Some politicians live in fear that old, racist posts they made on social media years ago will come back to haunt them in an election year. But Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) apparently feared the exact opposite might happen to him.
According to CNN's KFILE team, in 2016, Vance, who at the time was already exploring the idea of a run for office, successfully pressured an old professor to scrub a blog post he wrote when he was a student at Yale Law, in the days immediately after former President Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012 — the central thesis of which was that Republicans were destroying their future prospects by chasing racist fantasies about deporting nonwhite people.
“A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or ‘self-deporting’ them),” wrote Vance at the time, in a post that can still be viewed through internet archives. “Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.”
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Vance went on to say that the GOP was “openly hostile to non-whites” and had done everything it could to alienate “Blacks, Latinos, [and] the youth.”
The senator, who was elected in 2022 on a pro-Trump platform and is now former President Donald Trump's running mate, has been frequently criticized for his dramatic about-face on racial identity politics and on Trumpism in general; for years, he described himself as a Never Trump conservative and even compared Trump to Hitler.
Vance has now similarly embraced Trump's hostility toward even legal immigrants, helping to spur on a viral hoax that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio for work were eating people's dogs and cats — and has refused to apologize even as the false claim has triggered bomb scares and other death threats targeting schools and other community centers in the small city.
