“Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?”Hillbilly Elegy author turned Senate candidate J.D. Vance asked in a campaign ad he tweeted on April 4.
He goes on to say, “The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump's wall. They censor us, but it doesn't change the truth. Joe Biden's open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
The unchanged truth is that only a small fraction of the illegal drugs coming into America from Mexico are smuggled by the undocumented immigrants Vance describes as “Democrat voters.” The great majority of illegal drugs from Mexico are smuggled by the cartels in through legal checkpoints that would exist even if a Trumpian wall extended the entire length of the border.
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“By the truckload,”’ a retired Drug Enforcement Administration supervisor told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “Tractor-trailers.”
The latest figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that in February, 53,900 pounds of illegal drugs were seized at the legal crossing points. Only 6,800 pounds were seized anywhere else along the border.
Back in 2016, when Vance was promoting his book Hillbilly Elegy and offering his opinions as the newly proclaimed ”bard of the rustbelt,” Vance was only right to scoff at the notion that “[Trump] can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out.”
“Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein,” Vance wrote at the time, adding that “the quick high of ‘Make America Great Again’… enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears.”
With the cold indifference of a dealer cashing in on addicts, the Vance of 2022 is now peddling the falsehoods of the Trump cartel. Vance ends his new ad boosting his demagoguery by capitalizing on his mother’s near-fatal battle with addiction.
“This issue is personal,” he says. “I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border. No child should grow up orphaned.”
Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and if he is keeping up on the news from there he knows that a onetime football star at his old high school was sentenced on January 12 to 25 years in federal prison for flooding the city with heroin. Donte Holdbrook, 28, was supplied by the Sinaloa Cartel.
Middletown is also where Vance’s mother went from pills to heroin. He is lucky he was not in fact orphaned after the cartel began routinely boosting its profits by mixing in cheap but deadly fentanyl around 2015. The city recorded 1,991 overdoses between 2016 and 2018.
In March of 2018, Holdbrook and 11 others were indicted for selling heroin laced with fentanyl and he later pleaded guilty to drug trafficking. The government's sentencing memorandum noted a statistic provided by the Middletown Police Department soon after Holdbrook’s arrest.
“Overdoses in Middletown dropped by approximately one-third.”
The memo further reported that once the heroin was trucked across the western border, it became part of an all-American operation.
“In this criminal conspiracy, Mr. Holdbrook sat at the top of the organization in this District… It was Holdbrook who personally arranged for the acquisitions in Mexico. It was Holdbrook who personally arranged—commonly using his former status as star high school athlete and deploying his considerable persuasive skills—for drug mules to drive… to the western United States, where they retrieved the fentanyl mix and ferried it back to the Middletown community.”
The sentencing memo says Holdbook then sought to make each new load more profitable:
“It was cut (again, done or arranged by Holdbrook). It was Holdbrook who dictated and arranged for the distribution of the poison… from which to wring crass profit from those souls who are in the grip of the deadly and grim grasp of Fentanyl.”
What the memo describes as “the cash scythed from the addicts”was “packaged… for transport back to Mexico where it was used to buy still more Fentanyl.”
The memo emphasizes, “These are not speculations, these are facts.”
Such facts were important to the Vance of 2016, who tweeted back then that Trump was “an idiot” and “noxious” and “reprehensible..”
But those tweets have been deleted by the Vance of now, who is clearly desperate to win over a Republican base that mainlines Trump’s false promises and easy answers. His new ad features an American flag fluttering before a stretch of wall. And then comes a glimpse of the noxious, reprehensible idiot who Vance the candidate recently called “the greatest president of my lifetime.”
The tragedy is that Vance in 2016 seemed to be one of the few people who truly understood the Trump phenomenon.
But ambition has turned the hillbilly bard into a charlatan.
And elegy has become apostasy.
