Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Tuesday blasted J.D. Vance for being a “grifter,” because Vance claimed he was some sort of a hillbilly who grew up in rural Appalachia when, in fact, he grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. Governor Walz, on the other hand, grew up in a town of 400 people with “24 kids in my graduating class,” where “12 were cousins.”

In Vance’s autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, he trash-talks his poor relatives, essentially accusing them of not being successful in life because of moral defects like laziness and addiction; he doubled down on these memes in his RNC speech, pointing out his own mother’s drug use.

In fact, they’re victims of Republican policies that make the rich richer and keep poor people poor; his mother’s addiction is a symptom, not a cause.

Vance, of course, “nobly” rose above it all with the help of our socialist G.I. Bill (which Republicans opposed) paying his way through Yale, and with help from right-wing billionaires who took Vance under their wings and helped him set up a hedge fund that made him fabulously rich.

Often, the media refers to his life as a true “Horatio Alger story.”

When I was a kid, my dad was the national president of the book-collecting group The Horatio Alger Society: Vance’s is a story right out of Alger’s books. Alger wrote stories about poor young men being lifted up into business success by wealthy older men, although he’s now out of favor because he was busted as a sex predator. Even the Horatio Alger story itself, it turns out, was a grift.

Just like Vance’s career and his life story are a grift. Just like most all of Donald Trump’s failed businesses. Just like Nixon’s racist “law and order” grift. And Reagan’s tax-cut-for-the-rich “supply side” grift. And Bush and Cheney’s oil-grabbing Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” grift.

Republican policies, in fact, have been one long grift for more than half a century.

Largely thanks to Ronald Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and other similar legislation, the entire American economy has become one giant grift.

Every company, it seems, is trying to hustle us. Pretending they care about customer service or making/selling........

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