‘Triumph Of The Will Hillbilly’

Rod Dreher looks at a few egregious examples of 'cancel culture' run amok. I wonder how these people will react to the Thermidorian Reaction when it comes, and it will!

From The American Conservative

By Rod Dreher

Sarah Jones is a young left-wing writer with Appalachian roots. She has made it her business these past few years to savage J.D. Vance and his Hillbilly Elegy memoir because, as far as I can tell, he grew up poor, under painful and difficult circumstances, and emerged a conservative (though not a conventional one). Traitor to his class! Jones is out today with a screechy condemnation of the new Hillbilly Elegy movie, which airs on Netflix starting November 24. The excitable Miss Jones seems to think it’s a far-right Riefenstahlian gloss on Appalachian culture — call it Triumph Of The Hillbilly. Here’s how her piece starts:

Five minutes into Hillbilly Elegy, I hit pause and walked out of my living room. In the relative safety of my bedroom, I stared at the wall and then at the ceiling; both suddenly appeared preferable to my television.

Can you imagine? I mean, seriously, can you imagine being so damn fragile? She took to the bed! I hope Miz Sarah was able to get her hoop skirt off before her swoon, and that the maid came up with some quinine water on ice. Sounds like female trouble to me.

Sarah Jones is one of those lefties who is always two tics away from a gran mal seizure. That should have been a sign to her, and to her editor, that she is incapable of writing about this movie. But she has delivered a lengthy indictment of J.D. Vance (again) for his horrible politics, and director Ron Howard for whitewashing the fact that J.D. Vance is deeply problematic, a fascist, and probably tortures kittens.

I have not yet seen the movie. Netflix provided me a copy a couple of days ago. I plan to watch it tonight. I’ve read some of the ghastly reviews. Maybe it’s not a very good movie. I’ll see for myself. What I do know from these reviews is that some of the critics seem to be trashing the movie because it seems to make Trump voters seem like human beings. J.D. is a friend of mine, and I was an early champion of his book. But I’m going to be honest about the movie when I write about it.

That said, imagine my shock when I turned up in Sarah Jones’s screed, as an example of why J.D. Vance is a creep:

Elevated by Yale to dramatic heights, Vance spent years working for Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist whose links to the anti-democratic right predated his support for Trump. Thiel even blurbed Elegy, and helped bankroll Vance’s new venture-capital fund, which will allegedly bring tech jobs to the forgotten hollers of Atlanta and Raleigh. Following the success of his book, Vance became a frequent Tucker Carlson guest and developed an ally in conservative blogger Rod Dreher, who claimed in 2016 that Elegy “does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor Black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.” He and Vance remain personal friends to this day.

This matters, because Dreher isn’t exactly a Lincoln Project Republican. Like Thiel, Dreher belongs to a further fringe of the right wing. His views deserve some dissection, if only to illustrate how troubling it is that Vance will not disavow him, and that Howard has erased any trace of the politics that drew Dreher to Vance’s work. In his regular column for The American Conservative, Dreher has repeatedly recommended The Camp of the Saints, the openly racist book championed by Steve Bannon. Dreher has praised and even met with Viktor Orban, president of Hungary, dubbing him a champion for Christians. (Orban, if you aren’t familiar, shut Hungary’s borders to migrants in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, arrested critics, and recently assigned himself new, dictatorial emergency powers. Dreher has also said he is “glad” that Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator, won the Spanish Civil War.)

Just FYI, here is the core of Jones’s rant:

But in elevating Vance, however sanitized, Howard also elevates the nativist movement that influences his young hero. Glenn Close and Amy Adams have pinned their Oscar hopes to material penned by a right-wing commentator who keeps company with some of the most anti-democratic figures in the modern conservative movement. 

She criticizes Ron Howard for taking out the political material — the same material that offends her — but hates him for making a movie of J.D. Vance’s book at all, because his friends are awful people. Golly.

