Skip to main content

JD Vance: Bully or Bullied?


When someone does something repugnant or slimy, I often wonder: Who hurt you?

With JD Vance, I've found myself thinking, "Bless his heart. He's just being Trump's bitch. I wonder who hurt him. Was he bullied much as a kid?" 

I've read Hillbilly Elegy, but I don't remember much in it. Below are a few places where he mentions being bullied:

"When I was younger, I was the new kid in town. And as I quickly learned, the new kid always gets bullied." (Chapter 1)

"At school, I was constantly picked on, and I couldn’t understand why. My classmates would make fun of my clothes, the way I talked, and the way my mom acted." (Chapter 2)

"I was a poor kid with a messy home life, and I became the target of constant teasing, and that made me even more ashamed of where I came from." (Chapter 3)

"It’s hard to be proud of yourself when every kid in your class has more than you, and the people who tease you are just one reminder of your social status." (Chapter 4)

"Even though I was in a new place, I was still the same poor kid who got made fun of for his family’s problems. I couldn't escape the way other people saw me." (Chapter 5)

"I was in college, but still carrying the weight of being a kid who got picked on, a kid who was always made to feel inferior." (Chapter 6)

"The kids at school made it clear that my mom’s problems were my problems. They teased me about her addiction, laughed when she’d come to school in a state of chaos. I couldn’t escape it." (Chapter 7)

"When I went to college, I didn’t just feel like a fish out of water; I felt like I was going to drown. I had been bullied so much that I started to believe I wasn’t good enough to be there." (Chapter 8)

Get the idea? Every chapter, Vance paints himself as the victim. So he was bullied and bullied for years, and it has affected him deeply, maybe for life...

But does the person bullied become a bully himself? There seems to be a certain amount of logic to that, right? It feels good to swing back and be the one to hit about being hit all those years. 

People who knew Vance as a kid claim that he was the bully:

A woman named Serenity recalled: "I can't stand JD Vance. I grew up with him, I knew him personally. He was a bully when he was a kid. Very mean, very rude. Just being a bully as a child. He used to kick me in the shins all the time, and then I know that my ex-husband was also bullied by him in high school, so it's like very much the same Trump mentality of bullying. I think he has that as well. Maybe that's why they get along so well."

https://www.citybeat.com/news/shes-voting-against-her-childhood-bully-jd-vance-18468268

***

Vance's childhood was not a happy one -- full of trauma and violence. I'm willing to believe that he was bullied, and no, it wouldn't surprise me if that -- along with a lack of a father and everything he survived -- turned him into a bully, and a broken adult. 

I'm thinking about all this because of his typically stupid, inappropriate responses -- telling Zelensky to wear a tie, telling Denmark that their treatment of Greenland sucks, etc.

And now today, he "doubled-down," as they say, on a mistake that will likely cost a man his life. This man, a father with legal protection to be in the United States, was "accidently" sent back to his home country, El Salvador, and the mega prison where we're now claiming to send all the "worst of the worst." (Sent without evidence, although FoxNEWS assures us that they're all rapists and murderers, and pedophiles -- just take the Government's word for it, because hey, all the deported guys have that gang tattoo, so yeah). 

Vance's reaction to a father deported by mistake to the El Salvadoran mega prison: "Why are you so concerned with gang members and not their victims?"

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/vance-doubles-down-after-trump-admin-admits-error-sending-man-salvadoran-prison

This man is either dumb or stupid. Maybe both. 

Or maybe he's broken and he has decided to make Trump the father he never had. Maybe he's tired of people bullying him, and he has found security hiding behind the biggest, most powerful bully the world has seen in a long, long time. 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...