JD Vance Burns Credibility, Peter Thiel's Cash, In Doomed Ohio Senate Bid

This fuckin' guy ...

Oh, thank God! JD Vance, the Ohio GOP Senate candidate seemingly cooked up in a test tube by Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, has survived the post-apocalyptic hellhole that is New York. Phew, dodged a bullet there!

"Serious question," tweeted the author of a famous book about the warped values of "real Americans" in the state he hopes to represent. "I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?"

Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgu… https://t.co/XaaAa9ETr8

— J.D. Vance (@J.D. Vance) 1625965818.0 

 Haw haw. 

See, it's funny because he gets to shit on a city of eight million people, i.e. three quarters the size of Ohio with double the economic output, while pretending that anyone who points it out is just a humorless snob.

"As I've said before, the defining characteristic of these people is that they don't have a sense of humor," he tweeted in response to criticism from Republican strategist (and Devin Nunes nemesis ) Liz Mair.

"These people" needs no definition, of course. Culture war today, culture war tomorrow, culture war forever.

But every shot needs a chaser, and Politico Playbook is pouring a tall one this morning.

A LONG WAY FROM APPALACHIA —Ohio GOP Senate hopeful J.D. VANCE was in the Hamptons on Saturday night mingling with GOP titans of industry. JIM TISCH, REBEKAH MERCER, STEVEN PRICE and HEATHER HIGGINS were among those who came out to support the "Hillbilly Elegy" author at a fundraiser in Southampton. Before the event, Vance visited the East Hampton home of EMIL HENRY, a former senior Treasury official for GEORGE W. BUSH and a perennial sounding board for Republican presidential aspirants. Henry, a longtime supporter and adviser to Sen. ROB PORTMAN (R-Ohio), was an early supporter of JEB BUSH and notably declined to support DONALD TRUMP.

Very salt of the earth! Just a regular, non-elite guy cracking a couple Coors Lights in the Hamptons with the CEO of Loews, a guy who owns one of the largest media companies in the country, and the billionaire heiress who bankrolled Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, the data mining company that exploited Facebook data to ratfuck the 2016 election, and is now funding Parler .

Nothing like a bunch of Ivy League-educated aristocrats getting together in the monied enclave to "take on the elites."

Vance recently defended Nick Fuentes after he was kicked off Twitter, calling the white nationalist "a giant troll (and IMO dishonest) in his attacks against me," but lamenting that "Tech companies control what we're allowed to say in our own country. It has to stop." Vance had nothing to say about Fuentes's eviction from TPUSA's conservative confab, of course.

It's fucking rich coming from a fully-owned subsidiaryof tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and one of Facebook's original investors. After Yale Law School, Vance went to work for Thiel's venture capital firm. Thiel was a big funder of Vance's own VC firm Narya Capital, which opened in 2019. And Thiel contributed $10 million to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC supporting Vance's senate candidacy. [Edit: Looks like the Mercers are also casting their bread upon the waters of the Vance PAC.] 

All this is very nice, because it saves Vance from having to live off his wife's salary as a lawyer who clerked for three federal judges, including Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Mind you, this is a guy who says subsidized childcare discriminates against normal Americans who want their women to stay home with the babies.

And, in some sense, who bloody cares about JD Vance, right? He's clearly going to lose this primary to either Josh Mandel or Jane Timken. (Please, oh, please let it be that dipshit Mandel!) But as an avatar of cravenness, Vance wins every prize.

Sure, Mandel burned a surgical mask in an idiotic stunt to prove that COVID restrictions are tyranny, but at least he's been kicking around Ohio forever doing the work. He's not some uber-elite multi-millionaire who's never done anything for the public weal, much less participated in politics, LARPing as a populist savior while nihilistic billionaires prop him up with cash in hopes he'll get in power and reduce their taxes.

You cannot make this shit up.

[ Politico ]

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