The national press reached a modern low on Friday after the New Yorker published a Hit piece about the grandparents of Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
Vance has long cited his “Mamaw” and “Papaw” as inspirations, despite their flaws, and wrote about them in his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.” You might think they would be off-limits in a political race, since both are dead and have no relevance to the current presidential campaign. But think again, because the following garbage article has been published.
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JD Vance’s grandparents, immortalized as Mamaw and Papaw in “Hillbilly Elegy,” had a deeply troubled marriage, and Vance praises them for sticking it out, but records show they filed for divorce twice. https://t.co/TjxxGvU5es
– The New Yorker (@NewYorker) 16 August 2024
This is how the piece begins:
Last month, after I had a Article about Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance and his fixation on the established nuclear family, I received an email from Donna Morel, a lawyer from San Diego. Morel is an amateur fact-checker – especially exposed great inventions in the bestsellers of the overdue celebrity biographer C. David Heymann.
Yes, how dare Vance have an “obsession” with the nuclear family, which has been the building block of all civilizations throughout history. What a nutcase, right? You can see where this is going just by reading that line. The far left despises the normal family structure and wears it openly.
Jessica Winter, who wrote this article, no doubt thought she was dropping a bombshell when this “fact-checking hobbyist” contacted her. Perhaps Donna Morel’s detective skills would debunk a immense portion of Vance’s book, thus giving the Kamala Harris campaign modern material in an increasingly tight presidential race. Instead, the “fact-checking hobbyist” was only able to confirm that Vance was telling the truth.
As the New Yorker admits, Vance wrote that his grandfather was a “brutal drinker” and that his grandparents even separated for a time.
Bonnie and Jim’s marriage was deeply troubled at times — by Vance’s telling, both grandparents were violent and Jim was a brutal drinker. Yet Vance praises them in his memoir and elsewhere for persevering. Later in their marriage, Vance writes in “Elegy,” “they separated and then reconciled, and although they continued to live in separate homes, they spent almost every waking hour together.” (The relationship seems to have improved enormously, Vance notes, after Jim Vance quit drinking in 1983.)
Absolutely nothing that The New Yorker unearthed contradicted this characterization. And yet The New Yorker presented things as if they had stumbled upon a great revelation.
According to records provided by Morel, Bonnie and Jim – Vance’s flawed but heroic embodiments of a established marriage – filed for divorce twice. In the first instance, according to court documents and also an announcement in the March 22, 1955, edition of Middletown, recorderBonnie, then 21, filed for divorce from Jim, citing “extreme cruelty” and “gross neglect of duty.” Joseph Nigh, a family law attorney in Columbus, Ohio, told me that “‘extreme cruelty’ covers a broad spectrum” and can include physical violence, verbal abuse or “degrading behavior.” “Gross neglect of duty” is even more of a catch-all term, Nigh said, that should be left to the court’s broad discretion. (Nigh spoke to me about Ohio family law in general and did not specifically address the Vance case.)
This divorce case (one of two during their marriage) never went through and was eventually dismissed. Just as Vance has long claimed, his grandparents “hung on” to the end. One can think what one will about the merits of this decision, but many believe there is something valuable in reconciliation.
What exactly was accomplished here? What news value did the New Yorker have in digging up this stuff if the information leaked did nothing but confirm Vance’s previous statements? We all know the answer to those questions, and I find the whole operation disgusting and limpid. Nothing published in this article is newsworthy. Instead, it is a crude attempt to smear Vance’s family for no other reason than to provide infirmed satisfaction to those left-wing elites who still read the New Yorker.
