Man of the People
By 
With J.D. Vance running something like a Senate campaign based on a book where he insulted his own potential voters, our favorite fascist grifter is truly showing he is a man of the people when it comes to the issue of opioids, which it is of course their loser fault for getting hooked on.
When JD Vance founded “Our Ohio Renewal” a day after the 2016 presidential election, he promoted the charity as a vehicle for helping solve the scourge of opioid addiction that he had lamented in “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestselling memoir.
But Vance shuttered the nonprofit last year and its foundation in May, shortly after clinching the state’s Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, according to state records reviewed by The Associated Press. An AP review found that the charity’s most notable accomplishment — sending an addiction specialist to Ohio’s Appalachian region for a yearlong residency — was tainted by ties among the doctor, the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.
The mothballing of Our Ohio Renewal and its dearth of tangible success raise questions about Vance’s management of the organization. His decision to bring on Dr. Sally Satel is drawing particular scrutiny. She’s an American Enterprise Institute resident scholar whose writings questioning the role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis were published in The New York Times and elsewhere before she began the residency in the fall of 2018.
Documents and emails obtained by ProPublica for a 2019 investigation found that Satel, a senior fellow at AEI, sometimes cited Purdue-funded studies and doctors in her articles on addiction for major news outlets and occasionally shared drafts of the pieces with Purdue officials in advance, including on occasions in 2004 and 2016. Over the years, according to the report, AEI received regular $50,000 donations and other financial support from Purdue totaling $800,000.
Longtime Ohio political observer Herb Asher cast the charity’s shortcomings, including Satel’s links to Big Pharma, as a “betrayal.”“A person forms a charity presumably to do good things, so when it doesn’t, for whatever reason, that really is a betrayal,” said Asher, an emeritus professor of political science at Ohio State University. “That’s something voters can get their arms around.”
Well, we’ll see if voters do get their arms around this. It’s hard to be bullish about Ohio in 2022, but Vance is such a terrible candidate and disgusting human being that maybe it can happen.
Also, given my hatred for Vance and his bullshit book from the moment it came out and all the liberals (many of whom were college professors I know) who wanted to read his book to understand those white people instead of just talking to them, his complete collapse as a respectable figure has come with some extra joy for me, one that makes me hope some people will rethink who they look to for understanding about the contemporary nation. I remember for that matter people in comments on this site back in 2017 seeking solace in the book after Trump’s election and getting mad at me for making fun of it.