Recently a liberal filmmaker (Ron Howard) made a movie with liberal actors about the book Hillbilly Elegy. It has received strong criticism from both sides of the political aisle. But since this is not a conservative movie, and it was made by standard-issue Hollywood leftists, the criticism from the left is more interesting.

The book was written by a man who had grown up in Appalachia with a lot of poor white neighbors. He describes the pathologies of that culture, from drug use, to lack of planning for the future, to lack of interest in education, and so on. But he also mentions some virtues of some of his neighbors, as an increasingly desperate group of people try to cope with plant closures and economic changes that are devastating their neighborhoods. These occasionally sympathetic glimpses into the lives of poor whites are drawing the ire of leftists, and Glenn Reynolds thinks he knows why:

The old Southern Democrats maintained the allegiance of poor whites by making sure those poor whites felt they could look down on blacks. The modern Democratic Party maintains the allegiance of ­upper-middle-class whites by making sure they can look down on lower-class whites. By ­humanizing those lower-class whites, Netflix’s “Hillbilly Elegy” calls the whole enterprise into question.

One of the fun challenges of getting old is that one gets to shed one’s filter. Biden just said: “I’ll develop some disease and say I have to resign.”

The great Thomas Sowell has written his tribute to his friend, the great Walter Williams. Here is a sample:

Walter once said he hoped that, on the day he died, he would have taught a class that day. And that is just the way it was, when he died on Wednesday, December 2, 2020.