Who is J. D. Vance?
J. D. Vance first gained prominence from being the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. I read it and found it intriguing and well written. But the book stimulated a lively, often angry response from those who thought it painted too dark and negative a picture of Appalachia.
Vance started out as a critic of Donald Trump. Then, he made a fateful decision. He wanted power. And he was willing to do whatever it took to get it. In so doing, Vance abased himself before the Orange God.
Tom Nichols gives us an incisive look at Vance.
What do we call a man who turns on everything he once claimed to believe? For a practitioner of petty and self-serving duplicity, we use “sellout” or “backstabber.” (Sometimes we impugn the animal kingdom and call him a rat, a skunk, or a weasel.) For grand betrayals of weightier loyalties—country and faith—we invoke the more solemn terms of “traitor” or “apostate.”
But what should we call J. D. Vance, the self-described hillbilly turned Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist turned Senate candidate? Words fail. His perfidy to his own people in Ohio is too big to allow him to escape with the label of “opportunist,” and yet the shabbiness and absurdity of his Senate campaign is too small to brand him a defector or a heretic…
…Vance wrote, in this very magazine, that Donald Trump “is cultural heroin”—a powerful charge from someone who hails from the epicenter of the opioid epidemic—and provided a “quick high” that could not fix what ails the country. All of that vanished once Vance decided he wanted to go to Washington—and after the Trump supporter Peter Thiel dropped $10 million into a political action committee.
Peter Thiel, as you probably know, is a viciously Right-wing fanatic. Thiel is also backing neo-Nazi Blake Masters in Arizona. Thiel is a genuinely frightening person. If I may offer a few choice samples of his “thinking”:
In 2009, he published a piece arguing that he had come to “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” [My emphasis] Seven years later, he secretly used his considerable resources to bankrupt Gawker as revenge, after one of its blogs had outed him years earlier.
And there’s this:
[Quote from Thiel]: The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women [My emphasis]– two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
From the same article, this assessment by Robert Reich:
Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15m to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Thiel has donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.
Another figure that Vance listens to is the genuinely horrifying Curtis Yarvin, who frankly advocates the destruction of our democratic republic and the installation of an authoritarian state.
In September 2021, J.D. Vance, a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, appeared on a conservative podcast to discuss what is to be done with the United States, and his proposals were dramatic. He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.
To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things…”
To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “absolute power,” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “fascist” — a term he disputes, arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is “monarchist.” You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program — especially the “monarchy” thing — but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures.
And then there’s this delightful tidbit:
Last year, J.D. Vance proposed a “de-Nazification” plan to purge liberals from the government on a podcast hosted by a man who once said “feminists need rape.”
J.D. Vance appeared with podcaster who once said “feminists need rape”
The GOP Senate candidate proposed a “de-Nazification” plan for purging liberals from government.
Vance is in thrall to Big Pharma. The AP is on top of it:
When JD Vance founded “Our Ohio Renewal” a day after the 2016 presidential election, he promoted the charity as a vehicle for helping solve the scourge of opioid addiction that he had lamented in “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestselling memoir.
But Vance shuttered the nonprofit last year and its foundation in May, shortly after clinching the state’s Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, according to state records reviewed by The Associated Press. An AP review found that the charity’s most notable accomplishment — sending an addiction specialist to Ohio’s Appalachian region for a yearlong residency — was tainted by ties among the doctor, the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.
The mothballing of Our Ohio Renewal and its dearth of tangible success raise questions about Vance’s management of the organization. His decision to bring on Dr. Sally Satel is drawing particular scrutiny. She’s an American Enterprise Institute resident scholar whose writings questioning the role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis were published in The New York Times and elsewhere before she began the residency in the fall of 2018.
Politifact has weighed in on Democratic candidate Tim Ryan’s charge that Vance’s charity did virtually nothing. Their verdict: MOSTLY TRUE:
- In 2017, the year a nonprofit Vance formed to fight opioid abuse was most active, it spent nearly half of its receipts to pay a Vance political adviser to be executive director and to pay for a survey.
- The survey was done as Vance was considering a 2018 run for the Senate. It’s unclear exactly what the survey asked about.
- The nonprofit did little to fight opioid abuse.
Vance, the White Supremacist
Vance is a supporter of the vile racist idea known as “The Great Replacement”, the idea that Democrats are deliberately using people of color to undermine white control of America. America’s Voice has this to say:
In an attempt to burnish his radical-right credentials after years of being a public face opposing Trump, J.D. Vance actively courted figures immensely popular with the Republican base. Figures like Tucker Carlson, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk and of course, Trump himself, all of whom loudly peddle racist, xenophobic, and election lies. Vance quickly sounded like those he surrounded himself with, making a racist conspiracy theory about a non-existent immigrant “invasion” a core part of his primary campaign. This is the same racist conspiracy theory, it should be noted, that inspired the mass murders who attacked shoppers at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 and just across the Ohio state line at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Pennsylvania, in 2018.