Well, for the record, I have said flat-out that The Camp of the Saints is a bad book, and a racist book; I made it clear that my recommendation is to read it to understand our times. Sarah Jones — whose dishonesty I have called out before — seems to be one of these ultrafragile leftists who cannot bear to read something impure, even if it’s important to understanding the world as it is. Viktor Orban actually is a champion for Christians, whether Sarah Jones likes it or not. Her characterization of him and his Covid powers is more lying hysteria; after the Covid emergency passed earlier this year, the law granting him the powers (assigned not by Orban to himself, but by the Parliament to Orban) expired. Like I said she’s a loony. And yes, I am glad that Franco beat the Communists in the Spanish Civil War. That doesn’t mean that I endorse Franco’s dictatorship, but Spain faced two bad choices. I would rather have seen Franco win than the priest-and-nun-murderers aligned with Stalin. 

What interests me about Sarah Jones’s piece, though, is her demand that J.D. Vance “disavow” me as his friend. This is how many on the Left behave. They believe that one should denounce one’s friends if they are revealed to be in some way ideologically problematic. This is morally insane, of course. I have lots of friends with whom I don’t agree, even on important issues. But if I have offered you my friendship, you would have to go very, very far before I would denounce you. Denunciation is monstrous. I can’t even conceive of it. But those who call themselves friends of Sarah Jones had better be on alert for betrayal.

A friend e-mailed me this week a shocking example of the Left defenestrating a man who has done incalculable good for the cause of organic agriculture and small farming. Mother Jones leads the call for the cancellation of Joel Salatin, for a time the most famous small farmer in America. Salatin, about whom I wrote in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons, is a Christian libertarian farmer from rural Virginia. He has a punchy way with words, and established a big name for himself on the small farming/sustainable agriculture circuit, in part as an advocate of a grazing method that maintains soil fertility. The Mother Jones writer Tom Philpott writes:

For nearly two decades, Salatin has been the movement’s most famous farmer. He burst onto the national scene in 2002, when [Michael] Pollan wrote a paean in Gourmet Magazine to his ingenious pasture-based livestock-rearing techniques. Four years later, the self-proclaimed “lunatic farmer” starred in a large section of Pollan’s landmark bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma (excerpted by Mother Jones in 2006). The author summoned prose as lush as a summer prairie to describe Salatin’s operation, Polyface Farm, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley: It was “a scene of almost classical pastoral beauty—the meadows dotted with contented animals, the backdrop of woods, a twisting brook threading through it all—marred only by the fact that I couldn’t just lie here on this springy pasture, admiring it for the rest of the afternoon.”

Pollan’s book helped propel Salatin’s career as a speaker and writer, and the farmer soon emerged as a fixture on the global sustainable-agriculture speaking circuit and authored many popular books. He snagged a starring role in the Oscar-nominated 2008 documentary Food, Inc.; the Guardian called him “America’s most celebrated pioneer of chemical-free farming,” and Time hailed him as the “world’s most innovative farmer.”

So why is Salatin being cancelled now?

In 2019, Chris Newman, a young black farmer, tried to make a go of it using Salatin’s methods, but decided that they didn’t work, and that the small farm movement is not all it’s cracked up to be. Newman wrote a critical essay about it. Whether he was right or wrong, Newman made an actual argument, and deserved to be taken seriously.

Salatin responded with a tossed-off blog post titled “Whining And Entitlement,” dismissing Newman’s critique. He said in the post:

The problem with disagreeing with Chris is that I’ll be called a racist. That’s unfortunate. Is it more racist to play the race card to anybody who dares disagree with you than it is to actually be a racist? I’m bringing this up because all races need to understand that when you use that term, it shuts down all communication. So I’m going out on a limb here in saying anything negative about someone who is not white. For non-whites to assume the default “racist!” accusation fits most circumstances is to stall forward progress. Period.

That was wrong. Newman didn’t make his critique racial. Why did Salatin bring race into it, and in such a defensive way? What Salatin wrote was unfair, dismissive, and kind of jerky. Newman’s post got Salatin’s libertarian back up, and he responded poorly.

But then Chris Newman behaved badly too. Stung by memory of Salatin’s 2019 blog post, after the George Floyd killing, Newman began campaigning in the organic agricultural press for Salatin’s cancellation. Things heated up. Salatin again responded with combative rhetoric. And now it has gone nuclear.

