June 16: Who is J.D. Vance?

The RNC begins; Secret Service failures; AMP must open its books

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The Big Story

On Monday, Donald Trump announced his running mate: J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio. A lot can happen between now and November, but polls currently show Trump with a commanding lead over Biden in nearly every swing state—and tied with Biden in Virginia, previously assumed to be a relatively safe Democratic state. Which means that Vance is likely to be the next vice president of the United States and, at 39, the heir apparent to Trump’s political movement for the generation to come. What do we know about him?

First, despite being derided as an “isolationist” for his skepticism over U.S. policy in Ukraine (Vance called for a “negotiated peace” at the Munich Security Conference in February), he’s good on Israel. And by “good,” we don’t mean he stands up at AIPAC conferences and grandstands about how America will “keep Israel safe.” We mean he gets it: Not only does he read Tablet (here he is in 2022 sharing a Lee Smith article on the Iran deal), but also he’s capable of clearly articulating the realist case for U.S. support for Israel. For instance, here was Vance last night in an interview with Sean Hannity at the Republican National Convention:

We reached out to foreign policy guru and friend of The Scroll David Reaboi (follow his Substack here) for his take on the Vance pick. Here’s what Reaboi had to say:

J.D. Vance’s outlook on foreign affairs seems baffling for those who split the world into bumper-sticks like Hawks and Doves, or Isolationists and Neoconservatives. There’s enough evidence to make the case that he fits into any of these categories at different points in time–which really should be cause for reconsidering how useful or meaningful these labels are, or ever were. Truth is, like Ron DeSantis, Vance is best described as a Jacksonian.

Jacksonians (as described best by Walter Russell Mead) believe in a less ideological foreign policy—small ‘r’ realist—and one more tightly focused on national interests rather than on the abstractions of Wilsonians, left or right. First, that means getting a handle on how to define the national interest coherently: that the foreign policy of the United States should primarily concern itself with securing the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. They’re neither moralists seeking to shape the world in America’s image, nor are they amoral vultures or isolationists.

Jacksonians tend to understand Israel as a worthy ally, not due to PoliSci vagaries like “Democracy” or “shared values,” but because it is a friendly state that is also powerful. In expressing his support for the U.S.-Israel relationship, Vance immediately makes the key distinction between client states and allies.

I imagine Vance finds it obvious that we’d prefer the latter, and orient our foreign policy to seek to transform charity-case client states into more self-sufficient allies, if possible. Not only do allies like Israel materially benefit America—as with the Jewish State’s prowess in technology or supplying crucial intelligence globally—their ability to project power in the region serves as an extension of our own power, and at a far lower cost. Vance has said he sees Biden policy on the Middle East as destructive and nonsensical, as it works to undercut Israel’s ability to deter aggression from Iran and its terror proxies. Destroying an ally’s deterrence is a cardinal sin—not just morally, but practically, as it undercuts the benefits of the alliance in the first place.

Or, as Vance himself put it at a conference hosted by the Quincy Institute in May:

I think we have a real opportunity to ensure that Israel is an ally in the true sense—that [the Israelis are] going to pursue their interests and sometimes those interests won’t completely overlap with the United States, and that’s totally reasonable, but they are totally self-sufficient. And I think that the way that we get there in Israel is actually by combining the Abraham Accords approach with the defeat of Hamas that gets us to a place where Israel and the Sunni nations can play a regional counterweight to Iran. Again, we don’t want a broader regional war. We don’t want to get involved in a broader regional war. The best way to do that is to ensure that Israel and the Sunni nations can actually police their own region of the world.

Second, Vance is a populist on economics. Vance has walked a United Auto Workers picket line, praised Biden administration Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan for her anti-monopoly stances, and co-sponsored Senate bills with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (on insulin price caps), Sheldon Whitehouse (to impose capital gains taxes on large corporate mergers), and Dick Durbin (to require price transparency in pharmaceutical advertising), among other bipartisan economic efforts (read Lee Fang’s Substack for a fuller accounting.) In a June interview with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Vance said, “The people on the left whose politics I’m most open to … it’s the Bernie Bros.”

Third, Vance is an intellectual—which can be both a good and a bad thing for a politician. As pollster Nate Silver noted in his “Silver Bulletin” Substack, Vance is “the sort of guy you could imagine starting a popular Substack in between speaking appearances and consulting gigs.” Indeed, he first came to prominence as the author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which, with its portrait of Vance’s proud but dysfunctional Scots-Irish Ohio family, became a sort of Rosetta Stone for Acela corridor pundits seeking to understand the white working class’s enthusiasm for Trump in the 2016 election. And Vance, as a right-wing Silicon Valley millennial, has been known to read and consort with “New Right” figures like Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, the “red-pill prince” profiled by Jacob Siegel in Tablet in 2022. 

