Marilou Johanek, Ohio Capital Journal

Why does he do it? Why does Ohio’s former U.S. senator, hopeful heir to the MAGA throne, keep damning himself with snarky provocations and self-evident lies? How difficult is it for JD Vance to be respectful, instead of derogatory, honest instead of glibly deceitful?

Every time the vice-president is before an open mic he seems to revert to cutting diatribes about people MAGA loves to hate or alternative facts that bely reality. That’s not leadership from someone a heartbeat away from the presidency. That’s venom masquerading as virtue and promoting Orwellian “War is Peace” propaganda.

Vance has mastered the dark art of manipulating thought through ignore-the-evidence Trumpian rhetoric. He excels at stoking unfounded fear or fanning unquestioned loyalty whenever the boss requires subterfuge as a means to an end.

Hours after Trump unilaterally (and arguably unconstitutionally) chose to launch an unprovoked attack against Iran early Sunday (without the authorization of Congress) Vance was spouting the doublespeak of Team Trump on Sunday morning talk shows to portray America’s abrupt entry into foreign combat with Israel as a proud accomplishment.

To be clear, the U.S. inserted itself into a hot war by impulsively bombing a sovereign nation on the pretext of an imminent nuclear weapons threat — contradicted by Trump’s own U.S. intelligence community.

Iranian leaders called America’s act of aggression against their country “unprecedently dangerous” and a “betrayal of diplomacy.” But Vance peered into network cameras and pretended the unforced decision by the U.S. to drop more than a dozen 30,000-pound bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities was not what it looked like to the rest of the world.

“We’re not at war with Iran,” said Vance with a straight face. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program” — the same one U.S spy agencies and U.S. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard determined was dormant before Trump sent B-2 stealth bombers into Iranian airspace.

“We do not want war with Iran,” prattled the Ohio poser in the wake of the largest operational strike ever by those bombers to take out Iranian nuclear sites. “We actually want peace.”

Despite preemptive attacks certain to inflame greater conflict in an already volatile region.

In an awkward tap dance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vance tried to pivot from his longtime opposition to proactive military intervention in the Middle East.

As an Ohio senatorial candidate Vance was adamant about not supporting military action against Iran on its own soil — even as proxy militia groups escalated attacks on U.S. and coalition forces.

But the staunch isolationist did a 180 on Trump’s recklessness in dragging the U.S. into another sketchy war without an end game.

Trump was smarter than his predecessors when it came to targeting Tehran with American military muscle, Vance argued unconvincingly, so the risk of the U.S. succumbing to another endless war was slim.

“I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” said the ex-Marine who served in the Iraq entanglement. “I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

Trump directly threatened those objectives by alienating nearly every international partner and ally of the U.S., aligning with autocratic Russia against democratic Ukraine, destroying the federal national security workforce, and eliminating irreplaceable expertise, decimating global foreign assistance investments, nuclear safety protections, cyber security, and more.

But when Trump plunged the U.S. into a Middle East conflict with his bombardment of Iran, he knew exactly who to deploy to disingenuously frame America’s military pounding of that country as preventative medicine to reset fruitful diplomacy and spur peace.

Vance shelved his skepticism about starting foreign wars without clear objectives or exit strategies and gamely pushed a narrative that Iran essentially had it coming but rest assured the U.S. has “no interest in boots on the ground” or Iranian regime change. Maybe.

Yet the veep deals in dishonesty like a chameleon changes color. A day before Trump announced his bombing strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure, Vance was in Los Angeles lying through his teeth about the Democratic mayor of the city and governor of the state encouraging violent immigration protests.

Then he disparaged a former Senate colleague from California who was slammed to the ground and handcuffed at a press conference when he tried to ask the Homeland Security director a question. Vance referred to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla as “Jose Padilla” (a convicted domestic terrorist) and suggested his ordeal was “political theater.”

Why did Vance spew “lies and utter nonsense in an attempt to provoke division and conflict in our city?” asked LA Mayor Karen Bass. Why did Vance mock the first Latino elected to the U.S. Senate by intentionally misnaming him?

Same reason he put an Ohio city and its Haitian community in danger with savage lies about pet-eating immigrants: To snag attention, stoke ugly, and distort truth beyond recognition.

A slick Vance played his fellow citizens for chumps with Trumped-up bull that American troops belong on American streets and a wanton act of war by the U.S. isn’t. That’s not leadership. That’s a glib gaslighting from a cringe-making toady.

This article first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.

J.D. Vance has really done Ohio proud these last few weeks, hasn’t he? The lapdog vice-president, with evidently a lot of time on his hands, has managed to be firmly rebuked by Pope Francis, denounced by outraged NATO allies and widely ridiculed for his bizarre ‘masculinity’ rant at a weekend MAGAfest just a month into his tenure. Way to create a buzz/acute embarrassment back home!

