The new Republican vice presidential nominee hangs his proverbial hat on hailing from Middletown, Ohio — a steel mill town in the heart of working-class America. But for a few years, J.D.
Vance joined the world of coastal elites, building a robust venture capitalist career and hobnobbing with some of the wealthiest tech leaders in the Bay Area. Miles away from his Appalachian upbringing and long before he became former President Trump's , he was quietly building a Silicon Valley venture capital career and volunteering at a community garden in San Francisco. In an essay for the Atlantic in 2016, he contrasted life in San Francisco with conditions in his hometown: "A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I spent the morning volunteering at a community garden in our San Francisco neighborhood.
After a few hours of casual labor, we and the other volunteers dispersed to our respective destinations: tasty brunches, day trips to wine country, art-gallery tours. It was a perfectly normal day, by San Francisco standards. "That very same Saturday, in the small Ohio town where I grew up, four people overdosed on heroin.
A local police lieutenant coolly summarized the banality of it all: 'It’s not all that unusual for a 24-hour period here.' He was right: in Middletown, Ohio, that too is a perfectly normal day." The man who would later write the bestselling " : A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis" — and become a darling of the MAGA right — was in his late 20s when he moved to San.
