JD Vance is running for Vice-President of the United States as a rightwing looney tunes and the MAGA-est of the Trump brigade. As he has aged, he is like a snake that sheds its skin. He could be an evil mutant in the X-Men Marvel Cinematic Universe. In his memoir Hillbilly Eulogy published in 2016, Vance insulted all his prior friends and family members living in the Appalachian region of Ohio, branding them as losers who failed themselves (I know the title was really Hillbilly Elegy). As a politician, Vance claims he will always remember where he came from, but he doesn’t explain how he remembers them.
Vance escaped Appalachia by joining the Marines after high school where he avoided combat by serving as a public relations liaison (Smart move!). He used the GI Bill to attend college at Ohio State University but pulled up the ladder behind him and now attacks government programs that aided him as wasteful spending that keeps people like his family entrapped in dependency. The Ohio Hillbilly next moved onto Yale Law School where he rubbed shoulders with the privileged, met his wife, and latched onto a prominent professor who could promote his career. His big breakthrough was being “adopted” by rightwing Silicon Valley libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. Vance played up to Thiel when Thiel spoke at Yale Law School and became a venture capitalist in Thiel’s firm instead of a lawyer (Is a pattern of apprenticing to the powerful emerging?). Former Hillbilly Vance, he claims, made it into the elite world totally on his own initiative, unlike the losers he left behind!
But the Old JD Vance made a few mistakes along the way, leaving a paper trail in the form of emails and texts to a law school friend who just happens to be transgender. That Vance has now morphed into the Christian nationalist MAGA Vance who introduced a bill in the Senate to ban transition-related medical care for minors. Vance’s old trans friend had enough of the snake MAGA Vance and decided to release the texts and emails. Some of the juicer passages were published in the New York Times.
After Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, Vance’s friend sent him an email supporting the idea that police should be required to wear bodycams. Vance replied, “I love the body camera movement” and “I hate the police. Given the number of negative experiences I’ve had in the past few years, I can’t image what a black guy goes through.” Who would have guessed that the OLD JD was Black Lives Matter?
In December 2015, Vance’s friend wrote that because of Donald Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric, Muslim women wearing hijabs were afraid to go to the grocery store. The OLD JD wrote back, “I’m obviously outraged at Trump’s rhetoric, and I worry most of all about how welcome Muslim citizens feel in their own country. But I also think that people have always believed crazy shit . . . And there have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit.” The Old JD denounced rightwing “crazy shit, while the new MAGA Vance is rightwing “crazy shit.”
The OLD JD’s friend was working for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The OLD JD understood why because, referencing Donald Trump, the OLD JD wrote “He’s just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.”
I really liked this excerpt from an email about racism in the United States. The OLD JD wrote in 2016, “The more white people feel like voting for trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that.” I don’t think MAGA Vance still believes that. The MAGA universe’s claim is that in the United States white people are the ones who are really “oppressed.” These “oppressed” white people are now viciously attacked Vance’s wife who is the daughter of immigrants from India.
The OLD JD also shared texts with his law school roommate. In one text he wrote about Trump, Vance called Trump “loathsome.” In another text, the OLD JD speculated that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.”
Donald’s people clearly didn’t vent JD Vance carefully enough before selecting him to join the MAGA team. I would love to see a debate between the OLD JD and MAGA Vance. I think the OLD JD would rip MAGA Vance apart.