He Lies Brazenly, Shamelessly, With Gleeful Bad Faith, Knowing His Lies Will Perpetrate Harm
by Bryan H. Wildenthal (October 11, 2024)
(See Copyright & Permissions Note on Vita & Contact page. Updated October 31, 2024. See also my July 20 and August 15 essays on Vance.)
Sometimes a stunning moment of clarity arrives in the course of a long and contentious political campaign.
So it was when Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, the vice-presidential running mate of former President Donald Trump, was interviewed by the New York Times and asked repeatedly to acknowledge a simple and well-known fact beyond any rational dispute: that Trump lost the 2020 election.
Vance refused — five times in a row.
In a sense the interview doesn’t add much to what we already knew about Vance. He had already brazenly refused to concede Trump’s 2020 defeat during the vice presidential debate on October 1.
Anyone paying attention to facts and bothering to read up on Vance already knew, as I pointed out in an essay on August 15, that he’s a blatantly unqualified light-weight extremist whose main appeal (for Trump) appears to be boot-licking endorsement of Trump’s election lies.
Vance has disqualified himself from public office by his utter contempt for the Constitution and democracy. Like Trump himself, Vance poses a clear and present danger to our constitutional form of government.
Just since the time my previous essays were published, we have learned that Vance is willing to knowingly spread lies about non-White immigrants in order to stoke fear and hatred to advance his political career.
This is beyond disgusting. It is immoral. It is chilling.
Vance’s own Senate staffers fact-checked and debunked the lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio supposedly stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets before Vance went ahead anyway and spread them in the national media, using his megaphone as a major-party nominee for vice president. He KNEW the stories were false and unfounded!
Furthermore, Vance knows perfectly well that most of these immigrants have legal status and yet he has brazenly announced his intention to keep lying about them, including both the lie that they are “illegal” and the false pet-eating claims.
Vance’s own constituents, including the Republican mayor of the Ohio town about which he is lying, have begged him to stop. In response he has, in effect, flipped the finger at his own constituents and kept right on lying.
What more can you really say about a politician whose own wife is a non-White daughter of immigrants from India — who has mixed-race children whose grandparents are Indian immigrants — who is willing to intentionally stir up racist anti-immigrant hatred based on lies to serve his political ambitions?
My own husband happens to be a non-White immigrant from India. His elderly mother lives in our home. They are both naturalized American citizens. Thus, like Senator Vance, I too have an immigrant Indian American mother-in-law. They both live in the San Diego area! I don’t know much more about Vance’s parents-in-law but I pity the private agony they may now be enduring.
In appearance and accent, my own mother-in-law is conspicuously foreign. I now have to worry much more about her personal physical safety while walking around the coastal neighborhood surrounding our home, which hosts a lot of tourists and visitors passing through, some of them misbehaving yahoos. Some of our neighbors, and some visitors passing through, display MAGA signs.
Hate speech by leading politicians has a well-documented tendency to give permission and encouragement to supporters to commit hate crimes.
We’ve also learned more in recent weeks about the extent of Vance’s flirtations with far-right extremist figures, including Tucker Carlson, who gushingly praised and gave a prominent platform to a Holocaust denier and Hitler sympathizer.
When challenged about this, Vance, who later happily followed the Holocaust denier as a guest on Carlson’s podcast, could not be bothered to personally denounce the other guest’s views. Vance left that to a campaign flunky who issued a stunningly tepid statement that Vance “does not share the views of the [Holocaust-denying] guest.”
How reassuring. We know what did stir Vance’s personal passions in relation to this incident because he did personally and passionately defend Carlson for platforming and praising the Holocaust denier, saying: “We believe in free speech and debate.” He didn’t leave that part to a campaign flunky!
Vance, in so doing, eagerly and personally embraced and parroted the familiar false talking point and false framing commonly used by neo-Nazis, who love to pose as martyrs and claim the issue is all about their own “free speech.”
