Richard Hanania is an ostensibly conservative guy, although I don’t believe that. He is openly hostile to Trump, Israel, and Jews, and has been accused of being racist against blacks as well. For some reason, I followed him on X a long time ago (I really don’t know why), but I don’t unfollow him for a weird reason: While I invariably disagree with him, he occasionally says things that are thought-provoking, although (of course) not in the way he intended.

That was the case with his latest tweet, which links to an essay he wrote several months ago for his Substack account. The gist of the tweet is that JD Vance (whom Hanania apparently dislikes as much as he dislikes Trump), rather than being a spokesperson for poor, white Appalachian people in America, hates them:

It just never stops being funny that JD Vance made a name for himself talking about poor white people in ways that would make MAGAs form a lynch mob if the same opinions were uttered by a contemporary liberal. https://t.co/jlNxA83VVV pic.twitter.com/HSa75z6NSQ

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) June 9, 2025

Before recently starting Hillbilly Elegy, I had heard that it was harsh on poor whites. Yet other reviews hadn’t prepared me for just how negatively it portrayed them. Not only does Vance tell us that they do drugs, neglect their children, and spend recklessly, but he also spends a good bit of time psychologically analyzing what’s wrong with his people...

[snip]

At the end of the book, you’re left with the impression that instead of behaving like an Appalachia simpleton, Vance has now adopted the norms of [the] upper class...

I can’t read more than that because it’s behind a paywall and I’m not paying. However, the clear gist of the available paragraphs is that Vance is a bad person because he doesn’t have a gauzy, romanticized image of the people he grew up with. He should be praising those Appalachian Caesars, not burying them with his disdain.

In fact, though, Vance is doing exactly the right thing. He is bringing tough love to people who are engaging in self-destructive behavior. Indeed, they’re showing precisely the same behavior that’s plagued Appalachia since the 1700s and that blacks, sadly, adopted in the 1960s as their national culture at the behest of white leftists and black activists. Any culture that’s mired in drugs, drink, promiscuity, profligacy, etc., is a bad culture for the people practicing it, and that’s true no matter their race. And yes, it would be offensive if this came from a Democrat, because a Democrat would not come from a place of love, but from a place of hatred and disdain.

Vance loves the people he came from, for he recognizes the many virtues that are getting bogged down by those cultural vices. He is refusing to adopt the left’s cultural relativism, which would see him say, “That’s their culture; who am I to criticize?” Instead, he’s holding a mirror up to his people and telling them, “You don’t have to be this way. You can do and be better.”

One of the plagues in black America is the refusal to acknowledge that the inner-city culture is a bad one. The best thing that could happen to people trapped in the generational hellhole of black poverty would be to tell them exactly what Vance tells the people of Appalachia: This is a lousy culture, and you can do better.

However, anyone who dares criticize black culture is accused of being racist. Here’s the deal, though: If you tell blacks that they are congenitally incapable of being better, that’s racist. Telling them that they are God’s children and should expect more from themselves and those around them, that they should cultivate the brains God gave them, that they should refrain from the drink and drugs that destroy body and soul, and that they should fight back against the crime that destroys their communities...that’s not racism, that’s love.

As (almost) always, Richard Hanania is wrong (at least to the extent of what I was able to read before the paywall kicked in), but he certainly zeroed in on how Vance loves, not hates, the poor whites of his youth, and why leftists clearly hate the poor blacks to whom they deny the agency of self-knowledge and cultural change.

Image: C-SPAN screen grab (cropped).