The racist fiction holds that there is a literal invasion happening along the U.S. border with Mexico as non-white migrants are coming in a hostile and coordinated effort to replace white people and undermine our democracy and sovereignty. This is an absurd notion completely divorced from reality, but a powerful story to stoke fear and anxiety in the minds of voters. This rhetoric around “invasion” is inextricably tied into the white nationalist ideas of a “great replacement,” which research from the University of Chicago found was the “most important driver of the insurrectionist movement” that sparked the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by an angry mob in January 2021. Vance ran on these ideas and surrounded himself with others who amplified them.
“Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans,” says the ad, “with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
The claim that migrants represent “Democrat voters” is a form of “great replacement theory” rhetoric. This idea, which posits a nefarious elite scheme to replace native-born Americans with outsiders via migration-enhanced demographic change, comes in various forms.
One version is explicitly race based, envisioning “white genocide,” which Vance isn’t necessarily employing. Another version is more overtly partisan: It posits that immigration is really a plot by liberal and Democratic elites to replace conservative voters with “more obedient voters from the Third World,” as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson heinously puts it.
Vance’s formulation is in line with Carlson’s, albeit with a twist: He suggests “Democrat voters” in the form of migrants are one factor “killing Ohioans.” That’s partly a reference to drugs crossing the border, but the hint at an apocalyptic demographic threat is obvious.
Vance, Mortal Enemy of Women’s Rights
J. D. Vance’s views on women can only be called appalling. From Politifact:
[Reporter Curtis] Jackson asked Vance whether anti-abortion laws should include exceptions for rape or incest.
Vance replied: “Look, I think two wrongs don’t make a right. At the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”
Jackson tried to get Vance to comment directly about exceptions, asking “should a woman be forced to carry a child to term after she has been a victim of incest or rape?”
Vance replied: “My view on this has been very clear and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that is wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby. We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life. Right now our society doesn’t afford that and I think it’s a tragedy and I think we can do better.”
From Newsweek:
J.D. VANCE SAYS LINDSEY GRAHAM’S ABORTION BILL IS ‘TOTALLY REASONABLE’
J.D. Vance, Ohio’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, said the national abortion bill proposed by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was “totally reasonable” during Monday night’s debate against Democratic hopeful Tim Ryan.
Vance, when asked by debate moderators if he would vote for Graham’s bill that bans abortion after 15 weeks, said he thinks it’s “totally reasonable to say you cannot abort a baby, especially for elective reasons, after 15 weeks of gestation.”
Hey ladies, are you in an abusive relationship? Just hang in there and take the punches—for the kids.
Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance’s views on women have been unambiguous for some time now—he’s previously called rape “inconvenient” and said abortion is as morally reprehensible as slavery—but just in case anyone wasn’t fully aware of his stance, a recently unearthed clip featuring the venture capitalist makes it unequivocal.
Speaking to Pacifica Christian High School last September, with the interview published by Vice News on Monday, Vance claimed that divorce inflicts terrible harm on children and that it would be better for people in unhappy marriages to stay together, even if said marriages are “violent.” Vance told the audience: “My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways. But they never got divorced. They were together to the end, till death do us part—that was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the ’70s or ’80s. And I think that probably, I was personally, and a lot the kids in my community who grew up in my generation, personally suffered from the fact that a lot of moms and dads saw marriage as a basic contract, like any other business deal. Once it becomes no longer good for one of the parties or both of the parties, you just dissolve it and go on to a new business relationship. But that recognition that marriage was sacred I think was a really powerful thing that held a lot of families together. And when it disappeared, unfortunately a lot of kids suffered.” Vance opined that “it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s” for this.
I mean, he doesn’t “suggest” it. He says it. And it’s important to understand this isn’t some gaff.
The new right, with Vance as it’s figurehead, has a core belief that women should effectively be owned by men and that men should make choices for women.
JD Vance Suggests People in ‘Violent’ Marriages Shouldn’t Get Divorced
The Ohio Republican Senate nominee claimed people “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that it had damaged a generation of children.
J. D. Vance, the Carpetbagger from Silicon Valley who deserted Ohio and now wants to represent it.
J. D. Vance, who said he really doesn’t care about Ukraine and who has urged a negotiated settlement (i.e., a Ukrainian surrender) to end the war.
J.D. Vance, who purposely let Donald Trump humiliate him, with Trump saying that Vance “kisses my ass”.
J. D. Vance who wants to slowly strangle Social Security and Medicare:
In a blog titled the “Hillbilly Elite,” Vance “argued that Social Security and Medicare were among the biggest drivers of large federal budget deficits” and touted a proposed budget which “called for trillions of dollars to be cut from entitlement programs over a decade: repeal of the Affordable Care Act […]; transformation of Medicaid into a program funded through limited lump-sum grants to states, which would then manage it; and conversion of Medicare into a capped voucher program.”
But since winning the Ohio Republican primary in May — capitalizing on his Hollywood stardom and friendships with Silicon Valley tech billionaires — Vance has changed his tune.
Unfortunately, he never warned his Peter Thiel partner Arizona Republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters who last month was caught calling for the privatization of social security.
THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL THAT THIS SUMBITCH SHOULD BE IN THE U.S. SENATE.
(from Daily Kos, October 27, 2022 by Yosef 52)
