I come from a family that doesn’t have a whole lot of money.
Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.
I’m a big fan of Purdue as an institution and in its role of educating the next-generation workforce.
My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it’s a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.
I’ve always just felt a little out of place. I still feel out of place in San Francisco. It’s this place where everything is going great, and everyone feels super optimistic about the world. It’s a little different about how I grew up.
Politicians of both parties told us that free trade with Asia and Latin America would spur economic growth, and maybe it did somewhere else. In our towns, though, factories continue shutting down or moving overseas.
My grandma always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.
Many people should leave struggling places in search of economic opportunity, and many of them won’t be able to return. Some people will move back to their hometowns; others, like me, will move back to their home state.
Whether I’m speaking to conservative or liberal audiences, I don’t find that people are close-minded about the things I say. I’m still optimistic that we can bridge a divide between these various bubbles. But I do think that it requires a little bit of effort.
It’s not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face. But I think that if you don’t recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.
At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I’ll miss him and the example he set.
Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.
For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate ‘poor’ in our public consciousness with ‘black.’ Terms such as ‘welfare queen’ and ‘culture of poverty’ became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.
People don’t want to believe they have to speak like Obama or Clinton to participate meaningfully in politics, because most of us don’t speak like Obama or Clinton.
My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.
If it’s hard for Blue America to see Red America as anything other than a bunch of dumb, racist rednecks; it’s hard for Red America to recognize that many minorities are legitimately worried about what a Trump presidency means for their family.
I think running a small nonprofit to work on the opioid crisis and bring interesting new businesses to the so-called Rust Belt – all of these things are valuable, if not more valuable, than running for office.
I don’t think that the Left has a monopoly on bad ideas. I don’t think the Right has a monopoly on good ideas.
The regulatory approach of the Food and Drug Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office has driven up the costs of generic drugs.
The evangelical Christian faith I’d grown up with sustained me. It demanded that I refuse the drugs and alcohol on offer in our southwestern Ohio town, that I treat my friends and family kindly, and that I work hard in school. Most of all, when times were toughest, it gave me reason to hope.
In communities like mine, we send our best and brightest to our armed forces. Our culture’s elites, on the other hand, encourage their children to do just about anything else.
Violence and chaos were an ever-present part of the world that I grew up in. And unfortunately, it wasn’t just in my family. Sometimes, you’d see, you know, Mom fighting with one of her boyfriends. But a lot of times, you’d see people exploding on each other in a local restaurant or on the street.
Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world’s money supply. Paranoia has replaced piety.
It seems to me an indictment of the Republican Party that if you talk about issues of poverty and upward mobility, people assume you’re a Democrat.
We watch our sons go to war, disagree with the rationale for sending them, loathe the men who ordered them to battle, and then, when the veterans come home, beg and plead with the local V.A. to ensure they have access to proper care.
I happen to think that conservatism, when properly applied to the 21st century, could actually help everybody. And the message of Trump’s campaign was obviously not super-appealing to Latino Americans, black Americans and so forth. That really bothered me.
We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears – when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity – there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job.
I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well. I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe. The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter. But I didn’t learn how to get ahead.
For two years, I’d lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It’s jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse.
It’s very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, ‘Everyone is against us. You can’t believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they’re all conspiring against Christians.’
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