Vice President JD Vance is either secretly Charles Xavier and can read the mind of every Harvard University employee, or he is making shit up again in order to push a MAGA talking point.
The self-proclaimed hillbilly boldly compared Harvard University to North Korea at the American Compass anniversary gala Tuesday, claiming that “at least 90—probably 95 percent” of Harvard’s faculty voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
"But if you ask yourself—a foreign election, a foreign country's election, you say 80% of the people voted for one candidate. You would say, 'Oh, that's kind of weird,’ right? That's like, not a super healthy democracy,” he babbled.
“If you said, 'Oh, 95 percent of people voted for one party's candidate,' you would say, 'That's North Korea,” right, Vance said. “That is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen."
If you’re wondering how Vance acquired these completely made-up voting statistics and decided to draw these connections, you are not alone. Even Fox News noted that the vice president made the claim “without evidence.”
Then again, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just released an official government report citing fabricated sources, so it’s not unheard of for people in the Trump administration to pull data from thin air.
As for our eye-lined darling, using made-up information to push his longtime vendetta against higher education is just another example of his awkward attempts at being a relatable human.
When Vance was penning thoughts for conservative website National Review, he used vague sources he referred to as “friends” he knew to justify his narrative of the “college trap.”
And when the highly hypocritical Yale Law School grad is not dogging on Harvard, he is struggling to form sentences while interacting with workers at a donut shop to show voters that he, too, is a normal everyday guy who does normal, everyday things.
A “trawl of genealogy records” has called into question Vice President JD Vance’s self-declared status as a “Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart,” the New York Times reports.
Vance, in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, declared, “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”
But, according to a report commissioned by a Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) minister, Vance lacks “‘a conclusive family link’ to Northern Ireland.” The research was detailed in a “24-page dossier titled ‘The Family Footsteps of JD Vance,’” The Times reports.
As the Times notes, “Gordon Lyons, the Northern Ireland minister for communities, had been hoping to present a copy of the report personally to Vance over the St Patrick’s Day period in Washington DC.”
According to the Times, "as Scots-Irish, or Ulster-Scots, [Vance’s] family history would be tied directly to plantation-era Scots settlers whose descendants, generations after arrival in Ireland, set out for America.”
“Emails obtained via a freedom of information request show that in February Lyons’s office was advised that “it has not been possible to establish conclusive proof of a direct Vance link back to Ulster at this stage,” the report adds.
Fox News’ biggest stars have stopped defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid the weeklong firestorm over their former colleague’s dysfunctional management of the Pentagon and his potentially illegal handling of classified information.
Three months after Vice President JD Vance broke a 50-50 Senate tie to install the historically underqualified Hegseth at the Pentagon, journalistsroutinelydescribe a department in “chaos.” Five top Hegseth aides have left the department since last Friday amid reports of “vicious rivalries,” and a “leadership vacuum.” Reporters further revealed that Hegseth had shared details about U.S. strikes in Yemen in a second unsecured Signal chat, potentially endangering U.S. service members, and had the app installed on his Pentagon computer.
But other Fox hosts have been silent, even after rallying to support Hegseth when his nomination came under fire and again following the first revelation of his use of Signal to share attack plans.
Fox’s evening lineup of The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, and Gutfeld! have ignored Hegseth’s struggles this week (a passing remark from guest Jimmy Failla to host Laura Ingraham was the only mention of the story on any of those shows). The Five, the Fox panel show which features Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfeld, Jeanine Pirro, and Dana Perino, also has not covered the subject.
Even Will Cain, who spent years sharing the couch with Hegseth as co-hosts of Fox & Friends’ weekend edition, hasn’t mentioned his former colleague’s name on his afternoon show this week. (He did not comment on Fox correspondent Kevin Corke’s report about the Signal story during Monday’s program.)
As Fox’s stars take a pass, full-throated defenses of Hegseth’s leadership are coming from the likes of MAGA stalwarts like Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, and Laura Loomer, while their corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal editorial board savage his handling of the Pentagon.
Two explanations seem plausible for why Fox’s biggest stars have gone silent as their former colleague comes under fire:
They’ve decided that the best way to help Hegseth is to keep pretending the Signal story is over, hide other damning reports about his leadership from their viewers, and hope the firestorm dies out.
They think Hegseth’s performance is so bad and the stakes of his failure at the Defense Department are so high that they are unwilling to keep sticking their necks out for him.
