J.D. Vance Says Conservatives Need to Embrace Alex Jones and Oligarchs
Donald Trump may have selected Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his 2024 running mate in a bid to mollify critics who say he is incapable of tolerating dissent, but to suggest that the two men are not alike in their ambition — and their desire to reshape the nation to their own advantage — would be a mistake.
ProPublica and the watchdog group Documented reported Tuesday on a speech that Vance gave in 2021 to the Teneo Network — a conservative nonprofit that’s helmed by dark money maven Leonard Leo and aimed at combating liberal influence in the tech and finance industries During his diatribe, Vance presents an unguarded, unvarnished portrait of his worldview — one largely free of the trappings of Yale-educated respectability he adopts within the halls of the Senate.
Central to Vance’s arguments is the idea that “big corporations have really turned against conservatives in a very big and powerful way,” and he wants to force them back to the party.
“If we’re unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars
feel real economic pain, then we’re not serious about winning the culture war,” he declared early in the 10 minutes allotted to him.
Three big challenges concern Vance: the loss of institutions to liberal control, the loss of “basic truth-telling,” and being “horrified of unconventional people who say and believe unconventional things.”
What unconventional person does Vance think we should be less horrified by? Alex Jones.
“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,” Vance said. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”
It’s quite a generous view of Jones, who’s done everything from accusing the victims of mass shootings of being paid crisis actors, claiming that the U.S. military has access to tornado guns, and that the Clintons and Obamas are demons who “smell like sulfur.”
Vance added that he himself holds his own set of unconventional views. “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society,” he said. “That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”
The now-senator made the case that Republicans were only hurting themselves by forcing people like Jones out of their movement. Vance claimed he saw a poll after the 2008 financial crisis showing that “a large segment of the Democratic base believed that [makes air
quotes] ‘the Jews caused the financial crisis.’ The media did not demand that the leaders of the Democratic Party reject every single member of the Democratic base because a lot of
them believed the Jews caused the financial crisis.”
“I think that one of the things we have to realize is the left isn’t playing the game we think
that they’re playing,” Vance explains during the Q&A following his speech. “The left is playing a game of rewarding friends and punishing enemies. We need to be willing to actually defend our friends,” he adds, describing Republicans to a T in the process.
He adds that he worries that the right has “very few oligarchs on our side. And I don’t mean just rich people. I mean people who are smart about deploying their resources in a way that advances the cause.” As an example, Vance cites Peter Thiel, the man who essentially bought him his Senate seat.
The notion the right lacks powerful, wealthy, politically motivated backers is fictional. Figures like the Koch brothers, have loomed large in the winds of conservative politics for decades. In recent years, the public has learned about the quiet largesse of billionaires like Harlan Crow (Clarence Thomas’ chief benefactor), Barre Seid (Leonard Leo’s $1.6 billion donor), Paul Singer (another reported Leo donor), and Timothy Mellon (Donald Trump’s $75 million donor).
Others are joining the cause: Just this week billionaire Elon Musk pledged to donate $45 million per month to Trump’s reelection effort, and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pledged big donations, too.
Vance is correct that the American political system is run by corporate interests, but while he postures as a blue-collar populist who rode a Cinderella story into the senate, the Ohio senator is far from an enemy of corporate greed and influence — he just wants to make sure they’re on his side.
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