Meet JD Vance's Black Bestie!

He lives in Canada, you wouldn't know him.

JD Vance and Jamil Jivani in less stupid times in front of a poster of Mr. Spock. (Instagram/@jamiljivani)

There’s been a lot of speculation about how and when Republican vice presidential nominee and walking meme JD Vance had his big come-to-Orange Jesus moment.

The verdict is still out on if this weirdo beardo in eyeliner became radicalized after tumbling down one MAGA rabbit hole too many or if reversing his opinion on the convicted felon he once accurately described as “America’s Hitler” before going on to become his albatross running mate is simply due to a shameless lust for power. (You’ve probably heard enough jokes by now about Jizzy Davenport’s other lusts.) But the best explanation we may have for the Flipper fan’s flip-flop may have come from an old friend from university.

JD Vance Never F*cked A Couch; Here Are Some Jokes About JD Vance F*cking A Couch Anyway

The Washington Post took a deep dive two years ago into what makes the man tick and spoke to an insider who said Vance breaking up with polite society stemmed primarily from all the cool kids making fun of the biopic based on his book:

When the Hillbilly Elegy movie came out on Netflix in 2020, it was not just critically panned but greeted with intense online mockery, and the tenuous cultural diplomacy achieved by the book seemed to unravel for good. (Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 83 percent. Critics’ score: 25 percent.) According to Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the wounding commentary was the “last straw” in his falling-out with elites.

Netflix may also bear partial responsibility for Donald Trump’s pick for his new celebrity apprentice. His idiot failsons Uday and Qusay are said to be the ones who sold Dear Leader on him, and it’s easy to imagine them showing their deteriorating dad an episode of the hit thriller “The Night Agent” while excitedly telling him the handsome, tremendously strong hero FBI agent is the same actor (Gabriel Basso) who played Vance in the movie. Despite FBI agents having given him and “the great Hannibal Lecter” so much trouble over the years.

Jivani isn’t mentioned by name but is clearly included in this passage where Reek described his Yale classmates as “family” before his concept of family changed to something that’s now strictly biological:

One of those classes, a constitutional law seminar of 16 students, became a kind of family for me. We called ourselves the island of misfit toys as there was no real unifying force to our team — a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants, a black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others — but we became excellent friends.

I haven’t read the book myself so can’t say if this comes before or after the infamous passage in the news lately, which of course doesn’t exist but remains hilarious. (And a note to Harper editors: The word “black” is meant to be capitalized in this context.) The Indian woman mentioned is, of course, his eventual wife, Usha, while the lesbian in question, Sofia Nelson, turns out to be trans, and they recently went public with old emails literally highlighting their former friend’s flagrant hypocrisy:

The more white people feel like voting for trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that.

But his streetwise Black buddy has stuck by him. Jivani is the son of a Kenyan man and Scottish-Irish mother who grew up in Brampton, Ontario, in difficult circumstances and worked as a dishwasher/line cook before attending college. Like Vance, he got financial help from the government to do so and, also like Vance, he became the first member of his family to earn a degree.

Unlike Vance, nobody says he looks like a pile of butt hair. (Robert T Bell/Wikimedia Commons)

While at Yale, he interned at the office of Cory Booker, the Democratic junior senator for New Jersey who at the time was the mayor of Newark. He was then given a job running an ostensible charity Vance launched after the success of his memoir called Our Ohio Renewal, which had the stated goal to help “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams,” but the grift ended after only managing to raise $220,000 in donations and whose sole contribution to struggling Ohioans appears to be a couple of op-eds in local newspapers and a grand total of two tweets, according to the New York Times.

Jivani returned home to Ontario, where he scored a gig as a talk radio host with Bell Media but was soon let go. Jivani sued for wrongful dismissal, saying he was hired as tokenism but fired due to wokeism when his views didn’t conform to what privileged white media executives thought they’d be getting from a young Black dude. Bell claims they canned him instead for lousy ratings, giving a platform to anti-vaxxers, and basically being a dick to colleagues, specifically for an email the company described in court filings as “gross and intolerable insubordination and a disdainful attitude toward [his manager].”

He then decided to run for public office and — as JDV and TFG did before him — switched political affiliations in order to do so. A former card-carrying member of the Liberal party, Jivani successfully ran as the Conservative candidate for Durham’s Member of Parliament in a by-election last March to replace the party’s former boss, Erin O’Toole, who resigned as MP after being booted from leadership for being insufficiently Make America’s Hat Great Again. It probably didn’t help that his name made too many low-information rightwingers think Erin O’Toole was actually a woman.

I’ve no idea if Vance and new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre have met yet but they’ll likely hit it off as the the two men share a lot in common. Including starting families with women of color, although surely even Poilievre wouldn’t stoop so low as to feel the need to defend being in love with his wife even though “obviously she’s not a white person” because she’s a great mom, as Vance recently did during a cringe interview with noted racist Megyn Kelly.

Surely Usha made him sleep on the couch after THAT one, although this may not be the same level of punishment in the Vance family household as it is in others.

One of the more memorable lines from the movie came from Vance’s beloved Meemaw, played by the great Glenn Close, which earned her the distinction of being one of the very few actors nominated for both an Oscar and a Razzie for the same performance. “Everyone in this world is one of three kinds: a good Terminator, a bad Terminator, and neutral,” she told a juvenile JD while assuring him he had the makings of a good one.

This is objectively untrue. Terminators are time-traveling killer robots whose choices are determined by screenwriters and don’t possess free will. Although someone who does have the ability to make better decisions is the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor of California who chose to be on the right side of history as a high-profile Never Trumper, presumably leaving RFK Jr. as the least welcome extended family member at the Kennedy compound.

RFK Jr. And Trump Hookups Intensify

Hasta la vista, babies! I’ll be back.

[WaPo / NY Times / National Post / Times of India]