I fucking love this:
Watch it below:
Here’s some more context:
The Ohio U.S. Senate race is wide open, with both Republicans and Democrats vying for the seat currently held by retiring Republican Rob Portman. In a Facebook ad, GOP candidate J.D. Vance took aim at Rep. Tim Ryan, a contender on the Democratic side.
"Tim Ryan pretends to care about the working class, but he's a fraud who does nothing while his friend Joe Biden uses the ATF to illegally track your gun transactions and trample on your 2nd Amendment rights," Vance’s ad said Feb. 7. "Unlike Tim Ryan, I'll fight to end Biden's illegal gun database."
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is a frequent target of gun rights supporters. ATF operates under a number of legal restrictions, and here, we look into whether it has violated those limits, as Vance claims.
The core complaint is that ATF has millions of records, and gun rights advocates view those records as an invitation to abuse. But the Vance campaign was unable to point to a specific act by the agency that broke the law, and we couldn’t find one either.
Safety and law enforcement aren’t Vance’s priorities but banning porn sure is:
Like all Republicans, JD Vance thinks that banning guns is a very bad idea. On Thursday the Republican Senate candidate and bestselling author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy tweeted a long explanation as to why Joe Biden’s ideas about gun control are misguided. Enacting new laws won’t do anything to improve the gun violence problem in the US, he tweeted. Bans don’t work.
Except in some cases, of course. While Vance is firmly against banning guns, he’s very keen on banning porn. Yes, the man who made a name for himself with a book often described as “poverty porn” now has his sights set on eliminating actual porn. In a “newly unearthed” 2021 interview with Crisis magazine (an outlet which describes itself as A Voice for the Faithful Catholic Laity), Vance opined that porn is one reason why birth rates in the US are declining. There should be an outright ban on pornography, he suggested, because it’s stopping young people from getting married and having kids.
“I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other,” Vance said.
I think the combination of being endorsed by Donald Trump and spending too much time in the public eye may have rotted Vance’s brain. You don’t have to be a genius (or even remotely pro-porn) to realize that porn is not why birth rates are going down in America. Porn is not to blame for the fact that a lot of Americans simply can’t afford to have children anymore. Porn is not to blame for the fact that giving birth costs tens of thousands of dollars in America. Porn is not to blame for the US being the only industrialized country in the world not to guarantee paid family leave. You need to fix all these issues if you want people to voluntarily have more children. The problem, however, is that fixing all of these policy issues is difficult. Blaming porn, on the other hand, is easy.
Also, Vance has already been busted breaking the law:
The Campaign Legal Center and End Citizens United are suing J.D. Vance’s campaign committee and the super PAC Protecting Ohio Values for alleged illegal in-kind contributions during this year’s U.S. Senate primary election. The lawsuit, filed earlier this week, was first reported by The Daily Beast. It points to a covert website, uncovered by Politico last month, where the super PAC posted numerous campaign research, polling and strategy documents.
Protecting Ohio Values’ compiled a trove of information that would be useful if you happened to be running a campaign to get J.D. Vance elected to the U.S. Senate in Ohio. Which is perfectly legal — super PACs are allowed to collect unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations, and then spend that money to directly support or attack whichever candidates they choose. They just can’t contribute to or coordinate with a candidate’s committee.
And that’s exactly what the PAC and the Vance campaign did, the federal complaint alleges.
“Protect Ohio Values paid for a variety of campaign materials, including polling data, demographic voter targeting models, strategic insights based on this data, ideas and scripts for campaign communications, and raw footage of Vance — all of which it published on an obscure website that was not widely publicized, intending for the Vance Committee to obtain and make use of the materials,” the complaint reads.
They argue the Vance campaign making use of that information amounts to accepting an illegal in-kind contribution.
And Attorney Marc Springer points out in his new op-ed in Celeveland.com that it’s Vance who’s the one who keeps encouraging criminal activity:
Here’s what J.D. Vance told Fox News Channel while warning of an immigrant invasion: Democrats “have decided that they can’t win re-election in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”
And here’s what Buffalo gunman Payton Gendron said of those in the Buffalo supermarket he entered while armed with an AR-15-style rifle: The shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”
Mr. Gendron wound up shooting 13 people at the supermarket, killing 10 of them. All the dead people were Black.
Trying to define the connection between what Mr. Vance said, in this instance and many others, and what Mr. Gendron did is, to state the obvious, clear-cut. Mr. Vance promoted an ideology or a creed that stated that mainstream politicians, Democrats, Joe Biden, perhaps Vance’s opponent in this year’s Senate race, Tim Ryan, were actively bringing new voters in from outside the United States, to “transform the electorate,” to replace native-born white Americans. Mr. Vance didn’t make it out as a vague, far-fetched plot to take place in the future. Mr. Vance spoke of it as an active, ongoing, in-the-light-of-day plan being executed in the present by his political opponents.
Mr. Gendron apparently believed Mr. Vance and others like him. In his deranged mind, Mr. Gendron concluded that he should act on it. And so he did, killing ten Black people, while ranting online about the elimination of the white race.
Demagogues and politicians who promote racism and hate have existed since ancient Greek times. But these same perpetrators of this most awful human quality always have a way to deflect or deny the reality of what they’re up to. George Wallace, when he was governor of Alabama and the country’s leading racist, physically blocked Black students from entering and enrolling at the University of Alabama. Donald Trump began his race for the presidency with a racist rant about Mexicans. Yet both men always denied their racism while they thrived on marketing and channeling hate – racism was the tool, so to speak; hate was and is always their currency.
Here’s the latest poll on the Ohio Senate race:
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