he attended Ohio State University, and with the help of scholarships and the GI Bill, he went on to Yale Law School. The climb was real, but so were the ladders. Mentorships, institutional support, and elite networks were essential to his ascent. Yet in his retelling of his story, those lifelines have become footnotes. His speeches rarely mention the structural boosts that enabled him to “pull himself up.” That’s how the myth sustains itself, by Vance editing out the context that made his success possible.
After Yale, J.D. Vance didn’t return home to rebuild Middletown’s factories. Instead, he headed for Silicon Valley and joined Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, he later co-founded his own investment firm in Cincinnati. He launched a nonprofit called “Our Ohio Renewal”, meant to tackle addiction and education reform. The idea was noble. The follow-through? Not so much. The organization quietly folded within a few years, and with it went the promise of reform. The man who had written so passionately about the decline of the working class quickly pivoted to venture capital. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when your entire persona rests on being one of “the forgotten.” Working-class people rarely get Thiel-funded startups. Funny how that works.
Early in his public life, Vance despised Donald Trump. He called him “America’s Hitler” in private and described his appeal as “cultural heroin.” But when political winds shifted, so did he. In 2022, Trump endorsed Vance’s Senate campaign, and suddenly, the critic became the disciple. The same man who warned about populist extremism now mimicked it, publicly apologizing for ever doubting his political messiah. That about-face wasn’t subtle either, it was a full-blown rebranding. And it paid off. Vance won his Senate seat and became a darling of the MAGA machine. Two years later, Trump tapped him as his vice-presidential running mate, completing a political transformation that only ambition could explain. And now, with his flip flopping and all, Vance is the Vice President of the United States.
His Senate campaign leaned hard on “Hillbilly Elegy”, presenting him as a living embodiment of the American comeback story. But his donor base told another story, one filled with Silicon Valley money and billionaire backing. The same man who railed against the coastal elite was financed by it. When Trump selected him as his running mate, the press called it “the rise of the Hillbilly Elegy Republican.”, Thus making the narrative and the myth official.
With power came a new persona: Vance the culture warrior. He began railing against “childless cat-ladies” and warning that women prioritizing careers over motherhood were “walking a path to misery.” He embraced an anti-feminist, anti-liberal vision that positioned “family” as a weapon rather than a value. When young conservatives were caught sharing racist and antisemitic memes in group chats, Vance brushed it off as “boys being boys.” That’s an interesting level of forgiveness from a man who built his brand on personal responsibility. The empathy that once filled his memoir seemed to have evaporated, replaced by grievance and opportunism.
As his political stature grew, so did his ideological rigidity. He embraced what’s been dubbed “post-liberalism”, a worldview that rejects abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and global alliances. He’s described America’s support for Ukraine as “a waste of resources,” and he’s argued that the West’s decline is rooted in its moral decay, not its inequity. The Marine-turned-Yale-grad now speaks the language of nationalist resentment, and fluent in it he is. The rancic verbiage rolls off his tongue like the waves roll across the seas, effortlessly, seamlessly.
The media helped build the Vance myth, then tried to deconstruct it. Outlets like The New Yorker and The Guardian highlighted the contradictions: a man raised by chaos but funded by billionaires, a one-time critic of Trumpism turned its loudest echo. Yet the narrative persisted, Vance was and still is, the voice of the working class who somehow hasn’t lived like them for a very long time. The press loves a redemption story. It’s easier to sell one man’s rise than to confront the uncomfortable truth that most people born into his world never get out of the despair and the poverty they were born into.
PBS NewsHour and other fact-checkers have noted the glaring inconsistencies in Vance’ story; particularly the way he downplays the very support systems that made his rise possible. The scholarships, the federal benefits, the Ivy League mentorships, all of the mechanisms of support that pulled Vance out of the depths of despair and poverty, have been ever so carefully and conveniently minimized. The man who now rails against “government handouts” once benefited from them. That’s not villainy. It’s hypocrisy dressed up as humility.
For immigrants, underrepresented groups, and anyone ever told to “just work harder,” the J.D. Vance’s story is a cautionary tale. It’s about how power rewrites pain. How the media packages poverty into morality plays. How one person’s escape becomes an excuse to ignore everyone else who has been left behind. When one man’s memoir becomes political gospel, we should all be asking: who profits from that story? Because behind every neatly tied bootstrap, there’s usually a hand pulling the string, and it’s rarely the people at the bottom.
J.D. Vance’s life is undeniably dramatic, but it’s also instructive. It reveals how American politics rewards personal mythology over public accountability. He went from being a child of dysfunction to a bestselling author, a Marine, a Yale Law graduate, a venture capitalist, a senator, and now the Vice President of the United States. That’s quite the résumé. But Vance’s journey also exposes something deeper; when a man builds his brand on being self-made” and then uses that brand to cut off the very ladders he climbed, that’s not a hero’s journey. That’s narrative laundering. The real messed-up reality of J.D. Vance isn’t where he came from. It’s what he’s done with the story since he got out.
