Nolte: Tim Walz Isn’t Mocking JD Vance and Yale; He’s Trashing the American Dream

Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz thinks he’s ridiculing his Republican counterpart, JD Vance, when he’s really ridiculing the American Dream.

Tim “Stolen Valor” Walz’s attacks on JD “Actually Served in Iraq” Vance are beyond despicable and outright un-American.

“I had 24 kids in my high school class, and none of them went to Yale,” Walz said during his speech at Wednesday’s Democratic National Convention.

This isn’t the first time he’s mocked the Hillbilly Elegy author for rising above a childhood filled with poverty, his mother’s drug addiction, and despair.

The following is beyond the beyond…

“Like all regular people I grew up with in the Heartland, JD studied at Yale,” Walz said sarcastically at a recent rally, adding, “And then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on, that’s not what middle America is.”

This is a little off-point, but it’s important. Before JD Vance became JD Vance, I read Hillbilly Elegy. This was in early 2020. Here is part of what I wrote over four years ago: “Vance escaped, but he’s not — like so many others who do — looking back with a sneer.” That’s how I closed my short Xwitter review because to me that was the most important part. What agenda could I have possibly had other than to tell the truth? At that point, Vance was a political blank page. If anything, he was a media darling. But that, above all, most impressed me because, in general, people who “escape” rural life (as Vance did) and attend an Ivy League (as Vance did) and find themselves embraced by our media and Hollywood elite (as Vance was), they do look back at Normal America with a smug and arrogant sneer.

Hillbilly Elegy is about the beauties and horrors of rural life. Because of my fortunate circumstances, I mostly speak of the beauty. Because of his unfortunate circumstances growing up, Vance was able to write about the beauty (his grandparents) and horrors (addiction, joblessness, poverty, consumerism, how welfare destroys families and dignity). But Hillbilly Elegy is not a Bill Maher sneer. It is a compassionate plea for understanding and help.

Back to my main point…

Of all the criticism I have heard leveled over the decades at former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barry Obama, most of them are accurate but never have I heard someone pull a Tim Walz on them. Never have I heard anyone ridicule Obama for lifting himself out of a broken home to go on and attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard.

Never have I heard anyone degrade Bill Clinton for rising out of poverty and a broken home to attend Georgetown and then earn one of the rarest of academic distinctions, a Rhodes Scholarship.

What kind of un-American asshole thinks this is a brag: “I had 24 kids in my high school class, and none of them went to Yale”?

And then there’s the shameless hypocrisy:

Whatever you think of their politics or character, Barry Obama and Bill Clinton epitomize the American Dream, and so does JD Vance. Overcoming grinding poverty and a dysfunctional family life is what America and the American Dream is all about. Going from Hope, Arkansas, to a Rhodes Scholarship… Going from Appalachia to Yale… You don’t denigrate that. You don’t ridicule that. It’s not only spitting on the American Dream; think of the message A-Walz is sending to poor kids all over the country…

Hey, don’t be a sellout. Stay poor. Stay ignorant. Don’t be JD Vance. He turned his back on his people.

But, of course, this is what Democrats have always done: keep people down. Keep them ignorant and poor and dependent. This is the message Democrats send to black kids by refusing them private school vouchers and telling them they can’t succeed in a white supremacist country. This is what they do to welfare recipients through the creation of a system that discourages marriage and work. And now, A-Walz is telling the rural poor that striving is selling out your own.

Walz sold out his men in the Minnesota National Guard just as they were headed into a war zone, and now he’s selling out every poor, rural kid hoping for a way out.

NBC’s Mitchell: Vance Isn’t Attacking Walz’s Service; He’s Making Largely ‘Verified’ Criticisms of Walz’s Claims About It

John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.