With the nomination of Sen. J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, of course there is renewed interest in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and the Ron Howard movie based on it.
I’ve yet to read book, but I saw the movie in 2020 on Netflix, which distributed the film, and I thought it was a captivating look at Vance’s life.
Both the book and the movie draw on Vance’s upbringing in the southwestern Ohio post-industrial city of Middletown. His maternal grandparents were from Jackson, Kentucky–in the Appalachian portion of the state, which is where Hillbilly Elegy begins. The young Vance (Owen Asztalos) gets a quick lesson in the importance of family loyalty after losing a fight. The Vances, unfortunately, are quite the dysfunctional family, particularly his drug-addicted mother, Beverly (Amy Adams). Eventually, Vance ends up in the care of his grandmother, Bonnie “Mawmaw” Vance (Glenn Close), a chain-smoking, cussing, mean, but ultimately loving authority figure.
The movie contains many flashbacks as the adult J.D. (Gabriel Basso), a US Marine veteran who is a Yale law student, finds his promising future tangled up with his troubled past. His girlfriend, Usha (Freida Pinto), provides him much needed emotional support.
As I said earlier, this is a captivating film, and Howard, a gifted director, makes skilled used of imagery, including perhaps his favorite, water, and a stunning symbolic use of the Middletown rail bridge tunnel.
However, by 2020, Vance was vocal about his conservative beliefs, and he had moved from the Never Trump camp of the Republican Party to being a supporter of the 45th president. Which, in my opinion, led to movie critics, a group which politically consists mostly of leftists, to offer a large dose of negative reviews of Hillbilly Elegy. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper was a notable exception, he gave the movie a four-stars-out-of-four review.
An even worse response came from the 2021 Golden Raspberry Awards, better known as the Razzies. The bad movie answer to the Academy Awards nominated Hillbilly Elegy for three Razzies: Worst Director (Howard), Worst Adapted Screenplay (Vanessa Taylor), and Worst Supporting Actress (Close). However, Close, was also nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the same role, and Hillbilly Elegy also garnered a Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar nomination.
Was this hatred was triggered by Vance’s politics?
I am certain of that, because also that year, Razzie “winners” included the documentary Absolute Proof, which questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election. Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame “won” Worst Actor for his role in that movie, and Rudy Giuliani “won” for Worst Supporting Actor for his brief role in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
Voters for the Razzies are not required to see the movies they vote on. Other “winners” of Razzies, not surprisingly, include other conservatives, among them are Ronald Reagan, Dinesh D’Souza, and Jon Voigt.
I apologize for that brief diversion, but the Golden Raspberry Awards needs a serious and prolonged slapping around.
To summarize, don’t believe the critics. Unless you are an unhinged leftist suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, Hillbilly Elegy is well worth your time.
The lessons from Hillbilly Elegy are conservative ones. Family bonds, hard work, and perseverance, while not a guarantee of success, make success more likely.
I suspect that left-wing critics will have one more group lash-out at Hillbilly Elegy.
And from the only presidential term of Joe Biden comes another lesson: Don’t believe the media. Even movie reviewers can’t be trusted.
Hillbilly Elegy is available for streaming on Netflix, where as of this writing is ranked #4 in the movie category. It is rated R for violence, drug use, and foul language.
Newspapers have been folding fairly regularly for decades. Unable to adapt to the rise of television in the 1950s and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, the marketplace has spoken.
And it’s still speaking
Despite the rapid evolution of news consumption, the one finite resource is still time. If someone is scrolling X (Twitter), or worse, Facebook, then they’re not reading a newspaper, whether it’s an online edition or print. Sure, newspapers, magazines, broadcast and cable networks, and local TV stations utilize social media to attract visitors, but most users only casually scan the headlines.
As for the dead tree media, Chicago still has two major daily newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and both are bat sh*t crazy woke. Even in a deep blue city like Chicago, my guess is at best 30-percent of the population are members of the far-left. Once you include the suburbs, again it’s my guess, there’s a center-right majority.
Even if I’m wrong, the greatest athlete ever to put on a Chicago professional sports uniform, Michael Jordan, proved he had more common sense than most left-wing Chicago journalists and publishers. “Republicans buy sneakers too,” he said decades ago.
