J. D. Vance Quotes
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When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.
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I think what Trump will be judged on by the folks that voted for him... is whether things start to get a little bit better over the next few years. And ultimately, that doesn't depend on whether Jeff Sessions is the attorney general.
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Trump's biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.
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Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.
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If you think about what folks have been doing for 20 or 30 years, they have been bottling frustration and resentment that the political elites don't understand them, that the political elites don't care about them, that the political elites judge them in various ways. All Donald Trump does is provide the opposite of those things.
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I didn't come from the elites. I didn't come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America's working class.
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I needed a lot of the good things that church provided. But as I grew older, it became increasingly hard for me to rationalize the importance of church in my life with the beliefs that it required that were at odds with modern science.
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I never thought, when I was a kid, that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently - they primarily lived on the other side of town. And we're both poor, but that's kind of it. There wasn't much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship.
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We need to think about how we teach working-class children about not just hard skills, like reading and mathematics, but also soft skills, like conflict resolution and financial management.
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Violence and chaos were an ever-present part of the world that I grew up in. And unfortunately, it wasn't just in my family. Sometimes, you'd see, you know, Mom fighting with one of her boyfriends. But a lot of times, you'd see people exploding on each other in a local restaurant or on the street.
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We watch our sons go to war, disagree with the rationale for sending them, loathe the men who ordered them to battle, and then, when the veterans come home, beg and plead with the local V.A. to ensure they have access to proper care.
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We must have the courage to confront dreadful views even in the people we love the most. But that's difficult to do when we cast large segments of our fellow citizens into a basket to be condemned and disparaged, judging them even as we ignore that many of their deplorable traits exist in us, too.
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At a person-to-person level, I think that there's always something to be said for having some empathy for the folks who really, really disagree with you about a given topic.
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It's amazing to think how powerful of a force optimism and hope can be. It's the thing that saves me. I believed that I lived in the greatest country in the world. I still believe that, and consequently, I believed that I had a chance, even though things around me were absolutely crazy and difficult.
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The evangelical Christian faith I'd grown up with sustained me. It demanded that I refuse the drugs and alcohol on offer in our southwestern Ohio town, that I treat my friends and family kindly, and that I work hard in school. Most of all, when times were toughest, it gave me reason to hope.
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I don't think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban.
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We're very good at talking about the individual in American politics and excellent at talking about the government. But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture.
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We spend our way to the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.
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If it's hard for Blue America to see Red America as anything other than a bunch of dumb, racist rednecks; it's hard for Red America to recognize that many minorities are legitimately worried about what a Trump presidency means for their family.
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Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.
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I believe that I'm a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes, and I don't want to lose that. I think it's possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you're self-reflective and meaningful about it.
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Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains. Yet the white working class needs neither more finger-pointing nor more fiery sermons.
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Stanford's law school application wasn't the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren't a loser.
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There are definitely - there is definitely an element of Donald Trump's support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia. But a lot of these folks are just really hardworking people who are struggling in really important ways.