The Ben Cline campaign’s most recent fundraising email calls Beth Macy, born in rural Ohio, a low-paid journalist at The Roanoke Times for 25 years, whose name we know because she wrote a book about the opioid crisis in Appalachia, a “Hollywood attack dog” for “radical Democrats,” “the ultimate out-of-touch Hollywood elite.”
“This is the moment we show the Democrats and their Hollywood money machine that VA-06 is not up for grabs,” the fundraising email pleads to its recipients.
Macy’s sole tie to “Hollywood” – her book on the opioid crisis, Dopesick, was made into a Hulu TV series.
That’s it.
If you’re familiar with Dopesick, you know that it’s anything but “Hollywood” – the book is straight reporting on doctors in Southwest Virginia turning their offices into pill mills, middle-class teens and twentysomethings in Roanoke turning to opioids and then heroin to get a high, a drug kingpin fueling a wave of overdose deaths in the Shenandoah Valley.
“Hollywood.”
The out-of-touch elite here might actually be the guy who has never not had a check from the government to put into his bank account since graduating from a tony private school up North.
Who is asking people in the Sixth District for money to “fuel aggressive ads, mail, and ground operations to destroy her Hollywood-backed takeover and send a clear message.”
The guy already had $655,000 of your money in his campaign bank account when his campaign sent out this message.
There have to be better ways for you to spend your money.
For example, buying a copy of Dopesick, and learning something about the community that you live in that you might not have already known.