Vance’s spokesman added that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture,” thereby falsely claiming that Carlson was somehow just innocently “associated” with the guest he effusively praised and invited onto his show, bestowing upon him the gift of a hugely prominent platform to amplify his neo-Nazi bullshit. (And yes, I wasted two hours of my life watching Carlson’s podcast, so I wouldn’t have to rely on second-hand accounts. Let me tell you, Carlson’s Hitler-sympathizing buddy is one weird, creepy, and deluded nerd.)
Vance, with his Yale Law School degree, knows perfectly well that in the United States, pro-Nazi and Holocaust-denial speech is fully protected (as I agree it should be) by the First Amendment to our Constitution. The best remedy for bad speech is counter-speech. No leading Democrat has suggested otherwise.
Yet Vance falsely suggested that “the Democrats” think “the way to solve it is to censor it.” Vance also knows perfectly well that nothing in the First Amendment confers a right to be invited onto someone else’s internet platform. Hello! Not being invited is not “censorship”! The fascist nerd has his own internet platform.
The depth of Vance’s dishonesty knows no limits.
Adding a truly byzantine twist, Vance went on a weird rant about how “the Democrats used to be the party where if you had an idea you didn’t like, you pushed back against it, you fought back against it, you criticized it.”
Um … hello, senator. Earth to J.D. Vance. The Democrats still are that party! President Biden himself, and numerous other Democrats (along with some Republicans, all too few), furiously denounced the views of Carlson’s guest, and Carlson himself for praising and platforming him.
They never suggested the fascist nerd’s views should be “censored” or that he should be punished (despite Vance’s false suggestion to the contrary). But they absolutely “pushed back against” and “fought back against” and harshly “criticized” his noxiously false ideas!
Which makes it more than a little curious that Vance himself, while praising that exact type of response, conspicuously failed to respond in any such way! Vance did not personally utter even a peep of “criticism” of the Holocaust denier’s views. All Vance said personally was to needlessly defend his “free speech” rights, a talking point giving aid and comfort to the typical efforts by neo-Nazis to claim martyrdom and falsely frame the issue.
Vance left it to his campaign spokesman to offer that stunningly tepid statement that also failed to offer any actual “criticism” of the Holocaust denier’s views, merely claiming it was “obvious” that Vance “does not share [his] views.” Oh my … ouch! So I guess in Vance’s mind this is how you “fight back”? You primly note that you don’t “share” neo-Nazi “views”?
This would all be really laughable were it not so cynical, nasty, disturbing, and laced with malicious dishonesty.
And let’s not forget the final ugly twist.
Vance’s spokesman wound up his embarrassment of a statement on the senator’s behalf by accusing Vice President Harris (whose own husband is Jewish!) of “continu[ing] to cater to the antisemitic Hamas wing of her party.”
As everyone knows, the Biden-Harris administration, with Harris’s vocal and emphatic support, has strongly denounced anti-Semitism and has strongly supported Israel’s punishing military response to Hamas and its terrorist attacks on Israelis. (Hamas has specifically and intentionally targeted innocent civilians, including many children.)
Far from “catering” to Democrats critical of Israel’s response (which has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including children, though not intentionally targeting them), Harris’s resolute defense of Israel has actually endangered her chances of winning the presidency! Unlike Vance, Harris is quite obviously willing to take a stand even if it costs her politically.
Many Arab American and Muslim voters in Michigan, a crucial swing state, appear likely to refuse to vote for Harris, abandoning their support for Biden in 2020. Some will even punish Democrats by supporting the Trump-Vance ticket — perversely bizarre as that is, given that Trump (even leaving aside his many anti-Muslim statements and policies) has made clear he categorically supports whatever Israel’s political and military leadership may choose to do.
Vance has gone beyond dishonesty here. This is grotesque! What is especially striking about Vance’s new interview is how he refused to answer the question about Trump’s election lies.
Vance refused to answer while gleefully spewing still more contempt and dishonesty. He refused with a smirking insolence more reminiscent of a juvenile delinquent than a 40-year-old U.S. senator. Vance to the reporter interviewing him: “I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.” He might as well have stuck his tongue out.
This all raises five-alarm concerns about the very substantial possibility that this man will be a heartbeat from the presidency in just three months — under a man who if elected would take office at the age of 78, is in obvious mental decline, and would be ineligible to run for reelection, thus making Vance a likely successor, perhaps well before 2028.