Since the June 27 Joe Biden debate wipeout, the media, both nationally and here in the Chicago area, have been exposed as collection of liars and propagandists. Conservatives have known that for years, only now everyone else is aware, with possible exception of the dumbest person on the internet, pro-Biden brat Harry Sisson.
During the spring session of the Illinois General Assembly, the gerrymandered empowered Democratic supermajorities passed a series of bills–all first of its kind–that will offer taxpayer funded subsidies to dying newspapers and other media outlets. I covered this subject five months ago in this Da Tech Guy post: Journalism’s “extinction event” will lead to new and better choices for news.
Several of the new provisions [according to that legislation] aimed at shoring up local news outlets are written into the Illinois state budget as employment tax credits. They provide $25 million to newsrooms that hire or retain local reporters over five years. Specifically, newsrooms will receive $15,000 for each current reporter they employ and $25,000 for each new hire. The incentives are available to nonprofit and for-profit organizations alike, though there are limits on how much individual newsrooms and media companies can receive.
Separately, the Strengthening Community Media legislation, which passed both Illinois legislative chambers at the end of May and is awaiting signature by the governor, dedicates 50% of state advertising to local news outlets. It also requires that any newspaper in Illinois that intends to sell itself to an out-of-state company notify the public and its own employees 120 days before a sale occurs. The goal of this measure is to give in-state businesses and nonprofits the chance to bid on the outlet and increase the likelihood that ownership stays in state.
Terrible, terrible, terrible.
I’d like to say that it’s not up to Illinois to pick winners and losers, but the situation is worse than that. Illinois will be picking the losers.
For example, the headline of Sunday’s e-edition of the Chicago Tribune reads, “Trump ‘safe’ after gunfire.” A more accurate headline would be “Trump survives assassination attempt.” The Trib refuses to portray Trump sympathetically–it needs to placate its fellow wokesters.
After the very bloody July 4th weekend, Chicago’s far-left mayor and former Defund the Police advocate, Brandon Johnson, in a rambling press conference, blamed Richard M. Nixon, who resigned the president 50 years ago next month, for the carnage.
Okay, he didn’t flat out say, “Over 100 people were shot in Chicago last weekend–and it’s because of Nixon.” Again, Johnson didn’t utter those words.
Here’s what the mayor said:
Black death has been unfortunately been accepted in this country for a very long time. We had a chance 60 years ago to get at the root causes. And people mocked President Johnson, and we ended up with Richard Nixon.
As Dan Bongino says so often, “The media wants to tell a story, not THE story.”
Understandably Chicago area readers, except for those wokesters, tune out the Tribune and the Sun-Times.
The rest of Illinois has other legacy newspapers that are equally rotten. Gannett’s Rockford Register Star, it’s deriders know it as “the Red Star,” immediately comes to mind.
The bills to offer taxpayer subsidies to these propaganda outlets are awaiting Governor J.B. Pritzker’s signature. I suspect Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a Chicago Democrat, will sign them.
Pritzker is a likely presidential candidate in 2028–if not sooner. He’ll want his story, not the story, to get out. He’ll want the Democrats’ story–subsidized by taxpayers– to be told, not the real story.
Again, I have to tell Illinois’ legacy media that it makes more business sense to reach out to a majority of people as opposed to a few. But ideologues don’t cope well with common sense.
One more thing: Both nationally and in Illinois, the media has been claiming that Trump is a threat to democracy. If that was true, of course, then why didn’t 45 set up a dictatorship after the 2016 election?
John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.
“Christmas means carnage.” Ferdinand the duck, in the movie Babe.
“It’s assassination day…” is what a Chicago woman, Edith Pinkerton, according to ABC Chicago said of July 4, although Pinkerton may have been speaking of the next day, July 5, when her 74-year-old friend was wounded.
As of this writing, late Sunday afternoon on July 7, this Independence Day weekend has been quite bloody in Chicago. So far, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, over the long July 4th weekend, 17 people have been killed and at least 82 others have been wounded. Four mass shootings have so far occurred.