Indeed, the list of right-wing influencers that Vance follows on X—including figures such as Steve Sailer, FischerKing, Second City Bureaucrat, and Bronze Age Pervert—has provoked considerable consternation on the left that Vance is a “Nazi” or “white nationalist.” At the same time, Vance’s multiracial family (his wife is Indian American) and apparent enthusiasm for Jews have already earned him the ire of Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and the rest of the “antizionist” right-wing crew. 

Finally, Vance is a brokenist. The term comes from Tablet Editor Alana Newhouse’s November 2022 essay on the main divide in American politics, between “status-quoists” and “brokenists,” or people who …

believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

On Tuesday, for instance, ProPublica published a leaked transcript of a closed-door speech Vance gave in 2021, in which he “praised conspiracy theorist Alex Jones” and said he was a better source of information than Rachel Maddow. Which is a scary-sounding headline, but we’ll let you be the judge of Vance’s words:

If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country. But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and, oh by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too. Sorry, ladies and gentleman, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society. 

But then the second criticism I get is, well, he’s a crazy conspiracist, right? He doesn’t believe that 9/11 actually happened or he believed 9/11 was an inside job. And look, I understand this desire to not be called terrible names. It’s like, yeah, ok, this person believes crazy things. But I bet if you’re being honest with yourself, every single person in this room believes something that’s a little crazy, right? I believe the devil is real and he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now. 

And that’s also how we read Vance’s remarks in a 2021 interview with Jack Murphy, which will no doubt be getting plenty of play in the coming weeks as the Democrats attempt to paint Vance as the Hiter-Putin-Project 2025 dictator of your nightmares. Vance said:

I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, but a de-woke-ification program, in the United States. … Fire every mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. 

Realistic? Probably not. Temperate? Definitely not. A recipe for dictatorship? Well, only if you think that DEI commissars and Washington apparatchiks enjoy a permanent Mandate of Heaven regardless of electoral outcomes. Plus, maybe it’s just the Scots-Irish in us (on the author of this newsletter’s mother’s side), but we like something about Vance’s style. As Vance told Douthat:

I think most of us who are generally socially aware have a voice in our head that says: “You shouldn’t say this; you should try to say that. Maybe you believe this, but you should try to put it a little bit more diplomatically.” And in 2020 that voice had become absolutely tyrannical. There was nothing you were allowed to say. Offending someone was an act of violence. I think a lot of us just said: “We’re done with this. We’re not playing this game, and we refuse to be policed in what we think and what we say.”

Our sense is that the enduring popularity of Trump, despite everything, is a sign that the American people agree. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Antonio García Martínez on the time he got drunk with J.D. Vance

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The Rest

→The Republican National Convention opened in Milwaukee last night with an attempt to showcase the party’s increasingly diverse coalition. Among the featured speakers: Amber Rose, the biracial model and “SlutWalk” activist; Linda Fornos, a Nicaraguan immigrant who voted for Biden in 2020; and Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who savaged big business while praising Vance for walking a United Auto Workers picket line in Toledo, Ohio, last October. The RNC also opened with a prayer for the Israeli hostages …

… shortly after President Biden told Speedy Morman of “360 With Speedy” (we’d never heard of him either) that “I’m the guy who did more for the Palestinian community than anybody. I’m the guy that opened up all the assets.” 

→Three police countersnipers were stationed inside the building that gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks used in his attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday, per a report that originally appeared at BeaverCountian.com. According to that article and follow-up reporting by CBS News, the snipers observed Crooks outside the building on at least three separate occasions prior to the shooting, with one of the snipers snapping a picture of Crooks and radioing to the command post that Crooks was surveying the area with a range finder. Apparently, though, nobody saw fit to do anything—rather than take action, the snipers called for local law-enforcement backup, which didn’t arrive until after Crooks had opened fire. 

By the way, here’s a pretty stunning photo, taken only minutes before the shooting, showing the building from the perspective of the stage—and the clear line of sight directly from the roof to the former president:

Combat veteran Sean Parnell, who was present at the rally and shared the photo on X, called the failure to put a man on the roof “the most stunning incompetence & negligence in a tactical situation that I have ever been a part of,” and we see no reason to question his judgment. On Tuesday, however, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle finally offered an explanation for why no officers were on the rooftop: The roof was “sloped.” “And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” Cheatle told NBC. Which, uh—how do we put this delicately?—makes no fucking sense:

→But just in case you needed more to chew on, CNN reported Tuesday that the Secret Service had “surged” security resources to Trump in recent weeks after receiving a tip about an Iranian plot to assassinate the former president. No further details were available about the plot, and sources told CNN there was no indication that Crooks had any connection with it.

→Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, will donate $45 million per month to a new political action committee backing Donald Trump, according to a Monday report in The Wall Street Journal. Citing “sources familiar with the matter,” the Journal reported that Musk began donating this month to America PAC, a newly formed pro-Trump super PAC also backed by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, the Winklevoss twins, and Kelly Craft and her husband, the coal executive Joe Craft. Musk formally endorsed Trump on Saturday, shortly after the former president survived an assassination attempt, and his total commitment should round out to about $180 million, assuming the figures reported in the Journal are accurate.

→On Tuesday, a Richmond, Virginia, judge ordered American Muslims for Palestine (read more of The Scroll’s coverage here) to disclose its funders as part of a terror-financing investigation by Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares, The Washington Free Beacon reports. AMP, the parent organization of Students for Justice in Palestine, which is linked to the broader U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network through founder and board member Hatem Bazian, is under investigation for its failure to file tax forms that would allow it to legally fundraise in Virginia. AMP is also the subject of a lawsuit filed in May against AJP Educational Foundation, the parent nonprofit of AMP and SJP, by American families of Oct. 7 victims. The lawsuit alleges that AMP and SJP are part of an ongoing “material support enterprise” for Hamas (read our coverage of that lawsuit here). 

→France has rejected 3,570 applicants to work at the Olympic Games over ties to terrorism, Islamism, and other forms of political extremism, according to a Sunday report in The Telegraph. The French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced that 770,000 administrative investigations into Olympics job seekers had been carried out, resulting in 3,570 exclusions, including 130 for people on the French government’s watch list for terror suspects and threats to national security. Others have been excluded for ties to “radical Islamists, or the ultra-Left and ultra-Right,” according to the report. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The French Election, by Marc Weitzmann

Whoever wins, loses. French Jews, meanwhile, are already losers.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Drinking With J.D. Vance

‘Israel is a country and a nation that doesn’t hate its own fucking people’

By Antonio García Martínez

Do you know the old joke about a rabbi, a priest, and J.D. Vance walking into a bar?

Actually, it’s not a joke. It happened to me.

short-rule

In 2021, I found myself wandering around the Orlando Hilton trying to find a beer to self-medicate after hourslong harangues around the fallen nature of the West, when I bumped into J.D. Vance.

I was trying to fit in with the Catholics and Orthodox (of both Christian and Jewish varieties) who populate the National Conservativism Conference (NatCon), which I was covering for Tablet. I had my kippah on—though I was more than a year away from my conversion beit din—and I remember wondering whether it was helping or hurting my ability to socialize.

See, the “NatCons” are an odd assortment of traditionalists standing for nationalism, free enterprise, public religion, and other “Western values.” Their conferences sort of feel like a continuation of the Thirty Years’ War, spaces where Catholics and Protestants are somehow still in their battle for supremacy. Unlike in history, however, the Jews here had a leg up. Indeed, for all of its many mentions of Christian nationalism, this event was run by one—namely Israeli author Yoram Hazony.

When I finally found the bar, it was an Edward Hopper-esque scene of the edgy new right. Chris Rufo, the one-man media army, had just launched his anti-CRT crusade and was doing a victory lap over a recent legislative coup. Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air, was entertaining a crowd, as was Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, a notorious blogger whose views veer from nihilist to monarchist. Just about every contrarian weird Twitter account was there, and if you managed to tie the profile pic to the actual face, it felt as if your timeline somehow showed up in person. Drink glasses were filled and emptied as political views of questionable viability (or even sanity) were floated and shot down.

And then, several drinks in, James David Vance—as of yesterday the vice presidential candidate of the Republican ticket, but back then a candidate for senator from Ohio—rolled up behind me.

Already a star, he was at the conference to speak about universities as the enemy. Vance and I had a messaging history: He’d sent me a note of support when I had a little run-in with the trillion-dollar corporation which makes the laptop I’m typing this on. Since he was one of the few mainstream politicians—as opposed to semi-obscure Catholic integralist philosophers—in attendance, I decided he was the one to talk to.

We settled down at an L-shaped couch nearby, and within minutes the area around us filled up with various conference hangers-on, forming a hooting peanut gallery to our conversation.

I noticed immediately that Vance had to be at least three drinks deep, which could make for a great interview. Unfortunately, I also noticed, as I fumbled to set up the recording app on my phone and LARP at being a real journalist yet again, that I was at least as many drinks deep as he was. As I tried to remember my interview plan, Vance took the reins.

Vance: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe your book came out on June 28, 2016.”

Me: “That’s incredible recall. That’s right.”

Vance: “Your book and my book came out at the exact same time. The same day.”

Not only did I not remember when Hillbilly Elegy, my interview subject’s famous memoir of his family’s hardscrabble Appalachian upbringing, was published; I didn’t remember when my own book came out.