That reporter now knows what it must feel like to be a junior high school vice principal in charge of discipline dealing with an unrepentant teenage brat with seriously disturbed views.
Vance was only 39 when Trump named him to the ticket in July, the youngest presidential or vice-presidential nominee in modern history. His qualifications are shockingly thin and weak. He was first elected to the Senate (his only public office so far) less than two years ago. He has never held any major executive position.
By contrast, Vice President Harris was a career prosecutor for decades, D.A. of a major city, then the two-term chief law enforcement officer of the nation’s largest state, before being elected to the Senate and then the vice presidency.
After youthful military service, Vance went to law school, published a memoir at age 32 (largely about himself), then made a fortune as a venture capitalist thanks largely to special favors by his financial and political paymaster, a far-right weirdo extremist and Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel.
I wrote more about Vance’s strange personal odyssey and extremist political views in my July 20 essay.
Vance knows perfectly well it is not an “answer” to fire back a different question — leave aside that the reporter was not the one being interviewed (it must have taken every ounce of her self-control not to acidly point that out).
Vance has gotten undue praise in some quarters for interacting with the media on various occasions. He has in fact often dodged questions and responded with flippant questions of his own. His agreement to sit for this interview is now revealed as yet another lie. He never had any intention of answering questions he found inconvenient. (Here’s the link to the full interview published October 12; the Times ran a preview article on October 11.)
Like his political boss, Vance gleefully and shamelessly revels in projecting onto others his own sociopathic contempt for the truth and basic decency.
He had the nerve to complain to the reporter about the “obsession here with focusing on 2020.” It is of course Vance’s (and Trump’s) questioners and critics who would love nothing more than to move on and leave 2020 in the past. But the past can never rest in peace if the truth of history is denied.
It is Trump and his diehard supporters and lackeys like Vance — from whom he demands and receives boot-licking loyalty to his own falsehoods — who cling to their bizarre “obsession” with the 2020 election.
It is they who continually insist to this day on relitigating, denying, and brazenly lying about the result of that election — just as Trump actively sought to overthrow it and violate the Constitution and laws to stay in power in defiance of the will of American voters.
Vance was a private citizen during November 2020 to January 2021 and not then in a position (nor apparently then of a mind) to participate in the attempted coup d’état by which Trump sought to obstruct and then incite the violent disruption of the peaceful transfer of power.
But Vance, in this interview, said if he had been — if he had been in the Senate on January 6, 2021, if he had been vice president instead of Mike Pence — he would have refused to certify the election result. He says that given the chance, he would have participated in the attempted overthrow of the election.
He would have actively participated in trying to nullify the votes of 81 million Americans. Just pause and think about that!
This is despite the fact that the Constitution explicitly vests in the states the power to choose their presidential electors and the fact that all 50 states in 2020 (red and blue alike) certified their election results and slates of electors with no contested or dissenting submissions to Congress by anyone in lawful authority in any state.
There was and is no rational basis in fact or law to question the outcome in 2020. Vance, in the interview, called that a “slogan.” No, senator, it’s just a fact.
No vice president in American history has ever claimed the power Vance says he would have asserted if he had been in Vice President Pence’s shoes on January 6, 2021.
Americans should think about this very carefully before voting to put Vance in that very same position of power during the next presidential term, which ends on January 20, 2029.
When Vance dodged the question during the October 1 debate, he smarmily claimed he was “focused on the future.” I sure wish Governor Walz (who hammered him pretty well on the overall issue) had specifically pounced on that!
Walz could have said: “This question IS about the future! It’s about what you would do, if elected vice president, on January 6, 2029! With the power you say you’d have claimed on January 6, 2021, you’d have the sole power to dictate who becomes president in 2029!”
Keep in mind: Vance, if elected next month, would very likely be a candidate for president himself in that election.
When pressed in the interview, Vance fell back on a bizarrely convoluted diversion he has used before. As the Times summarized, he argued that “Trump would have won more votes in 2020 had social media companies not limited posts about … a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. Trump allies had maintained that documents on the laptop linked President Biden to corrupt business dealings, but those claims were unfounded.”
