JD Vance is Not Appalachian, Here’s Why
01/28/2026
By Adrien Lee
I say, living in Appalachia is like living in the belly of the American beast, nestled firmly in the guts of poverty-stricken rot and unearned white excellence sold to folks who never had the chance to read beyond a fifth grade reading level-- for reasons I couldn’t begin to cover in this little romp of pure spitballin’ anger I’m feeling that’s forcing my pen to proverbial digital paper. But I’ll try my best to scrape the surface, for if nothing else, it’ll ease my blood pressure just a little bit to get it out.
A disclaimer here and now, no I have not read Hillbilly Elegy (in its entirety, anyway, for I have thoroughly dissected the bits and pieces like a carrion on a carcass), nor have I watched the film, and I have no plans to. I’ll take my kin’s words for it that it doesn’t do us justice, yet another ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps like I did’ story that glorifies poverty in a way that could never be reality. Poverty is not grace. It does not ‘build character’, despite popular belief. It forces you to adapt or die, something it seems that the likes of Vance have hardly even experienced during his summering in Breathitt County, Kentucky, with his Mamaw and Papaw, barely cosplaying an actual Eastern Kentucky Appalachian person.
Though if there’s one thing we seem to have in common, despite debates of him ‘not being from here’, it is drugs. More specifically, opioids. Vance’s mother suffered from the same kind of addiction that anyone from Appalachia would know. I will not begrudge how difficult it is to have someone you love suffering from such an addiction, and I am sure it affected him in some way or another. Looking into his past, unsubstantiated claims that his mother tried to sell him for pills float around in Facebook groups and retweets as a gotcha meme for him. One would think, with all of this personal experience in having a family member suffering from the effects of the opioid crisis, it would breed a smidgen of empathy.
But we know him, don’t we?
Context matters here: what is the opioid crisis in Appalachia? When did it start? I’ll offer the abridged version for the sake of brevity: OxyContin was marketed aggressively by a company called Purdue Pharma in the late 90s, early 2000s, to which they chose West Virginia (which spread to Appalachia as a whole) as their testing “ground zero” to see if it would be effective nationwide. This essentially led to what we now call ‘the opioid crisis’, an epidemic that Appalachia is hardly escaped from twenty years down the road.
Due to Appalachia’s poverty-stricken stereotypes making it impossibly easy to write the entire region off as ‘dumb hillbillies’, it was a “perfect” choice, as they faced little to no consequences. Appalachia had a large population of coal miners at the time. Coal miners, with one of the most famously impossible jobs, suffered from chronic back pain (amid other workplace related injuries), and was a region known for little to no regulation (think coal companies and what they got away with!). It only made sense they would choose Appalachia.
It is the author’s opinion that this was a strategic move to prevent the folks in Appalachia from realizing their worth. We have a long time history of unions, and fighting for worker’s rights (see: Battle of Blair Mountain). Mountain people have a culture of being against the government as whole. (NASCAR was built by bootleggers suping up their getaway cars!) This was a punishment. A way to further destroy a region already impoverished by disappearing coal jobs. If we were both dumb hillbillies and drug addicts, nobody would listen to what we had to say. We’d slowly forget our roots (like we have now) and acquiesce to whatever the boot says we do.
Where does Vance play into all of this? From what I can gleam by skimming the trash heap that is his memoirs, Vance puts the onus of poverty on Appalachians. It is rife with a conservative ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality, and ignores all factors that would drive the behaviors he criticizes. He even seems to paint the entire region as Scots-Irish (not true, Appalachia is extremely diverse) and imply that group of people are inherently at a disadvantage due to having a ‘volatile tendency towards anger and violence’, which can’t skim the idea of Appalachian Fatalism (the outlook that we’re fated to a live of poverty, exploitation, or hardship just by being here) from my mind.
Which is it, Vance? We’re predetermined to violent traits that keep us poor, and you’re the golden boy that happened to pull yourself out of the holler and into something worth it? What about us that just can’t overcome those trials and tribulations, like you did? Those who don’t have a Mamaw and Papaw to look after us when an addict parent is absent. It’s that reason why Hillbilly Elegy is a bloated sensational meant to push the ‘bootstraps’ mentality to conservatives, and make blue state liberals feel better about their own personal circumstances. It’s why the book sold so well with every political affiliation out there. Appalachia is once again the political lamb to slaughter because it’s easy, and what are those dumb hillbillies going to do about it anyway?
All of this leads to my last point: I can hardly wrap my head around the support he gets here. I half think it’s just because his name is attached to the Trump presidency for the time being, but it’s ridiculously easy to pull his shiny facade back and see him as the fraud he is. Look into ‘JD Vance’s Ties to Purdue Pharma’ and you’ll see a myriad of results from 2022, covering his anti-drug charity “Our Ohio Renewal” and how he brought a Purdue Pharma “doctor” (mouthpiece) to Ohio. Literally bringing to the wolf to the sheep, and claiming ignorance that it was a wolf. I’m going to need us (as Appalachians) to take a closer look at the man who is likely to be our next president and his ability to claim kinship with us before I lose what marbles I have left.
see this post on Substack: JD Vance Is Not Appalachian, Here's Why