J.D. Vance is Trump’s VP pick.
So far I’ve seen Tucker Carlson supporting and Jonah Goldberg opposed, which is 2 votes in favour.
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Started with a book Hillbilly Elegy in 2015
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Which I haven’t read. I have not paid a lot of attention to Vance since before he went pro-Trump.
Anyone have any sense of why he changed? Road to Damascus moment or good old fashioned political expediency?
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Road to Damascus imo
Vance and his wife had a very comfortable life in California, working at prestigious law firms and venture capital. Why give that up and move back to Ohio?
He understands the struggles of the working class especially in Ohio and Kentucky and Appalacia. When Hillbilly Elegy came out and became a success, he was a media darling and was being interviewed by every network and newspaper.
I’m probably projecting too much from my own experience. I wasn’t crazy about Trump in 2016 but I said I’m going to keep an open mind after he won. I actually tried to understand where his supporters were coming from in 2016 and after some research I had a light bulb moment myself.
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Mitt Romney on JD Vance: “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance.”
That’s 3 votes in favour then.
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JD Vance has an interesting position on AI:
Interestingly enough JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was a solid left-wing book in 2016:
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Interesting. I was exposed to Vane’s writing purely through conservative and libertarian sources.
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This raises a whole bunch of red flags for me…Trump is going to clean house? Hahahaha…hardly. (Note to self: you keep forgetting it’s all 4D chess.) Do you (the “universal you”) feel manipulated yet?
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Shakeel likes to exaggerate:
Vance worked for Thiel venture capital firm when he lived in California. Thiel donated to his Senate campaign in 2022. Protege is an overstatement.
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Regardless of intentions, no President can clean house. The bureaucrats cannot be fired.
AI search result:
According to the search results, the President’s authority to fire federal employees is limited. The President can terminate political appointees at their discretion, but this is not the case for career federal employees, also known as competitive service employees, who are appointed under Title 5 of the United States Code.
In order to change the government it requires getting a 2/3 majority in the Senate and a majority in the House and POTUS. Or 2/3 majority in the Senate and the House. And probably control of the Supreme Court, but a truly dominate position would allow taking over the Supreme Court.
All the hoopla about whichever President saving the country is complete propaganda. All it does is help reinforce people’s desire to have a king.
More and more what the Presidents of both parties are doing is acting unilaterally in an unconstitutional manner with executive orders.
Like I said neither party will hold their people accountable. This is easily observable if you look at what the party does when it controls the House, Senate and Presidency. The Democrats don’t tax the rich and the Republicans don’t fix immigration. You can pick whatever major issue the parties say they are for or against and then see what they do when they supposedly get power to do so.
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Here’s an interesting lecture from Russian history about this very dilemma and a prime minister / president, Stolypin, who ended up getting assassinated by his opponents after he tried to reform things within a deep state that opposed him:
You know what happened afterwards - and it was the land reform that led to the victory of Lenin and his Bolsheviks.
The whole TV show is a piece of history well worth watching from start to end.
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Career federal employee!!!
I read an interesting article about this 5 years ago but I can’t find it now!
The author had some interesting ways to circumvent such as relocation outside of DC like the Midwest
Put them in rubber rooms or reassignment centers
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Yes. I was under the impression the Left DIDNT like the book, because of course white people CANT be poor and disadvantaged.
I grew up on (and now live on) a little shelf of Appalachia, the Pocono Plateau. You’re undoubtedly thinking , “The POCONOS? Appalachia? 
. Yes it’s a vacation home area, but, um who do you think puts in the onsite sewage, mows the lawns, removes trees, ploughs snow? That’d be my classmates in elementary school and their children. They do not live in abject poverty like the sharecroppers in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (The interiors and clothing in the movie of Vance’s book are perfect.) But they’re always on the abyss of it. And like all non-wealthy working class young white men in our country, they are disadvantaged. And that was even BEFORE #metoo and DEI.
If anybody on the Left liked this book, I reckon it was just because it put rural white Americans in a bad light. But that isnt its intent, and it’s not how it came off to me because of my lived experience. It’s more like a non-fiction “The Beans of Egypt, Maine”.
I recommend that book and Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”. And I’m glad we have a candidate for national office who has such experience.
As for being anti-Trump, well, most of the party was, back in 2015 when he entered the race.
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There is a lot to be said for putting major FedGov offices in Fairbanks, Alaska. It is nice there at this time of year … except for the mosquitos, of course.
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Of course, I totally agree. I just don’t understand why some people think that Trump can turn this proverbial ship around—even under the best of circumstances—much less by onboarding protégés of swamp creatures like Peter Thiel.
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Palantir is a problematic business. How do you justify that investment?
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From October 27, 2016
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This claim does not have the ring of truth, cute graphic notwithstanding. Vance’s book was promoted by all the usual suspects on the Right, viz.,
N.B.: This is from 2016.
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I suspect we may be seeing 2 different things: books purchased versus book tour promotion events. In my experience, they are usually correllated, but not always. Publishers don’t always have a consistent idea of who’s going to buy a book. And for that matter, probably few of us here watch much lefty media that might promote it.
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