Long before he became a senator or the Republican Party's vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance championed a far right-wing Heritage Foundation report that called hunger a “great motivation” for Americans to find work and said abortion should be “unthinkable” in America.
The New York Times reported Tuesday Vance was embroiled in the 2017 project that produced 29 essays from conservative commentators voicing extreme opinions.
They included opposition to in vitro fertilization and fertility treatments, which they called harmful to women, the Times reported.
Vance wrote the introduction to the essays and called them “admirable.” At the collection's release party, he was the event’s keynote speaker.
The writings came five years before Vance’s election to the Senate and a year after the publication of his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
It also came a year after Donald Trump’s election as president. The Heritage Foundation went on to become the architect of Project 2025, which reportedly aims to set out the agenda for a return of Trump to the White House.
“Taken together, the pieces in the report amount to an effort to instruct Americans on what their families should be, when to grow them and the best way to raise their children,” the Times reported.
“Authors argued in the 2017 report that women should become pregnant at younger ages and that a two-parent, heterosexual household was the “ideal” environment for children.”
The hardcore philosophies echo what Vance has said since, including his opposition to abortion and his comment that powerful Democratic women were “childless cat ladies.”
In one essay, conservative Katrina Trinko wrote that children born to single mothers were a “tragedy.”
In a statement to the Times, Vance’s campaign spokesperson Luke Schroeder said, “Senator Vance has long made clear that he supports I.V.F. and does not agree with every opinion in this seven-year-old report, which features a range of unique views from dozens of conservative thinkers.
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“It’s bizarre that The New York Times is writing an entire piece attacking Senator Vance for the views of other individuals.”
Vance’s introduction to the collection of essays described conservative social values involving families as integral to reversing cultural decay.
“Culture, in other words, must serve as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, and proper conversation about culture will never be used as a weapon against those whom Christ described as ‘the least of these,’” he wrote.
“It will be a needed antidote to a simplistic political discourse.”
In one essay in the collection, conservative Cal Thomas, wrote that welfare programs encouraged Americans not to work, and called them the “ultimate poison.”
“The threat of an empty stomach is a great motivator for people who are able to work to find work,” he wrote.
“For many, human nature would rather get a check from the government without working for it than earn a check from a job.”
Vance has also written the foreword to a to-be-released book by the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts.
