See some excerpts:

So, about that con: Vance, now the junior senator from Ohio, talks a lot about his hardscrabble roots. But people should read what he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” which shows startling contempt for the people he grew up with but who, unlike him, didn’t escape small-town poverty. And people should also be aware that while his convention speech on Wednesday denounced “Wall Street barons,” his rise has to a large extent been orchestrated by a group of tech billionaires; he’s a protégé of Peter Thiel.

“Hillbilly Elegy” was part personal memoir, part social commentary and, to be fair, it responded to a real issue. Over the past couple of generations, something has gone very wrong in much of rural and small-town America. There has been a sharp rise in the fraction of men in their prime working years without jobs, notably in the eastern part of the American heartland. Social problems have proliferated; as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented, there has been a surge in “deaths of despair,” which they defined as deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide.

J.D. Vance Puts the Con in Conservatism

Opinion | J.D. Vance Puts the Con in Conservatism

Sincerely,