In the past I have talked about how J.D. Vance was a fraud from the get-go. Today I’d like to remind people that, separate and apart from my takedowns of his book and general persona back in 2016-17, the man is beholden to some truly odious beliefs and policy positions. Specifically, Vance has a long and consistent history of advocating fascist ideology. This is something that became crystal clear to me while covering Vance as a political figure for the alternative paper Columbus Alive and Columbus Monthly magazine and Vance was campaigning for the U.S. Senate.
From July 2021, here’s what I wrote about Vance’s campaign trail fixation on people without children and his belief that they should have no say about the direction of the country:
Vance railed against “the childless left” — singling out Vice President Kamala Harris, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — as people who, because they do not have children, have “no physical commitment to the future of this country” and instead offer an “elite model” for the American business and political class. Of those four figures he asked, “Why is this just a normal fact of life for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?”
Harris, of course, has two step children with her husband, Doug Emhoff, and Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, have been trying to adopt a child for a year now via a program that would allow them to receive a baby who has been abandoned or surrendered at very little notice. Vance’s devaluation of step-parenting and adoption — or his basic ignorance of the lives of those whom he is attacking — is beside the point, however. The point here is that Vance is engaging in some venerable right-wing, nationalistic rhetoric related to birth rates and the health of a country.
Vance then pivoted to advocacy for a policy of encouraging childbirth that he nicked from Hungary’s fascist president Viktor Orbán who, in turn, copped it directly from Benito Mussolini and his infamous “Battle for Births” policies.
In the spring of 2022 Vance took things further, mainstreaming the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, which is a fascist theory which states that non-whites are being brought into the United States and other western countries to “replace” white voters in an effort to advance a liberal progressive political agenda that is, allegedly, destructive to western society and which will lead to the extinction of the white race. As I wrote at the time:
[Vance’s] invocation of a “border invasion” was positively subtle compared to what Vance had to say a month earlier while appearing on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. There, he explicitly invoked the great replacement conspiracy, referring to “Democrat politicians who have decided that they can’t win re-election in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” In a campaign stop in Portsmouth last month, Vance said, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”
Vance has spent years preoccupied with birth rates and the dilution of native-born citizens’ voting power, and that preoccupation falls in line with the ideas motivating the great replacement conspiracy.
It should also be noted that it falls in line with the motivation of (a) the mass shooter who killed ten people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York in 2022; (b) the man who opened fire on shoppers inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, killing 23; (c) the Australian white supremacist who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques in 2019; (d) the mass shooter who massacred 11 people at the Tree of Life Congregation synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and (e) the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and resulted in one participant murdering a woman by mowing her down with his car.
The extent to which extreme-right concepts such as birthrate panic and the Great Replacement conspiracy animates J.D. Vance’s politics is frankly shocking. Vance, however, has yet to talk about any of that, let alone repudiate these toxic views. People want to talk about Hillbilly Elegy and his change of opinion about Donald Trump, but not the issues which he cares about and, if put in a position of real power, will no doubt seek to advance.
Not that he ever will repudiate these things, at least not in a genuine manner. That’s because it’s very clear that he believes these things to his bones. Indeed, he has based his entire political career on these toxic ideas. And now he stands to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
