J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, says the nation’s ruling class “actually enjoys plundering the greatest country in the world” rather than investing in American communities.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Saturday, Vance said a “fundamental problem” in the U.S. is that economic and political elites have no obligation to America’s working and middle class.
“I think a lot of these people have unfortunately convinced themselves that they don’t owe anything to the country that gave them so much wealth and so much power,” Vance said:
It’s not just the bad policies of the Biden administration that we have to push back against, that’s obviously important, it’s the entire leadership class in this country in the government, in the bureaucracy, in the private sector … these people do not see themselves as Americans first, as owing an obligation to the country that gave them all the incredible opportunities. And that is maybe the fundamental problem in this country: The ruling class that instead of investing in this country — building institutions, making the people who live here wealthier, happier, more prosperous — it actually enjoys plundering the greatest country in the world because it doesn’t see that it owes anything to the people who live here, to the previous generations that actually built this country. [Emphasis added]
On immigration, for instance, Vance said economic elites are stripping investment from middle America and sending that money to the coasts as a result of their desire for mass illegal and legal immigration to drive down U.S. wages.