JD Vance’s call to fame is a self congratulatory piece of garbage “book” where he talks about how he was able to get out of poverty in the Appalachia’s, without ever mentioning the fact that it was right wing playbook shit that put them into poverty in the first place

The social and economic stratification of Appalachia comes largely as the result of classism. Many politicians and businessmen took advantage of the region’s natural resource industries, such as mountaintop coal mining. Appalachian laborers were heavily exploited, which prevented the region from developing socially or gaining economic independence.

Coal operators and plantation bosses had discouraged education and civic action, allowing workers to become indebted to plantation stores, live in company housing, and generally make themselves vulnerable to exploitation. Additionally, some employers were known to encourage racial divisions in order to divide workers and pit them against each other, spurring competition and serving to lower wages. Workers also experienced heavy discrimination when seeking employment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_and_economic_stratification_in_Appalachia?wprov=sfti1#Power,_politics,_and_poverty

But some of those poor people had cell phones, and since he couldn’t afford one working as a teen at a grocery store, it was their fault not to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps