Answering Kennedy’s Call
Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as Vice-President means the chaos of Trump’s first administration will continue on steroids, as Trump will have a VP who will assist him in continuing to tear down one institution after another that protects ordinary Americans.
JD Vance looked down on working class whites he grew up among when he wrote his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness,” as cited by Paul Krugman in a recent NYTimes Op-ed.
“We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents,” he said. But now that he’s the Republican Vice President candidate, those lazy males have suddenly become victims of the surge of illegal immigrants that are “poisoning the blood of Americans”, in Trump’s words, and taking their jobs Vance has said in numerous speeches and interviews.
But that’s not the case. The unemployment rate of adult white males is just 4 percent, below the current national unemployment rate, said Krugman, a Nobel prize winner in economics.
As an example of the chaos during his first administration when Trump was taking babies away from immigrant mothers and attempting to build a wall, I wrote this 2017 Huffington Post piece on how his immigration policies will damage the US economy.
“For most of the past half-century, adults in the U.S. Baby Boom generation – those born after World War II and before 1965 – have been the main driver of the nation’s expanding workforce, reports the PEW Research Center. But as this large generation heads into retirement, the increase in the potential labor force will slow markedly, and immigrants will play the primary role in the future growth of the working-age population (though they will remain a minority of it).
“The stakes are enormous if Republicans succeed in removing most of the estimated 11 million undocumented worker (only half of which are from Mexico and the Latin countries), and cut legal immigration in half, as they have promised to do. Economic growth will plummet, since it is mainly based on growth of the working age population, as well as labor productivity, which has also fallen since 2000,” I wrote then.
It is one more example of the Bully Mentality I’ve been writing about ad nauseum that is particular to the Republican Party—the bullying behavior of the strongest preying on the weakest that has made citizens of the red states they control the poorest.
How much of a bully is JD Vance? He is now mimicking Donald Trump’s behavior. In an interview with ABC News "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos, Vance doubled down on his views of the 2020 election, saying the results shouldn't have been immediately certified, and he went on to suggest Trump should ignore "illegitimate" U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
"If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there," he continued. "That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that's what we should have done."
It is returning to the Law of the Jungle, the Darwinian struggle where the fittest survive and prosper that Donald Trump now with the assistance of his Vice Presidential candidate will return America to.
It is monumental hypocrisy of a man from Kentucky who grew up among the very people he has made into victims, a red state that has suffered so much from what is now the official policy of Donald Trump’s party.
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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