Whenever something bad happens — even a hint of disagreement — you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in. - JD Vance

As one book, Appalachian Odyssey, notes about the influx of hill people to Detroit: “It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved . . . the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.”10

So I think that any successful policy program would recognize what my old high school’s teachers see every day: that the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home.

The question each European nation needs to ask itself is this: are you prepared to defend yourself? And the question the US must ask is: if our European allies can't even defend themselves, are they allies, or clients?