Back to July 5. According to Hey Jackass.com, last Friday, when 45 people were shot, that day was “the 3rd highest, single day total found in our dataset since 2013.”
July 5th's 45 shot is the 3rd highest, single day total found in our dataset since 2013. 5/31/20 – 51 8/5/18 – 49 7/5/24 – 45 6/22/20 – 44 6/27/21 – 40 8/8/21 – 40 6/17/24 – 40#Chicago#ChicagoScanner
Last year, a majority of Chicago’s severely misguided voters had a choice between Paul Vallas, a moderate law-and-order Democrat, and Brandon Johnson, a onetime supporter of the Defund the Police movement, who was pushed over the top by the far-left Chicago Teachers Union.
Johnson, closely followed by Chicago’s two major daily newspapers, the Sun-Times and the Tribune, as well as Crain’s Chicago Business, has been the chief minimizer of street mayhem in Chicago.
While he was still mayor-elect, when asked about a downtown flash mob riot, Johnson said it was important not to “demonize” the thugs. A couple of days later when asked about what Chicago’s listless media calls “unrest,” Johnson offered more sanitization of widespread lawlessness, “They’re young. Sometimes they make silly decisions.”
A central part of the mayor’s approach to crimefighting for this summer was to hire “violence interrupters.” During the mayoral campaign, Johnson suggested sending social workers to domestic incidents, instead of Chicago police officers.
To be fair, had Vallas prevailed, Chicago would still be a mess. She’ll be out of office in five months, but the policies of Kim Foxx, Cook County’s Soros-funded prosecutor, continue to wreak havoc. And as I’ve noted in prior DTG posts, this summer is the first one since Illinois’ SAFE-T Act, which abolishes cash bail, became law.
Two months ago, the mayor’s choice as Chicago police superintendant, Larry Snelling, said the city is short 2,000 cops.
Johnson, to placate his leftist base, wants to cancel the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system, but not until after next month’s Democratic National Convention.
Chicago has almost three years to suffer under Brandon Johnson.
Rather than address the Chicago’s crime crisis, Johnson’s prefers to deflect. At the Juneteenth flag raising ceremony, Johnson called for reparations for Black people.
Speaking from the realm of common sense, Corey Brooks, Chicago’s legendary “Rooftop Pastor,” threw a bucket of cold water at that demand.
Where are the reparations for the city’s failure to produce adequate protection for its residents? Where are the reparations for the city’s failure to provide adequate schooling to inspire kids toward the American Dream instead of nihilistic violence? And where are the reparations for the city’s woke legal system that puts the interest of violent criminals above the interests of the city’s hardworking citizens?
For now, look for more Chicagoans to say, “It’s assassination day.”
UPDATE July 8, 7:15pm EDT:
The official July 4 weekend Chicago Police Department figures are in, and they’re brutal. There were 109 people wounded by gunfire during the long Independence Day weekend, 19 of them fatally.
At a press conference this morning not only did Mayor Johnson not take responsibility for the widespread bloodshed, but he blamed Republicans, including President Richard Nixon, who left office 50 years ago this summer. Chicago hasn’t had a GOP mayor since Big Bill Thompson–a crook by the away–who was voted out in 1931. While we’re at it, Democrats hold supermajorities–thanks to gerrymandering–in the state General Assembly, and Illinois hasn’t had a Republican governor since 2003, when another crook, George H. Ryan, retired. Of Chicago’s 50 alderpersons, none are Republican, although four or five have some conservative leanings.
Now that people who only get their news from MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have learned that Joe Biden is suffering from severe cognitive decline, there is an understandable panic among Democrats, as well as calls to replace him on the fall ballot.
Had Biden chosen a running mate in 2020 based on the ability to serve as president, instead of identitarianism, the answer would be easy regarding a replacement at the top of the ticket, the sitting vice president. But Kamala Harris is the veep. This dopey DEI hire, until last week perhaps, polled even worse than Biden. She’s the poster child of a symptom of public sector incompetence: failing upwards.
Harris checked three boxes–Black, Asian, and female. Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s governor, who was said to be a finalist to be Biden’s running mate, checked only one.
