I’m not an expert in the manifestly white experience of working-class Appalachian whites, and I don’t pretend to be. Thus, when slews of livid leftists emerged from the dregs of the commentariat to deem Hillbilly Elegy, Netflix’s ambitious fictionalization of the best-selling memoir, “poverty porn,” I won’t jump to impugn such ill-tempered motives, but the Maoist harmony of the media chorus does point to two undeniable facts. First, that the same media that celebrated the narratively incoherent Oscar bait The Shape of Water (not coincidentally written by the same author of Elegy‘s screenplay) and bent over backwards to defend Cuties, the French film featuring prepubescent children pantomiming oral sex and doggy style to titillate adult perverts, erupted in the same sort of unison to excoriate the largely innocuous Elegy. Second, that the story’s author, attorney and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, is a real person who actually exists.

For the unacquainted, Vance, an elder but still slightly boyish millennial, has become something of a soothsayer on the right side of the aisle, penning his memoir of the demographic that arguably delivered President Trump his victory long before Trump even won the 2016 Republican primary. In the great libertarian debate of the GOP’s post-Trump future, Vance has proven one of the more eloquent and nuanced champions of the more nationalist and natalist end of the conservative spectrum. If the Left wanted an effective internal agent against the corporatist and laissez-faire orthodoxy of the GOP, they couldn’t find one better than either Vance or his memoir.