Vance: “I remember because your book got to The New York Times bestseller list and mine did not. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘holy shit, this guy wrote this great book about Facebook and he's going to be the book that’s successful and my shitty book, it's not going to do anything.’ Anyway, your book is good …”

Me: “Yours stayed on the bestseller list much longer than mine did.”

Vance: “Fair.”

What little mental planning I’d done here was totally foiled at this sudden confession, five years after the fact, of a writerly competition between us. What I did have, though, was genuine curiosity about how the Big Important Ideas so seriously being fought over by the Twitter avatars here—ideas about religion in society, about populism—might ever translate into actual politics.

“The particularities in my race are very distinct, and so I don't draw too many lessons for the specifics of my race from the national conservatives,” Vance told me. “But with that caveat, I can't think of a single other political movement in America right now that has as much energy as this one.”

I asked him to expound a bit.

“The left is committed to brain-dead Bidenism,” he said (note that this was three years before the president’s disastrously feeble debate performance last month). “Biden’s entire political project is harmonizing various parts of the American left that don’t make any sense. And the American right, at the establishment level, is a series of dogmas that existed 40 years ago and are totally exhausted. And then there’s this thing called national conservatism,” Vance continued, “and it is vibrant and young people are excited about it.”

Hoots and hollers rang out from the peanut gallery. (“This is on the record!” one sharpie darkly warned the others. My iPhone was sitting on the coffee table in plain view.)

And not only young people anymore. In the wake of yesterday’s announcement, much has been made (including in these pages) of the seeming enthrallment of a segment of tech with the ticket that Vance—himself a former tech venture capitalist—is now a part of. My own chats have been lighting up with people fighting about how to understand his views on tech, which some people misunderstand as contradictory. He has, for example, praised Lina Kahn—the head of the Federal Trade Commission who is widely loathed in Silicon Valley. But in fact, Vance points to an emerging split in this space: He is, to use Marc Andreessen’s coinage, pro little tech and anti big tech.

“About three months ago, I gave a speech in Youngstown and the whole speech was me shitting on the power of big technology. After, a guy comes up to me and he says, ‘I really love your speech. The one criticism I had was your point about big tech.’ I thought I was going to hear a classical liberal defense of the private sector again. But what the guy then says is, ‘I agree with what you said about the big tech companies, but you want to break them up. Why can’t we just throw all their CEOs in prison?’”

(A voice from the crowd piped up, presumably having heard this anecdote before. “I thought he wanted to kill them. Wasn't it ‘kill them,’” “No,” Vance joked, “that was in southeastern Ohio.”)

To riff on another old joke: OK, but is all this … good for the Jews?

Before I could get my exact question right, Vance launched. “Israel is a country and a nation that doesn't hate its own fucking people,” he said. “I really admire that.”

It’s worth noting this was pre-Oct. 7, which opened up an ugly rift on the right over Israel, with accusations of Jewish war-mongering bleeding into obscene antisemitism. Still, his comments didn’t feel either superficial or transient. Unlike the neocons, from whom he’s staked a far position, Vance’s admiration for Israel is directly tied to the ideas he has about what’s best for America and our future.

“Israel is the only advanced economy in the entire world that has birth rates above replacement level,” he said. “One of the great lessons of Israel for the United States of America is that when you develop a civilization that’s rooted in self-love and patriotism, you don't have declining birth rates.”

I asked him how religion factored into these views.

“My relatives want Israel to be successful so that when the Second Coming of Christ happens in seven years, there’s going to be a country there ready to absorb it. So yeah, there’s some of that,” he said. “But the actual reason that most middle-class Christian Ohioans love Israel is that Israel is a nation that doesn't hate itself. That’s it. That’s why I like it. My dad does not wake up saying, ‘I really want Israel to be successful over the United States of America.’ He says: ‘Israel, they care about each other. They love their own country. They’re basically aligned more or less with America.’ And that’s it. And I think that’s a great thing.”

The conversation rambled on as the crowd chimed in with increasingly intoxicated commentary. I circled back to my original question—namely, whether all of the talk of big ideas would ever translate on the ground, to the lives of actual people?

“Does a normal Ohio voter read Yoram Hazony and Mencius Moldbug? No. They’re old people. They live their lives, they support their family, they want jobs,” Vance told me. “But do they agree with the broad thrust of where we think American public policy should go? Absolutely.”

But who are these people? Are they just old dying white people, headed for minority status anyway, or are they—as Vance has argued—the members of a multiracial and multicultural base of Americans? Listening to the tape now, I hear skepticism in my own voice—a doubt that the coalition these people had in mind would ever come together. Vance didn’t share it.

“Translating the impulse of the multiracial, multicultural middle class turned working class—there’s a lot of work to do,” he said. “But the instincts of the middle-class Black voter, the middle-class white voter, the middle-class Latino voter, are the same.”

And what are they?

“We love our country, but we don’t want to live in a shithole.”

It was time for another drink.