Why Liberals Envy JD Vance
17th July 2024
If you want to know the secret of J.D. Vance’s meteoric rise, at the age of 39, to Donald Trump’s choice for vice president should he win, just glance at some of the more overheated liberal analyses of Vance’s success. This one, published in the New York Times, is a classic: it is like the X-ray of a liberal psyche outraged by the success of people who are on the “other side”.
Titled “How Yale Propelled J.D. Vance’s Career”, it reveals that “many students and professors remember Mr. Vance as warm, personable and even charismatic. But several also said they were perplexed by what they saw as Mr. Vance’s profound ideological shift.” That’s a real head-scratcher: since when does being warm and personable have anything to do with one’s ideology? Mussolini could be warm and personable. As for charisma, well.
The article recounts, with an air of true perplexity, the conundrum of Vance and his wife, who is of Indian descent and the daughter of immigrants, “deliver[ing]- home-baked treats” to a transgender student who had just undergone, as the Times put it in smug jargon, “top surgery” as if it were an everyday procedure, like a tonsillectomy. It then quotes the student, who said they abruptly ended the friendship after Vance, as senator from Ohio, supported legislation in Arkansas that prohibited transgender care for children.
Of course, they had every right to take offence. But there is no contradiction between treating trans people with kindness, protectiveness and respect and opposing transgender treatment for children. Except in the mind of the New York Times, whose grim, sanctimonious and lucrative prosecution of MeToo, the 1619 Project, the trans revolution, and its stigmatising of everything from a Confederate statue in the middle of nowhere to gas stoves and gas-powered cars had as much to do with Trump’s resurrection as anything else.