When asked yet again whether Trump lost the election, Vance replied with his idiotic smart-ass counter-question: “Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?”
The reporter may have been tempted to reply in a way forbidden by journalistic etiquette. But I’m just a lowly law teacher that few people have ever heard of, so I’ll give you the honest answer:
“No. It’s a fucking lie, senator. It’s bullshit and you know it.”
Let’s take this apart piece by piece. Unless (as I sometimes suspect) Vance just faked his way through Yale Law School, he knows perfectly well it is not “censorship” if a privately owned social media company (Twitter, now known as “X,” or any other) chooses to block any messages it doesn’t like.
A social media company’s website is not a public park or street or sidewalk. It is not a public forum of any kind. It is a proprietary private forum. To the extent the First Amendment plays any role, it assures the right of such a private company to decide exactly what speech by users it does or doesn’t want to host.
So even if Twitter did block messages or stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop based on some partisan motivation, it had a perfect First Amendment right to do so. It would actually violate the First Amendment if the government tried to force a company to host or platform views or speech it does not want to.
This is a well-known hornbook rule of free speech law. I have taught it many times. Unless he was asleep in class or at home doing something on his couch, Vance learned it during Constitutional Law at Yale Law School.
Trump supporters have tried to claim the government improperly pressured private social media companies to exercise their undoubted First Amendment right to block any messages they choose on their own proprietary websites. But no convincing evidence of that has ever emerged. And even if it did, it could not justify overthrowing an election.
Let’s take Vance’s casual claim that the allegedly improper handling of the Hunter Biden story, by one or more private social media companies on their own proprietary websites, “cost Trump millions of votes.”
First of all, it’s preposterous on its face — utterly laughable. It has certainly not been proven or even plausibly “suggested” by any “independent study.” It’s not like blocking messages on one or more private social media websites prevented the story (or ever could have) from spreading like wildfire (as it did) in rightwing media outlets.
Nothing prevented Fox News and a multitude of other rightwing media outlets from stroking and propagating the Hunter Biden story six ways to Sunday (as they did). There was never any “censorship” of any of that.
It’s bullshit, pure and simple, no matter how deep you dig.
But at a deeper and more serious level, this is obviously a disturbing and absurdly unworkable basis on which to argue that a freely and fairly conducted election should be thrown out and … what? Done over again? How?
Just reverse the outcome based on sheer speculation about how many voters might have been influenced by some media outlet? And whom would Vance entrust with such awesome power? The courts? Elected politicians? Oh yeah … apparently one single official, the vice president charged merely with presiding over the opening of the Electoral College votes.
It would hardly be possible to limit such a startling principle to private social media companies deciding what kind of misinformation to block on their own proprietary websites.
What about more traditional media companies like, say, Fox News? How many “millions of votes” were influenced by the innumerable ways in which Fox pushed anti-Democratic propaganda during the 2020 campaign while promoting Republican lies and blatantly favoring Trump?
There is no stopping point to such nonsense.
It is important to note that Vance, in this interview, did not even attempt to suggest any basis to question the conduct of the election itself or the counting of all those “millions of votes.” He did not venture into any debunked nonsense about hacked voting machines or other conspiracy theories.
No. Vance eagerly avows he would have sought to destroy democracy — he would have aided and abetted Trump in trying to overthrow a free election — based on legally and factually bogus arguments that private social media companies mishandled their content moderation on their own websites.
Keep in mind that Vance somehow snagged a Yale law degree. He knows EXACTLY how absurd and dishonest this is!
Why does he say it? We all know the answer. He feels compelled to publicly KISS TRUMP’S ASS. I guess the New York Times felt it would be too impolite, too far outside the bounds of journalistic propriety, to put it quite so crudely.
Apparently, nothing matters to Vance except winning political power and advancing his own cynical career. (The following section of this essay was updated October 31, 2024.)
Vance’s malicious dishonesty escalated to shocking and dangerous new levels in the final week of the campaign as he embraced long-debunked lies about vaccines.
