Minnesota Gov. Torches JD Vance: He Knows 'Nothing About Small-Town America'

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) recently slammed Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, over his views on rural America.

Duringan appearance on a Tuesday segment of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the governor criticized Vance for the way he characterized “small-town America” in his 2016 bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.”

“People like JD Vance know nothing about small-town America,” said Walz, who was raised in rural Nebraska. “My town had 400 people in it, 24 kids in my graduating class — 12 were cousins.”

“And he gets it all wrong,” he continued. “It’s not about hate, it’s not about collapsing in. The golden rule there is mind your own damn business.”

Walz then said that the Republican Party has “destroyed rural America” through their policies.

“They’ve divided us. They’re in our exam rooms, they’re telling us what books to read,” he said. “And I think what Kamala Harris knows is, bringing people together around the shared values — strong public schools, strong labor unions that create the middle class, health care that’s affordable and accessible — those are the things.”

The Minnesota governor later emphasized his point that Republicans have created division, saying, “We can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with our uncle, because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary.”

He added that right-wing politicians are running for the “he-man, women-haters club or something.”

“That angst that JD Vance talks about in ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ — none of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale, and none of them went on to be venture capitalists or whatever,” he later continued. “It’s not who people really are.”

Vance, a Marine Corps veteran, attended Yale Law School