Harris may still end up on top of the ticket if Biden bails, partly because the money raised so far by the Biden-Harris campaign can only be transferred to one other candidate–the president’s running mate. Also, the Dems may want to avoid a rancorous battle to replace Biden–and stick with Sleepy Joe–then hope for the best in 2028, because Donald J. Trump can only serve one term.
Whitmer is part of the whispering campaign to replace Biden, as are three other governors, California’s Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker.
Since I live in the Prairie State, I’m going to discuss Pritzker. Two years ago, when he was running for reelection, I covered Pritzker’s shortcomings in this DTG post, Reasons to oppose Pritzker for governor and president. That blog entry is in need of an update. Of course, the problems I listed in 2022 haven’t gone away.
Crime and the SAFE-T Act: Lawlessness was a problem in Illinois two years ago, particularly in Chicago and its inner suburbs. I live in one of those suburbs.
While the murder rate has gone a little bit in Chicago, assaults and thefts, particularly automobile thefts, have gone up. I haven’t been able to locate state statistics on crime, I’m confident they’re also bad.
Over three years ago, Pritzker signed into law the pro-criminal SAFE-T Act, making Illinois the first state to abolish cash bail. Criminality in Illinois was already encouraged by the catch-and-release prosecution policy of Cook County’s George Soros-funded state’s attorney, Kim Foxx.
Pritzker and the Democrats must have had qualms about the SAFE-T Act, because it was set to take effect nearly two years after the governor signed it into law. A court challenge delayed that until last fall–just as violent crime makes it annual seasonal decline.
We are now a month into the first summer of the SAFE-T Act. In June, there were two egregious murders where the accused were free on pre-trial release. Jai’mani Amir Rivera, who was seven years-old, was shot to death on Chicago’s West Side was shot to death by a teen on electronic monitoring. Also on the West Side, a retired Chicago police officer, Larry Neuman, was fatally gunned down by two teens, both of them were on pre-trial release–one of the pair was on electronic monitoring.
To be fair, even without the SAFE-T Act, with Foxx as the so-called prosecutor, these thugs may have walked free. But Chicago’s failures are being replicated statewide.
Pritzker is active on X, he discusses a wide range of topics.
I can’t remember the last time he mentioned the SAFE-T Act.
Obviously, he knows it’s a problem for him. It’s a more deadly problem for Illinois’ 12 million residents.
Health: I’m going to hurt some readers feelings with this segment.
Shortly after his inauguration, Jimmy Carter released his federal tax returns to the public. And since then, Donald Trump being a notable exception, most presidential candidates have followed suit.
Health records are probably next.
Now that the president’s cognitive decline is an established fact for everyone except for the Biden bitter-clingers, look for future presidential candidates to release specific details on their health, perhaps even making their personal physicians available to the media for unrestricted questioning.
Pritzker is morbidly obese. According to the Mayo Clinic, that condition is “associated with many diseases responsible for a high prevalence of morbidity and mortality, such as insulin-resistant diabetes mellitus, hypertension, coronary artery disease, hyperlipidemia [high cholesterol], and sleep apnea.”
Standards and expectations are understandably much higher for president than for a governor. Pritzker’s health will be an issue if he makes a White House run.
How heavy is Pritzker? I don’t know. But he’s weighty enough to likely cause a femur stress fracture by just standing. J.B. doesn’t even know how that bone broke. I had a stress fracture once–it was one of my fibulas. I know how I got mine–it was from running 32 marathons in 20 years.
Not reaching across the aisle: Harris is a predictable result of a bad candidate winning office in a state dominated by one party. Her goofiness–both in demeanor and in political views–is not enough of an impediment for her to lose to a Republican in California. Gavin Newsom is much more seasoned and serious, but he’s another example. In 2004, when he was governor of San Francisco, he announced a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness. There are more homeless people in San Francisco now than there has ever been twenty years later.
Harris, who was a US senator and the attorney general from California, didn’t have to, metaphorically speaking, reach across the aisle to win statewide. There are not enough Republicans in the Golden State to stop a Harris–or a Newsom.