Either way, this disaster was the predictable result of President Donald Trump putting a former Fox weekend host with little relevant experience in charge of the Pentagon. The secretary of defense oversees a massive budget and bureaucracy and has the authority under certain circumstances to launch nuclear weapons and end human civilization. The risks of handing the position over to someone because of their takes on TV are almost incalculably high.
Hegseth is currently struggling to manage the Pentagon when its biggest problem is a costly, ineffective, and apparently unending bombing campaign in Yemen. How will he respond if India and Pakistan start trading fire?
Democrats are aghast after the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic reported that he was accidentally added to an unsecure text chain in which Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and multiple other top national security and Trump administration officials discussed planning a military strike in Yemen.
The Trump administration says the text chain—in which the officials were discussing not only whether to strike the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group, but how and when they would do it—is authentic. They are looking into how Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the thread.
But the fact that the Trump administration officials were discussing classified and highly sensitive military plans on a messaging app is the real problem.
Goldberg reported that Hegseth was discussing information that, “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.”
He also reported that multiple national security lawyers said Waltz “may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of ‘national defense’ information.”
From Goldberg’s report:
All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.
And on top of that, Goldberg reported that by using an app like Signal—where texts are set to disappear—the Trump officials could also have been violating federal record laws.
“If you read one article today, make it this one,” Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) wrote in a post on X of Goldberg’s report. “Total incompetence, yet again. And putting our national security at great risk.”
Democrats are now demanding information and threatening to launch investigations.
“Only one word for this: FUBAR,” Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), who served as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq, wrote in a post on Bluesky, referring to the military slang term to describe something as “Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.” “If House Republicans won’t hold a hearing on how this happened IMMEDIATELY, I’ll do it my damn self.”
Only one word for this: FUBAR.
If House Republicans won’t hold a hearing on how this happened IMMEDIATELY, I’ll do it my damn self.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), who lost both of her legs while serving in Iraq, was aghast at the recklessness of the Trump administration officials.
Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in history, is demonstrating his incompetence by literally leaking classified war plans in the group chat...
Hegseth and Trump are making our country less safe.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said, “Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally – that would normally involve a jail sentence.”
And Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) connected the incompetence of the Trump administration’s national security officials to the Trump giving co-President Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency bros access to Americans’ personal information.
“The Trump Administration, which just committed one of the biggest and most incompetent national security breaches in history, is also giving Elon Musk and his team of unvetted lackeys access to every American's personal information,” Beyer wrote, putting in stark terms just how much trouble we all are in with these fools leading the federal government.
Ultimately, there is so much irony to this story.
First, almost every member of that chain criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, citing national security concerns.
“Talk about a DOUBLE STANDARD: Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent top secret emails to Hillary Clinton’s private account and the DOJ didn't do a DAMN THING about it,” Waltz—who is responsible for adding Goldberg to the text chain in which they were recklessly discussing military operations—said in a 2023 appearance on Fox News. “No wonder Americans are losing faith in our justice system.”
— (@)
“Seems like every day there are new revelations on how Hillary's private email server put national security at risk,” Rubio wrote in a 2016 tweet.
"Hillary Clinton put some of the highest, most sensitive intelligence information on her private server because maybe she thinks she's above the law, or maybe she just wanted the convenience of being able to read it on her Blackberry,” Rubio also said at a campaign event for his failed presidential bid in January 2016. “This is unacceptable."
Given that Hegseth is discussing confidential military plans via Signal, maybe he should look in the mirror for why that information leaked.
Worst of all, as Democrats lambast the Trump administration officials and call for investigations, Republicans have been virtually silent—even though they would be screaming to the heavens if a Democratic administration had done anything even remotely similar.
As of press time, few Republican lawmakers have commented. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) posted on X, “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels—and certainly not to those without security clearances, including reporters. Period. Safeguards must be put in place to ensure this never happens again.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told Semafor’s Burgess Everett that it, “Sounds like a huge screw up. I mean, is there any other way to describe it?”
We can guarantee that Cornyn would’ve had much stronger words if it had been Biden administration officials doing the same.
And Trump himself used the age-old excuse that he hadn’t heard the news in order to avoid commenting on it.
“I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. ...You're telling me about it for the first time,” Trump told reporters on Monday.
If the commander in chief did not yet know about the fact that his top aides were putting the country at risk by discussing military operations via text message, then that’s a scandal in and of itself.
