J.D. Vance

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.

I don\'t think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban.

We need to ask questions about how we\'re going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home.

I have been waiting for someone to come along and tap into that very real frustration that exists in a very large segment of the working-class Republican base. And no one had done it until Donald Trump. I very clearly saw a void, and I knew somebody would fill it. And the moment I knew he had filled it, I knew he would win the nomination.

Every two weeks, I\'d get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.

When I started law school in 2010, I would have called myself an atheist. When I graduated law school in 2013, I was exploring my faith again. A lot changed in those three years.

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.

I do think that tonal element of Trump\'s is attractive, but I don\'t know if I would go so far as to say the confrontational element of his rhetoric is necessarily attractive.

Stanford\'s law school application wasn\'t the standard combination of college tran, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren\'t a loser.

Hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.

I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn\'t know how the world of the American elite works.

It would be great if people returned to areas of the country that need talented people with good economic prospects. Our country would really benefit if those who went to elite universities, who started businesses, who started nonprofits, weren\'t just doing so on the coasts.

I once interviewed my grandma for a class project about the Second World War. After 70 years filled with marriage, children, grandchildren, death, poverty and triumph, the thing about which she was unquestionably the proudest and most excited was that she and her family did their part during the war.

There are definitely - there is definitely an element of Donald Trump\'s support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia. But a lot of these folks are just really hardworking people who are struggling in really important ways.

I am proud of my service and proud of those who served alongside me. But war is about more than service and sacrifice - it\'s about winning.

Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation\'s highest office.

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.

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.

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.

I didn\'t come from the elites. I didn\'t come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it\'s a town that\'s really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America\'s working class.

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.

We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn\'t teach me.

For decades, scholars have studied the ways in which implicit biases affect how we perceive other people in this multiethnic society of ours. The data consistently shows that about 90 percent of us possess some implicit prejudices - and, unsurprisingly, people typically favor their own group.

Airing the family\'s laundry can make people upset.

We need to think about how we teach working-class children about not just hard skills, like reading and mathematics, but also soft skills, like conflict resolution and financial management.

My grandma - we called her Mamaw - loved her country.

People have lost their faith that if they work hard, if they try to get ahead, if they play by the rules, then that will ultimately result in positive outcomes.

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.

We\'re very good at talking about the individual in American politics and excellent at talking about the government. But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture.

It\'s amazing to think how powerful of a force optimism and hope can be. It\'s the thing that saves me. I believed that I lived in the greatest country in the world. I still believe that, and consequently, I believed that I had a chance, even though things around me were absolutely crazy and difficult.