Pritzker, while enormously popular in the Chicago area and university towns, is generally hated downstate. The Democrats enjoy supermajorities in the General Assembly. Which means Pritzker doesn’t need Republicans to rule.
In the 2022 race, in many downstate counties, Pritzker’s Republican opponent, Darren Bailey, won more than 80 percent of the vote. In rural Edwards County, in southeastern Illinois, Bailey romped with 88 percent of the ballots, while in heavily Democratic Cook County, where Chicago lies, Pritzker collected a more modest 73 percent. About 1.4 million votes were cast in Cook so you can see how Pritzker comfortably won reelection, since the statewide vote total was four million in 2022.
Illinois’ listless media, dominated by leftists, rarely challenges Pritzker.
The governor’s speaking style is condescending. As I’ve remarked before, when he talks, he reminds me of a closer at a timeshare presentation. Yuck.
To win the presidency, no candidate can rely on one party’s votes. To govern effectively, a president needs to work with both parties.
Gerrymandering: With so many Republicans outside of Chicago, why do the Democrats have supermajorities in the General Assembly? It’s because of gerrymandering. As a candidate during his first run for governor, Pritzker vowed to veto gerrymandered legislative maps. He lied. Nationally, the Dems blame gerrymandering for not having a majority in the House of Representatives. While presidents have no power over state remaps, Pritzker’s gerrymandering flip flop certainly betrays a lack of character.
Depopulation: Like California, Illinois is losing residents. High taxes, a high crime rate, and high regulations are the catalyst. And as I mentioned earlier, with little or no political opposition, Illinois government is an echo chamber of liberal failure.
Pritzker has been governor for over five years. If Illinois is so great, why has state’s population gone down every year for the last decade?
Gaza: For the most part, I’ve supported Pritzker’s pro-Israel stance in its war with the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Although the governor has not condemned the loud anti-Semitic voices within the Democratic Party, such as Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman. His silence on the Jew-haters in his party is disturbing.
Pritzker is Jewish. But since the Democrats are increasingly the anti-Semitic party–anti-Israel Dems like Bernie Sanders are given a pass from the pro-Hamas activists–his faith could be a problem for him. Sad, but true, in my opinion. Pennsylvania’s Shapiro, who is also Jewish, is pro-Israel too.
But the voters most likely to agree, generally that is, with Pritzker and Shapiro on Gaza are Republicans.
Pensions: Illinois’ public pensions are among the worst funded among the 50 states. The pension crisis–created by both parties–has not been adequately addressed by Pritzker. Great leaders solve difficult problems. Despite new taxes, Pritzker’s latest budget shorts Illinois’ pension plans. Such malfeasance is how Illinois ended up in this mess.
Education: Pritzker did nothing to stop Illinois legislators from letting Illinois’ school choice program expire. Thirty states have some sort of school choice program, Illinois is the first to end one. Just 27 percent of Illinois students perform at grade level in math, and only 35 percent of students read at grade level.
Obviously, Democrats, including Pritzker, are more interested in kowtowing to the teacher unions than educating Illinois’ kids. Who would Pritzker nominate to be Education secretary? A radical along the lines of Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates?
I covered additional negatives in my first post about a potential Pritzker presidential run. Those demerits include his tax scam to lower property taxes on his Chicago mansion by removing toilets from the mansion adjacent to his–which he also owned, as well as his ties, not deep, but ties they are, with Boss Michael Madigan, who faces trial later this year for corruption, as well as a connection with one of Illinois’ ex-con governors, Rod Blagojevich.
Pritzker is in the second tier of possible Biden replacements. His negatives are apparent, but the billionaire governor has contributed millions of his own funds to finance his gubernatorial campaigns, and he’s been a generous donor to other Democrats’ campaigns, so he can call in a lot of favors, which is what he did to bring the Democratic National Convention to Chicago this summer.
Because of his fat wallet, Pritzker can hit the ground running–not literally, of course–if he needs to start a presidential campaign tomorrow. But for now, like Newsom and Whitmer, Pritzker is firmly in Biden’s corner.
Conservatives, we need to keep a wary eye on Pritzker. If not in 2024, then in 2028. We laughed off Biden five years ago.
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