Vance claimed in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that he “really started to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing” several years ago because “the sickest that I’ve been in the last 15 years by far was when I took the [Covid] vaccine.”
There is overwhelming scientific evidence that Covid vaccines have SAVED MANY MILLIONS OF LIVES. As the New York Times noted, Vance, in falsely and idiotically referring to getting “sick,” was merely “describing normal immune-response side effects that, though unpleasant, are not dangerous.”
It is regrettable that the Times failed to add and clarify that such side-effects (though admittedly “unpleasant”) are actually a HEALTHY and POSITIVE sign that the body is reacting EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD to the vaccine! The reaction is evidence that the body is generating the antibodies that PROTECT against the Covid virus! This is true of other vaccines as well and is an easily googled fact.
As the Boston University Laboratories website has summarized: “IT’S GOOD TO FEEL BAD AFTER YOUR COVID SHOT.”
This cuts very closely and personally for me. My own husband, a critical care physician, treated one of the first Covid patients hospitalized in the San Diego area in March 2020. He has repeatedly risked his life to treat many such patients. In April 2020, a good friend of mine in Florida died of Covid.
And guess what? Every time my husband has taken the Covid vaccine shots, he has felt downright shitty for a day or two, just like Vance apparently did. But he has wryly noted it’s a good sign. It has protected him from actually getting “sick.”
My own reactions to repeated Covid shots have been far more mild, barely noticeable. I am five years older than my husband and more than 20 years older than Vance. Younger people often have stronger reactions to vaccines (and develop stronger protective antibodies), while older people often have few or no side-effects.
Our different reactions may well explain why my husband, despite working in a hospital setting where he has often faced potentially deadly exposure to the virus, has apparently never gotten Covid. By contrast, I did get infected, apparently from casual social exposure, and suffered a mild case that dragged on for weeks during January 2023. The fact that I was fully vaccinated probably did protect me from getting more severely ill.
The Covid vaccines have saved the lives of many millions of people (especially the elderly), who may get sick but avoid hospitalization and life-threatening illness.
Vance is a highly educated man. He knows all this. He is not scientifically illiterate or uninformed. His mother-in-law is a molecular biologist at the University of California in San Diego. He is more than capable of googling basic information about vaccine side-effects.
Vance did NOT get “sick” from his Covid shot (any more than my husband did) and he KNOWS it — even if, in a laughable departure from the toxic hypermasculinity flaunted by the Trump campaign, Vance chooses to publicly whine about his side-effects.
Vance, on this as on so many other subjects, KNOWS what he’s saying is fucking BULLSHIT! He KNOWS he has a dangerously loud megaphone as a nationally famous politician. He KNOWS his lies ENDANGER LIVES! Potentially MILLIONS of lives in the case of vaccine denialism if we face another pandemic, which is a dangerous possibility.
So again, why does he say these things? As noted above, it’s pathetically obvious.
Just as Vance parrots Trump’s election denialism in order to kiss Trump’s ass, he now parrots Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cynical and profit-motivated vaccine denialism to appeal to the many Trumpian MAGA supporters he knows have long since swallowed the “red pill” of denialism. Most such voters who lack Vance’s educational advantages probably believe such denialist conspiracy theories.
But please, don’t believe for an instant that Vance himself has actually been “red-pilled.”
The only “red pill” Vance has swallowed is lust for power. The facts don’t matter to him. The truth doesn’t matter. Science doesn’t matter. The law doesn’t matter. The Constitution doesn’t matter. American voters don’t matter. The safety and even the lives of his own constituents and supporters don’t matter.
Only his fear of offending Donald Trump matters — only his servile submission to his political boss, his cowardly desire to cater to the MAGA base, and his yearning for power. Apparently he’d eat shit on national TV if necessary to please Trump.
Vance is worse than contemptible. He is beneath contempt. And he is dangerous. He has proved over and over that he’s utterly unfit to hold any public office, much less the vice presidency — and far less the presidency, to which he would be dangerously close if enough American voters in enough swing states are foolish enough to elect the Trump-Vance ticket.
The Skeptical Professor 