The Left Hates J.D. Vance

And that’s the best argument in his favor.

Donald Trump’s choice for vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), is, according to the Washington Post, “a rising star in the Republican Party and previously outspoken Trump critic who in recent years has closely aligned himself with the former president.” The leftist establishment media will in the next few weeks make a great deal out of his having been a Trump critic, leading some patriots to wonder if this was yet another of Trump’s personnel decisions that ended up backfiring on him (think Pence, Tillerson, McMaster, Bolton, et al). The strongest point in Vance’s favor, however, is that the left burns with a loathing for Vance that is almost as intense as its hatred for the man at the top of the ticket.

Zack Beauchamp, a “senior correspondent” at the far-left propaganda organ Vox, wrote Monday that Vance is “friendly, thoughtful, and smart — much smarter than the average politician I’ve interviewed.” Praise from a “journalist” of the caliber of Zack Beauchamp is a red flag. Zack Beauchamp thinks J.D. Vance is smart; Zack Beauchamp also thought that there was a massive bridge connecting Gaza and the West Bank, forcing Vox to issue a Babylon Bee-level correction: “An earlier version of this post suggested there was a bridge connecting Gaza and the West Bank. Various plans to do this have been floated, but the bridge was never actually built.”

Beauchamp also noted in 2021 that a surge in antisemitism in the U.S. coincided with a “recent flare-up in fighting between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas,” which actually made sense, since in some cases, the perpetrators “waved Palestinian flags or shouted pro-Palestinian slogans.” Instead of actually coming to a realization, however, Beauchamp then retreated into his familiar leftist cocoon, improbably blaming Bad Orange Man: “the anti-Semitic attacks are part of the generalized surge in American anti-Semitism since 2016, which most experts link to the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right movement.” Sure, Zack: supporters of the most pro-Israel president in history have always “waved Palestinian flags or shouted pro-Palestinian slogans.”

Zack Beauchamp is thus not just a doctrinaire leftist; he’s an exceptionally dim bulb. If he thinks you’re smart, you can probably beat the average second grader in a tough game of tic-tac–toe, or parrot the leftist dogmas Beauchamp loves so deeply, albeit ineptly. So Trump’s pick looks disquieting, except that Beauchamp goes on to say that Vance’s “worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.” When leftists start prattling on about “democracy,” or more commonly, “our democracy,” they mean their own hegemony and dominance of the American public square. If Vance threatens that, Trump has made a good choice after all.

Beauchamp then treats us to a scare paragraph about just what a black-hearted villain Vance really is:

Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week’s assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence.

This business about Trump trying to “overturn the election results” is common media spin for efforts to get a genuine investigation of the abundant evidence that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump didn’t want Mike Pence to “overturn” the election results, but to withhold certification of the results until the fraud claims were fully investigated (which most never were; most of them that went to court were dismissed on other grounds). Pence clearly could have done this, as the Democrats in Congress later passed a law limiting the vice president’s power in order to ensure that it could not be done in the future.

Numerous Jan. 6 defendants, meanwhile, have languished in prison, in inhuman conditions, for years now without trial. Do they not deserve justice? Or at very least, fair treatment? J.D. Vance thinks so. Zack Beauchamp doesn’t. And as for the request for the criminal investigation of the columnist, it’s no surprise that Vance’s argument went way over Beauchamp’s soy-nourished head; it was an exercise in using the left’s “insurrection” hysteria against the left.

Beauchamp also hates Vance for blaming a leftist’s attempt to murder Trump on the left’s overheated and hysterical rhetoric about the Republican candidate. Vance, you see, is just trying to “whitewash his radicalism.” Never mind all the leftists who have for years now been calling openly for Trump to be killed. In Zack Beauchamp’s tiny Marxist world, they don’t exist.

And so Zack Beauchamp has, in sum, penned a long-form campaign ad for J.D. Vance, and Vox is happily featuring it atop all of its hard-left agitprop. It’s the best testimonial the vice presidential candidate could have wished for.