The national press found a new low on Friday after the New Yorker released a hit piece on Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s grandparents.
Vance has long cited his “Mamaw” and “Papaw” as an inspiration despite their flaws, writing about them in his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy.” You’d think they’d be off-limits in a political race given both are dead and hold zero relevance to anything concerning the current presidential race. Think again, though, because the following garbage article was pushed out.
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J. D. Vance’s grandparents, immortalized in “Hillbilly Elegy” as Mamaw and Papaw, had a deeply troubled marriage, and Vance praises them for sticking it out. But records show that they entered divorce proceedings twice. https://t.co/TjxxGvU5es
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) August 16, 2024
Here’s how the piece begins.
Last month, after I published an article about the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance and his fixation on the traditional nuclear family, I received an e-mail from Donna Morel, an attorney in San Diego. Morel is a fact-checking hobbyist—notably, she exposed major fabrications in best-selling books by the late celebrity biographer C. David Heymann.
Yes, how dare Vance have an “obsession” with the nuclear family, which has been the building block of civilizations throughout history. What a weirdo, right? You can already see where this is going just by reading that line. The far-left has contempt for the normal family structure, and they wear it on their sleeves.
No doubt Jessica Winter, who wrote this piece, thought she was going to be hit with a bombshell when this “fact-checking hobbyist” contacted her. Perhaps Donna Morel’s sleuthing skills would debunk some major part of Vance’s book, providing fodder for the Kamala Harris campaign in what is increasingly a tight presidential race. Instead, all the “fact-checking hobbyist” could come up with is confirming Vance told the truth.
As the New Yorker admits, Vance wrote that his grandfather was a “vicious drunk” and that his grandparents even separated for a time.
Bonnie and Jim’s marriage was, at times, deeply troubled—in Vance’s telling, both of his grandparents were violent, and Jim was a vicious drunk. But Vance praises them in his memoir and elsewhere for sticking it out. Later in the marriage, Vance writes in “Elegy,” they “separated and then reconciled, and although they continued to live in separate houses, they spent nearly every waking hour together.” (The relationship seems to have improved immensely, Vance observes, after Jim Vance quit drinking, in 1983.)
Absolutely nothing dug up by the New Yorker contradicted that characterization. Yet, the New Yorker chose to frame things as if some grand revelation had been stumbled upon.
According to records sourced by Morel, Bonnie and Jim—Vance’s flawed but heroic avatars of traditional marriage—entered divorce proceedings twice. In the first instance, according to court documents and also an announcement in the March 22, 1955, edition of the Middletown Recorder, Bonnie, then twenty-one, filed for divorce from Jim on grounds of “extreme cruelty” and “gross neglect of duty.” Joseph Nigh, a family-law attorney in Columbus, Ohio, told me that “ ‘extreme cruelty’ is a broad spectrum,” and can encompass physical assault, verbal abuse, or “demeaning conduct.” “Gross neglect of duty” is even more of a catchall term, Nigh said, intended to be left to a court’s broad discretion. (Nigh spoke with me about Ohio family law as a general matter, and did not address the Vance case specifically.)
That divorce proceeding (which was one of two throughout their marriage) was never followed through on and was eventually dismissed. Just as Vance has long claimed, his grandparents “stuck it out” until the end. One can believe what they want about the merits of that decision, but many would believe there is something valuable in reconciliation.
What exactly was accomplished here? What news value was there in the New Yorker digging up this stuff up when the information shared did nothing but confirm Vance’s prior statements? We all know the answer to those questions, and I find the entire exercise disgusting and transparent. There is nothing newsworthy about any of what is published in that article. Instead, it’s a gross attempt at smearing Vance’s family for no other reason than providing some sick satisfaction to whichever left-wing elites still read the New Yorker.
