I'm from West Virginia. If you didn't know what was happening in NASCAR, you were on the outside. NASCAR is a big league sport, but it's still also country and redneck.

In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it's a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can't see from any highway.

Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.

Anytime you're in West Virginia or near it, and you sing, 'Take Me Home, Country Roads,' it's a sight to behold.

People in West Virginia do have cars. We have indoor plumbing. We even use knives and forks.

I've been a conservative in West Virginia before that was popular. I've seen a change in West Virginia. Not a change in John Raese, but a change in West Virginia and a change in America.