Politics

Archived version

Here is the archived transcript of the J.D. Vance speech (the video link is in the article)

Sen. J.D. Vance, whom Donald Trump named as his vice presidential running mate Monday, told a group of influential young conservatives in a closed-door speech in 2021 which was published only recently that they should stand up for “nonconventional people” who speak truth, such as Infowars founder Alex Jones.

"If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”

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[JD Vance] said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”

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Vance made these remarks at a September 2021 gathering of the Teneo Network, an invitation-only group of young conservatives that counts elected officials, pro athletes, financial executives and media figures among its members. Vance joined Teneo six years ago.

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According to tax records, the Teneo Network’s chairman is Leonard Leo, the legal activist who built a pipeline of lawyers who interpret the Constitution based on the “original intent” of the framers or the meaning of the words in the text when they were written [...] Leo helped confirm all six conservative justices currently serving on the U.S. Supreme Court. Leo-aligned judges have pushed to restrict abortion rights and rein in the government’s power to regulate corporations.

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By the time Vance spoke at Teneo’s 2021 conference, he had joined the race to fill outgoing Sen. Rob Portman’s seat. Despite his past criticisms of Trump, which included calling the former president an “idiot” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, Vance won Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and cruised to a comfortable victory.

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[Vance] said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”