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Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social

The first settlers in my state were mostly Scots-Irish—a hard, proud, fiercely independent people, forged in the hills of Ulster and the backwoods of Appalachia, ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization. They were the ancestors—as it just so happens—of my friend and our vice president, JD Vance. As the historian David McCullough writes, the Scots-Irish families that first settled Missouri “saw themselves as the true Americans”: Their idol was Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory of Tennessee, ‘One-man-­with-­courage-­makes-­majority’ Jackson, the first president from west of the Alleghenies … Their trust was in the Lord and common sense. That they and their forebears had survived at all in backwoods Kentucky—or earlier in upland Virginia and the Carolinas—was due primarily to ‘good, hard sense,’ as they said, and no end of hard work.
sep 3, 2025, 1:34 am • 7 1

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