Long Islander Brian Kilmeade hosted venture capitalist, Yale Law School grad and U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance for a session of bashing Jennifer Lawrence as an out-of-touch liberal who doesn’t understand “the common man” the way Vance does.
Republicans are complaining that Vance is missing from the campaign trail but he can be seen pretty regularly on Fox News these days.
Vance recently compared abortion to slavery but now that anti-abortion positions are not working out so well for Republicans, Vance joined the growing field of Republican candidates trying to recast themselves as women-friendly. (Never mind that Vance recently suggested people should stay in "violent" marriages.)
Kilmeade was there to help. First, he prefaced the interview with an ad featuring Vance’s wife.
Kilmeade said that Vance is “pushing himself as a common man who’s in touch with Ohio voters, maybe because he is.”
Or maybe he isn’t. MSNBC host Ari Melber summed up Vance’s professional biography as “basically a hit list for today’s right-wing grievance culture.”
MELBER: He was a coastal banker and a venture capitalist; an Ivy League elite from Yale Law School; a self-styled literary intellectual who mused about the dangers of right-wing extremism in magazines like The Atlantic and then – I’m out of fingers on this hand – and then he pursued a perch within the coastal media elite, pushing a trendy book where he claimed to explain the rust belt and the midwest while writing from the coasts, and then taking that tome, Hillbilly Elegy, to go spend as much time as he could talking to his fellow media elites about what were his coastal observations about the troubled rest of the nation.
Those aspects of Vance's resumé, along with the allegations that he illegally colluded with a Peter Thiel super PAC, were not mentioned by Kilmeade. Instead, he continued, “But out-of-touch Hollywood says 'not so fast.' Get this: Wealthy A-lister actress, glamour queen Jennifer Lawrence – she’s really good at acting – is questioning whether Vance is a common man, after all.”
Let me pause to note that Kilmeade is another one whose bio could be a hit list for right-wing grievance culture. He’s a TV host who grew up in the Long Island suburbs, where he went to college and lives today, has written six books and did a stint as an anchor/reporter in Los Angeles.
I’ll bet that neither Kilmeade nor Vance lives far from a Whole Foods. Or has had to ration medicine or doctor’s visits lately, cut back on gasoline consumption or had trouble paying for anything.
Kilmeade “asked” about Lawrence, “Does she think that people in rural America can’t read? Or you can’t possibly write a book if you grew up poor?”
Vance said, “That’s sort of the implication, is that those of us who actually do buy books out here in the heartland are somehow not representative. I think that’s ridiculous.”
Actually, that’s not what Lawrence said or implied. She was arguing that Vance is not a hillbilly, only pretending to be one. Here's the relevant passage, from a recent Vogue article:
[Lawrence] was heartened by all the union-organizing in the news, but appalled that J.D. Vance, the Yale-educated author of Hillbilly Elegy, was running in Ohio for Senate. (“He’s not a hillbilly if he wrote a huge book. Rich twat. I mean, I’m a rich twat, but I’m not running for office pretending that I’m not.”)
But one of the rules of Fox News seems to be: Never pass up an opportunity to bash Hollywood. Vance certainly didn't.
VANCE: It’s a classic example of Hollywood getting involved in politics. This is why the Oscars have all-time low ratings. This is why people have tuned out the politics of Hollywood. They’re there for entertainment and I think when they do it well, great, but at the end of the day they should leave politics to the people who actually vote and try to run in elections in this country.
Oh, yes, conservatives just hate when Hollywood gets involved in politics - unless you’re a Republican.
You can watch it below, from the September 10, 2022 One Nation with Brian Kilmeade.