The Atlantic is republishing--"on the occasion of its tenth anniversary"--JD Vance's July 4, 2016 essay in which he likened Donald Trump to heroin. At the time, it was part of the media push for his rotten goddam book and the campaign to move units and welcome him into the club by defining him as our foremost working-class-grievance whisperer, someone who had the blood of the common man in his veins but had passed through the Ivy Leagues and been vetted by the right people and could now be certified as a voice worth listening to. It runs alongside an article titled "What J. D. Vance Once Knew," which suggests that Vance once thought that the Real People would eventually see through Trump's bullshit, a process that he presumably thought might begin after her had been definitively trounced at the polls. It further seems to now assume that those whose eyes will soon be scales-free now includes Vance himself. JD Vance is an oily little hustler, morally speaking, a cockroach, who learned to speak the language he needed to succeed in one arena and then, when the winds changed, adopted a different language. Although he is an empty suit, I do not believe he doesn't mean anything he says. I think the real JD Vance must lean closer to the deputation-happy racist liar, because I think it is must be far easier for someone like that to pretend to respect his trans friends and fret about the self-destructive choices of poor Appalachian Trump voters than it would be for someone who is not himself a bigot to use that kind of language for political gain without eventually shooting himself. But the media elites can never quit him, because to do so would amount to admitting that he ran a game on them, and they fell for it. Which ought to tell them something before any of them writes another piece speculating that The Base will be seeing Trump for what he is and turning on him like Willard's rat army any second now.