The long Mother Jones piece serves as a justification for why everyone should ignore Joel Salatin because he always was problematic, but journalists didn’t see it. Philpott confesses his error:

For my part, I regret not taking a more skeptical view of Salatin. A self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” he has long appealed to journalists’ impulse for counterintuitive stories. We picture political progressives when we think of farmers deploying biodiversity rather than agrichemicals to run their operations. Salatin’s staunch political conservatism breaks that mold, and that makes him a compelling story.

Salatin was always this! But food journalists and others realized that he had interesting and important things to say, even though he held political views they might not like. I featured him in Crunchy Cons because he was a right-wing Christian organic farmer who had some important and prophetic things to say to conservatives about how we need to change the way we think about farming, and caring for Creation.

What Philpott’s story seems to say is that Salatin should be thrown aside because his politics are a problem. I think it’s perfectly right, and even necessary, to subject Salatin’s claims for his farming model to empirical analysis. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. But the fact that Joel Salatin is a pro-lifer, or a Covid denier, or a white man who inherited land from his father (whose politics were also problematic) — it’s just weird and destructive. Surprise! They have now decided that transpeople would make better farmers than old white Christian libertarian males like Joel Salatin. Final graf in the Mother Jones story:

Newman offered a similar explanation for the emerging tendency to question a go-it-alone approach to farming. “I think marginalized people are better equipped to think of more innovative models for how sustainable agriculture can work than most of the white people who are incumbent in agriculture,” Newman told me. “People who are Black or Indigenous or gay, who are trans, are used to having to architect their entire existence around incumbent oppression.” He added: “When you see all these collective movements and cooperatives coming out of communities of color, it’s really not surprising, because people of color who want to get on the landscape don’t usually have the opportunity to go it alone.”

I don’t know Joel Salatin personally — the last time I talked to him was 2005, when I was reporting Crunchy Cons — but this depresses me. Salatin has a big, bumptious personality. His political views are not always my political views, and he definitely went at Chris Newman the wrong way (though Chris Newman took the bait, and reacted just as Salatin predicted he would). But is it really the case that all the good and pioneering work that Joel Salatin has done is now to be trashed because he has offended against leftist sacred cows? Are crotchety white conservative farmers now persona non grata among left-wing types, because they hold non-leftist views?

In Crunchy Cons, I wrote about a large Texas farm family who learned from Salatin’s methods, and who provided delicious meats to customers at the Dallas Farmer’s Market, and to restaurants in the area. The family were all conservatives, and not just conservatives, but fundamentalist Christians. The father, Robert Hutchins, told me that he often felt closer in spirit to his hippie farmer friends than to conventional suburban Republicans. Back then, nobody really seemed to care what the religious beliefs of the Hutchins family were. They knew that I was a Catholic, and an urban Republican type — but they welcomed me to their farm anyway, and made me and my wife and kids feel at home. Once on a big open house at their farm, we saw some secular lefties we knew from Dallas food circles. Everybody was having a good time, sharing in the good of family farming.

Now, though, I wonder if that is possible. The Left is busy cancelling Joel Salatin, who, whatever his sins and failings, has done more to advance a good and noble undertaking than almost anybody. This Mother Jones piece calls all of Salatin’s life’s work into question because of political views the Left considers cranky. It is deeply unjust. Hear me clearly: Salatin is not a sacred cow, and his work should be criticized, and criticized fairly. But that’s not what’s happening here. The Left doesn’t like his political views, so Joel Salatin is done.

This is a pattern with the Left today. Sarah Jones calls J.D. Vance’s entire work into question, and Ron Howard’s movie, because of some of Vance’s political views, and some of his friends and associates. Similarly, Jim Wallis, a patriarch of the Religious Left, was cancelled this year because he declined to publish in Sojourners a hysterical piece accusing the Catholic Church of white supremacy. All of Wallis’s work meant nothing to these zealots. He’s just another old white male who is insufficiently woke.

These people are dangerous. If you are on the Left, you had better watch yourself. They’ll come for you next. A writer who cannot watch five minutes of a movie without taking the to bed, overcome with rage, is not a stable person — or friend, or ally.