Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) has been marked for extinction by the elites and the mainstream media. It’s a story that’s proving to be very similar to that of Donald Trump. Everyone on the left adored him until he decided to put the American people ahead of the interests of foreign oligarchs. Since he accepted Donald Trump’s offer to be his running mate, Vance has been the subject of some of the most intense smears that we’ve seen since Sarah Palin was picked by John McCain. It’s so bad that European publishers are refusing to print more copies of Vance’s bestselling book.
Publishing house Ullstein Buchverlage owns the rights to Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. The book immediately sold out in Germany when Vance accepted the nomination to be Trump’s VP. Many Germans had never heard of him and there is intense interest in getting to know him. Now that the book has sold out, however, Ullstein Buchverlage has announced that it is refusing to print any more copies.
The company would rather lose money than allow people to realize that JD Vance is not exactly the monster that the mainstream media makes him out to be.
The book, Hillbilly Elegy, wasn’t written from a political perspective. It was first published in 2016—six years before Vance ran for his US Senate seat. It was about growing up poor and white in rural Ohio. The book was a runaway bestseller and Ron Howard turned it into a movie in 2020. It was nominated for dozens of film awards and Glenn Close won Best Actress for her portrayal of Vance’s grandmother, “Mamaw,” at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
The book was popular overseas even before Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate. A lot of people in Europe have an intense interest in the reasons why the social fabric in America has disintegrated—and Vance’s book provides a few answers from someone who lived it.
Hillbilly Elegy has nothing to do with the America First policies that Vance has come to champion in recent years. But Ullstein Buchverlage has decided to censor the book because of that.
“He [Vance] is officially acting alongside him [Trump] and advocating an aggressively demagogic, exclusionary policy.”
Ullstein Buchverlage acknowledges that the book is one of the most important and influential books of the 21st century. The American empire is in decline and on life support, and it’s good to try to figure out the reasons why. But because Ullstein Buchverlage doesn’t like Vance’s pro-America political policies, nobody in Germany gets to read the book that has nothing to do with MAGA!
HarperCollins is currently scrambling to print enough copies of the book here in the US to keep up with demand. It shot back up to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list the moment that Vance was selected by Trump. At least not every publishing company is allergic to making money.
The fact that a German publishing company is censoring the book is drawing a lot of uneasy comparisons to the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s. It’s kind of a sensitive subject to the German people these days. Whether you refuse to print a book or set it on fire, what’s the difference? People don’t get to read it for themselves and consider the ideas in it either way.
Blacklisting and censorship of non-pornographic works never succeed. They do, however, tell you a lot about the character and intent of the people doing the censoring.
