In a blog post from 2012, J.D. Vance, then a law student at Yale, criticized the Republican Party for being “openly hostile to non-whites” and alienating “Blacks, Latinos, [and] the youth.”
Four years later, he asked his former college professor to take down the post, titled “A Blueprint for the GOP.”
Brad Nelson, who taught Vance when he was an undergraduate at Ohio State University, had asked his former student to contribute to the blog he ran for the Center for World Conflict and Peace. During the 2016 presidential primary, Vance asked Nelson to delete the post so he could work in Republican politics, which Nelson did, according to CNN.
The article, which is accessible on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, attacks the GOP’s immigration policies, saying from a conservative point of view, expecting the government to deport 12 million people is nonsensical.
“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 Republican vice presidential nominee wrote. “The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.”
It’s the opposite of Vance’s views now, as he seems to openly argue that immigration is bad for America, despite the fact that his wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian immigrants. And it’s telling that this is what Vance wanted deleted from the internet when the Ohio senator has expressed far more controversial views, including on right-wing podcasts.
On one podcast in 2020, for example, Vance expressed strange views on the role of grandparents, on Indian culture, and the “postmenopausal female.” Meanwhile, two of his accounts on X still follow Hitler apologist Daryl Cooper. Yet Vance is more concerned with his own valid criticisms of the Republican Party remaining online.
Before he entered politics, Vance was critical of Donald Trump and his 2016 candidacy for president, saying that “he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” It seems like Vance wants to put his previous views of Trump, along with his old views of the GOP, behind him for the sake of political advancement, which raises the question of whether he actually believes anything he’s saying now.
