Hillbilly Elegy director Ron Howard has taken a swipe at JD Vance, suggesting that Donald Trump’s Republican running mate has “changed” since he first met him.
Earlier this year, Vance was selected to be Trump’s possible vice president in the 2024 US presidential election race – but before his political career, he was known for being the author of memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which was later adapted into a Netflix film of the same name.
Since being announced as Trump’s running mate, Vance has been criticised for comments that saw him refer to women, such as Trump’s presidential rival Kamala Harris, as “childless cat ladies”. This prompted swift backlash and accusations of sexism, with Vance claiming the remarks were made in “sarcasm”.
“When we spoke around the time that I knew him, he was not involved in politics or claimed to be particularly interested. So that was then.”
I have a hard time believing that. Filmed in June 2019, and Vance was elected November 2022, I simply don’t buy that he 180’d that hard just a year or two later. Perhaps Vance did not talk about campaign plans on set, but without question his narrow bigoted views would’ve been made clear. Ultimately, I too am surprised and disappointed, but in Ron Howard for making a movie about this ass.
Look into Vance a bit deeper. He’s no hillbilly. Nor Appalachian. He was born in Middletown Ohio. He went to Yale. He’s latched on to experiences only heard about in stories from his family. Pretending it was something he did. He’s the lowest kind of low.
The thing that f****** got me is he was all read this book and you’ll understand why we respond the way we do. And you go through the entire book waiting for the other shoe to drop or the first shoe to drop.
It goes right from business drying up in Appalachia and drugs moving in, to him trying to scare the s*** out of the poor to hate the foreigners while taking their money and giving it to the corporations who don’t give two f**** about the people.
The book itself is just a grift.
Well I think it’s pretty safe to say that when it comes to conservatism these days. There’s nothing more genuine than being fake.
It’s out front in a local Barnes and Noble in the SF Bay Area.
His grift worked, I think. So many people on the left want to understand the right, that they reward bad behavior and put themselves in positions to be tugged right.
It’s okay to simply reject the book without reading it (or buying it). But here we are. And it’s okay to not watch Fox News and reject their rhetoric without watching it.
It’s is possible to understand the right and not be pulled right.
The people who are pulled, are pulled because they have something in them that resonated with the right’s hate filled ideology.
The ideology isn’t that compelling and the right wing voters are not victims. They are all active participants in the spread of hated.
They see themselves as victims, their ideology is based in their own imagined victimhood. It is foolish to actually except their victimhood, that is their ideology tugging on you.
The people who are pulled, are pulled because they have something in them that resonated with the right’s hate filled ideology.
In my observation portions of conservative ideology may start with a valid premise or fact, but its quickly distorted or outright lied about with all supporting statements resulting in cesspool of vitriol that is today’s conservative ideology. It requires consumers to accept the base premise without the follow-on critical thinking.
One common example I see a lot from them is something like “We don’t have enough money [at this exact second] to fix all the problems that exist”. That is actually a truthful statement. We have lots of problems and fixing them all RIGHT NOW would be monumentally expensive beyond any amount of money we have.
The critical thinker would look at what money we do have, triage the many problems we have begin allocated what we have immediately to the most critical needs. In parallel, new funding sources should be sought to bring more money to bear on the vast number of remaining problems.
Instead the conservative answer is “because we can’t fix ALL the problems RIGHT NOW we should fix NONE of them and give what little money we do have on hand to people that are rich who already have the most money and the fewest problems”.
In parallel, new funding sources should be sought to bring more money to bear on the vast number of remaining problems.
You cannot even bridge this subject with conservatives in my experience. There’s no generating more income to the government through taxes or fees, only “we cannot do this without debt so obviously we need to cut programs”. In their turd of an opinion, raising revenue is never an option when it comes to a debt crisis…even though it’s a patently obvious solution to the “problem”.
Do you buy the books? Do you read their books?
Oh I didn’t buy his book I just read it.
And I’m here to tell people that it’s not worth their time or money. And I bring this up probably to the same 60 people every time just in case someone new happens to see it.
I, however, don’t entirely agree on not watching Fox News. I certainly wouldn’t make it a habit of watching it but their coverage of the DNC was actually pretty enlightening. I was at a local pizza place the pizza is great but the family are of course staunch Republicans. We were stuck in the last booth in the place and I thought oh great I’m going to just have to deal with this s*** until the kids get their fill of pizza. But I occasionally looked up and found that they really had nothing. They bitched and complained about a bunch of stuff that was kind of nitpicky but for all the negative they wanted to sell they didn’t have anything meaningful to say about it. And that said a lot more than the actual CNN coverage of it.
I read a few pages. It was pretty awfully written.
Yeah, there were numerous instances where I had to read for context to understand what they were getting at.
Im around Middletown and people around here hate that asshole vance.
Oh good. I went to high school there and was 50-50 on whether they’d hate his guts or like him because republican
Yeah and for those who aren’t aware, Middletown is in the Dayton-Cincinnati area. It’s not even a little Appalachian, but rather extremely rust belt
His mentor says hillbilly elegy was written to propel him into politics. So I find it hard to believe he wasn’t interested when that was the reason for the book
Yes I find it much more likely that Opie was fed a line into that big gaping Gob of his. By a metro sexual upholstery fetishist who saw an easy mark.
I said same thing not long ago when learned of the fucking movie and saw who directed it. I was sad to think that he was right wing and why would he direct this movie. Also fuck Netflix for funding it.
You’ve never spent time around midwesterners, I see.
Ron was happy to cash a fat Netflix check for his bullshit memoir, now shocked he ignored all the signs Vance was an asshole.
How ron? How? Why wouldn’t a creepy grifter continue to be a creepy grifter
Fuck Ron Howard for making a movie about this guy to begin with
I want to know what Clint
the superior Howard thinks.
Is he smiling in that picture?
Fuck Around: “Sure I’ll take money from this revanchist freak to inflate his reputation before a Senate campaign”
Find Out: “Oh no! He’s leveraged his position to drag the country back to the Dark Ages!”
