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🌊 Inside JD Vance’s Hometown
Plus: Roca’s mission comes to life in America’s 250th year
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By Max Frost
Tomorrow, America enters its 250th year. As it does, the media will tell you different things: That it is a country of woke lunatics; that it is one of fascists and racists; that it is enabling genocide; that it is preventing it; that it needs to be made great again; that it already is.
Don’t listen to them.
On Tuesday, Roca videographer Drew and I arrived back in New York City from a week-long road trip through southern Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. It marked our eighth US trip in the last year – a period during which we visited 12 states, drove ~10,000 miles, and interviewed ~1,000 Americans.
We doubt many journalists have seen more of this country than we have in the past year. We’ve traveled from the glistening high-rises of Chicago’s Loop to the city’s crime-ridden West Side; from the Mexican neighborhoods on the Rio Grande to the ranches of northern New Mexico; and from the self-described hillbillies of Appalachian Georgia to the booming downtown of Atlanta.
And in doing so, we’ve learned this: Anyone who has a simple take on the country hasn’t seen enough of it.
There’s little we’re prouder of at Roca than our commitment to covering this country as it actually is. We think we’ve made huge strides toward that in the last year, which has seen us become the fastest growing news channel on YouTube, gaining over 200,000 subscribers in just 11 months, and made us the only large news outlet to correctly predict last year’s election result. If you read Roca’s on-the-ground reports, you knew Trump was poised to win.
In America’s 250th year, we’re using this newsletter to double down on that mission: We’ll be delivering weekly installments from our travels across the country. If you want to know the state of America in the year ahead, this is the place for you.
We begin that series today, with a dispatch from Vice President JD Vance’s hometown.
“Yeah, we knew JD,” the woman said.
She was sitting on her porch, shaking. I assume she had Parkinson’s. She took a puff of her cigarette and gestured behind her: “My son worked with him at the store over there, what’s now the Dollar General.”
The Dollar General was just one sign of the poverty in this part of Middletown, Ohio.
The buildings downtown were mostly empty, although there was a Boost Mobile store and a few shops. People in the neighborhood adjacent to downtown told us that prostitutes wandered the streets of the area. The women outside the downtown cafe told us that they had moved to the suburbs because downtown had gotten “so bad.”
“Don’t you know this is a top 15 most ghetto town in Ohio?” one man asked.
Vance launched his political career off this hometown: Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir about growing up in a troubled family between Middletown, Ohio and Jackson, Kentucky became a best-seller that fueled his political rise. We wanted to know if the book was accurate and what Vance’s hometown thought of him, so we went to Middletown.
The lady on the porch…
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Editor’s Note
One man’s dying town is another’s great opportunity. Thank you for reading, and we hope you have a nice weekend. We’re off tomorrow but will be back in a couple of days. See you then.
And if you want some long weekend reading, check out the below:
Thanks for the replies to yesterday’s article on multiculturalism. Here are a few of those emails:
Collin wrote:
As someone who is the grandson of immigrants (one from Columbia, one from the Ukraine), I do believe multiculturalism is what makes this country so great. As you repeated in the article, this country was built by immigrants. My grandparents came over to this country for a better life for themselves and their children. Many of the immigrants today have the same aspirations. It is so saddening to me how we are treating these people today. Basically kidnapping them at their places of work. Sure, there are some who are criminals, drug dealers etc, who came here with bad intentions. However I believe a majority simply want a better life for their families. They come here to work and for opportunities that they would never be able to have in their home countries. The story about the girl who dreamed of being a physicist and loves Stepan Curry was very touching, and in my opinion should be the primary way we see immigrants. People who come here to work hard, provide for their families, and hopefully give their children a life they otherwise would never have. A country built by so many different cultures, viewpoints & perspectives is what makes America so great.
Gerald wrote:
your stance seems to be that only white people oppose mass immigration. White people are racist?
Your liberal mindset gives you an inability to grasp the larger issue of societal collapse, which is sure to occur if mass migration continues!
Your stance is a joke. Your credibility is a joke
And Jeannine wrote:
I think your article hit in an important point, cultures being willing to assimilate into some average customs and the laws of our land. My husband’s grandparents both immigrated, one from Mexico and the other from Spain. His parents both knew the importance of assimilation and stressed that with their children. Although they ate primarily Mexican food at home, their culture was American.
My great grandfather immigrated from Sweden. He was a doctor. He assimilated into American society while maintaining his culture.
If immigrants aren’t willing to assimilate into, then we end up with a fractured society with infighting. I love cultural observances, but the goal of citizenship should be to become American.
Happy Fourth!
Max and Max