Tag: jd vance
Vance Invented A 'Fact' About Harvard To Make Himself Really Mad

Vance Invented A 'Fact' About Harvard To Make Himself Really Mad

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.

Then again, Vance can’t even keep his own family or sports fans on his side—so his historic unpopularity makes a lot of sense.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

J.D. Vance

Official Genealogy Report Explodes Vance's 'Scots-Irish Hillbilly" Claim

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.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Kissing Trump's Butt Paid Off Big For Corporate Donors

Kissing Trump's Butt Paid Off Big For Corporate Donors

Recent filings with the Federal Election Commission have revealed the scale of record-breaking corporate donations to the Donald Trump-JD Vance Inaugural Committee. Trump smashed his previous inaugural donation record of $107 million for his first presidency, raising more than twice as much, with 650 donors—140 of whom gave no less than $1 million. This includes the tech billionaires who ponied up and got VIP seats at the dreary event.

Trump’s top donor, Elon Musk, has benefited from his co-presidency, growing even wealthier while not worrying about conflicts of interest when it comes to protecting his companies and government contracts. Then there are individual billionaires, like crypto mogul Justin Sun, who has had his criminally fraudulent activities wiped away with help from large donations to Trump. But there are a whole lot of others filling up the swamp and wetting their beaks.

The crypto industry donated a total of $18 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and has been one of the biggest winners so far. Trump courted cryptocurrency firms during his campaign, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.”

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which dropped a cool $1 million on Trump, watched the Securities and Exchange Commission drop its lawsuit against them after Trump came into office. And Trump Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently announced that the Justice Department’s unit that investigated cryptocurrency fraud-related crimes would be disbanded.

Companies with a large investment in the electronics market such as Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook gave $1 million to Trump, have received a respite from potentially crushing China tariffs on popular products like the iPhone, though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said there’s a good chance that will change.

Intuit, maker of TurboTax, got more than their $1 million donation’s worth. Reports have indicated that the Trump administration plans on ending the IRS’s Direct File program. The move benefits tax-filing companies by eliminating the free filing option for Americans.

Pilgrim Pride, a poultry company owned by Brazilian meat conglomerate JBS, reportedly made the largest donation to Trump’s inaugural committee, $5 million. What did they get in return so far? Trump recently paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that has allowed the U.S. to investigate and prosecute foreign corruption tied to America’s trade interests since 1977. JBS knows this law intimately, having already paid out more than a quarter of a billion dollars in criminal bribery charges under the FCPA.

And there is no end in sight for billionaires who want to make payments to Trump in some form or another. Major companies like Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and X, which all face ongoing government lawsuits, are settling cases, many of which are considered by critics to be baseless, with Trump himself.

Both Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X went so far as to settle long-standing, questionable lawsuits from Trump, with Meta sending $22 million to his presidential library and X sending another $10 million in settlement money.

At the same time Musk, whether or not he decides to step out of the political spotlight to try and repair the terrible branding effect he’s had on Tesla, is still reportedly ready to hand over $100 million to Trump-controlled super PACs.

With hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts on the line, and many companies coincidentally linked to investors with names like Musk, Vice President JD Vance, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to connect the swampy dots in Trump’s White House.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Pete Hegseth

Amid Pentagon Chaos, Fox Hosts Stepping Away From Hegseth

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, journalists routinely describe 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.

Hegseth responded to his growing list of scandals with a combative Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends, whose hosts defended his conduct.

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?

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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