Keep in mind that Vance, despite his difficult upbringing, now works with Peter Thiel, so you’ll excuse me if I take his musings about what’s REALLY going on in the American heartland with a grain of salt.

This whole strain of argument is rooted in falsehoods and #NotAllRednecks logic. For one thing, the median income of Trump voters was HIGHER than the national average. Secondly, empathy for the working class is NOT a blind spot for the media. Every Presidential election cycle BEGINS in rural Middle America—Iowa, and New Hampshire, which is the Iowa of New England—and the travails of people in flyover country have been preserved as lore in our culture since the American Revolution. Pick any spot in American pop history and you will find your Joad families, and your Tommys working at the docks. Hell, the entire Bruce Springsteen discography consists of a rich dude furiously reaching out to empathize with every down-on-his-luck white dude. You want a real blind spot? Try redlining. Try the iceberg the size of fucking Delaware that’s about to break off Antarctica, melt, and flood southern Florida.

And yet that hasn’t stopped the media from latching onto the “working class whites were slighted!” narrative and, in some cases, even acting on it.

It’s no coincidence that NBC hired Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly away from the Eye of Sauron just last week. Given that they already employ vacuous career both-siders like Brian Williams and Chuck Todd, it's clear that NBC is establishing standard, day-to-day conservatism as its new center. White Working Class folk are the new hotness, and we’re about to get a whole lot of their perspective stuffed into a pill and crammed down our throats.

The election of Trump, as you might have guessed, isn’t going to crush these nefarious media elites. Most of them have already simply adjusted their principles in order to curry favor with the powerful (coughSCARBOROUGHcough). And saying that you TOTALLY get what rural America is going through is a cheap and easy way to distance yourself from all the bad bad bad media people who correctly pointed out that your average Trump rally this fall looked like a Grand Dragon conclave.

So I’ve had enough. I’ve been to Middle America as well. Hell, I grew up there. I’ve had my fair share of good times with rednecks and hunters and God-fearing truck drivers. Most people in these regions of our country are very nice people. Of course they are. Are they all racist? Of course not. Are their problems real? Of course they are. Have Democrats done a shit job offering them things of value? God, yes.