What is wrong with J.D.? Have the wheels come all the way off? Why does the 40-year-old awkwardly playing VP keep stepping in it stateside and abroad? Is the “childless cat ladies” charmer acting out unresolved rage from a bad place? Working through some deep-seated anger? Seriously, Vance manifests juvenile cringe, not sober sway, as he settles into his nondescript role as an appendage in the Trump-Musk administration. Even Trump won’t name him as a slam dunk heir apparent. Not good.

For a supposed Ivy League intellectual, Vance sure spouts stupidity on the regular: Honestly, you’ve got to be really off base on Catholic theology for the Vatican to correct your twisted take on love with descending priorities as justification for mass deportations. In Vance’s godawful reading of the Christian order of love concept; (to mesh with his political ideology) family, community, and country come first and everyone outside that concentric circle later or not so much. Which puts migrant families outermost from Vance’s construct on brotherly love for me but not thee from outside our borders.

Francis rejected the VP’s sophomoric theoretical defense of cruel immigration crackdowns as flatly wrong. He urged the misguided millennial to meditate on the parable of the Good Samaritan, “on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” But “American citizens first” nativist Vance has no interest in building a “fraternity open to all,” just an all-white patriarchy focused on baby-making. To that point, he started a holy war (barely a week after inauguration) against charitable organizations across the country that feed, clothe and house refugees and immigrants (i.e., Catholic Charities and Catholic relief groups) by implying they perform their labor of love for federal money — not humanitarian concerns.

“Devout Catholic” convert Vance went all glib and combative on compassion and care for the “least of these” because they included Brown and Black mothers and fathers and children fleeing horrendous homelands for hope. But upholding the dignity of every human being (native-born or not) as a core tenet of Christianity clashes with the core MAGA mission to degrade, shackle and ship terrified families back to the foreign hellscapes they fled. Vance threw nasty and mean into the mix to look tough on dehumanized “illegals” and scorn mercy. He is a dutiful, if not decent, Trump toady.

But the swift rebuttals to Vance’s hollow broadsides from the Church and the pope himself only reinforced the veep’s smallness as a smug sycophant slinging ugly. Whatever reputation Vance may have enjoyed in the past as a thoughtful individual with at least a modicum of integrity is long gone. With a brief stint as a venture capitalist, an even briefer stint as Ohio senator and now VP, Vance is heady with power and hubris over his meteoric rise from bending the knee to a man he once derided as “America’s Hitler.” Then Vance went to the Munich Security Conference recently, not to collaborate with NATO allies on mutual security interests and Ukraine, but to turn on them.

Vance, the shameless election denier in service to an authoritarian regime lawlessly dismantling a democratic republic, had the towering audacity and historical blindness to lecture his European audience on democracy, downplay threats from Russia and China, and publicly court a far-right German party (AfD) that many Germans consider the heirs of Nazi ideas and that sanitizes the Holocaust. His blistering dress-down of European leaders, rightly dismayed over rising extremism and history repeating itself, coupled with his pronounced affection for far-right politicians a week before a crucial German election (U.S. election interference?) was obscene.

The last thing the world needs now is a U.S. vice-president trashing eighty years of foreign policy with America’s closest and most enduring friends. But that’s what a dangerously reckless Vance did on the world stage to compete with Elon Musk and boost his nascent brand as an uber-nihilist bent on destroying plurality for purity and seeding a new world order. It’s wing-nuttery on a disturbingly dark scale. But Vance, for all his performative bravado — whether it’s lashing out at European allies for not welcoming extremism, or engaging in petty posting on X, or weirdly obsessing about “the essence of masculinity” and a “broken culture” that tells you “You’re a bad person because you’re a man” — is a phony.

He morphed from Never-Trumper to groveling suck-up for unimagined power, but he can’t quite pull it off as a poser with a makeover beard spewing stupid and offensive and strange. Vance has been doing us proud by attacking friends, embracing enemies, insulting humanitarians, drawing papal ire, and pontificating laughably on what makes a man a man.

Seriously, what is wrong with J.D.?

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

The quote is attributable to a 1965 sermon Martin Luther King Jr. gave the day after “Bloody Sunday,” when civil rights protestors were attacked and beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In a period rife with ugliness and hate, King exhorted his beleaguered congregation to live with moral courage when faced with grave wrongs or die with soul-killing silence long before you take your last breath.

“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.” King’s prophetic words should reverberate off the walls in this fraught moment for American liberty and justice as the tyrannical hammer of Project 2025 methodically pounds down the rule of law.

But they don’t. Not to a wide swath of apathetic Americans. Not to their spineless and largely muted political leaders. Nothing drove home the point more than the stunningly suppressed reaction to the presidential pardon of Jan. 6 convicted police beaters who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to hang the vice-president, hunt lawmakers and stop the peaceful transfer of power through mob savagery. Crickets and meh is what we got.

Although the brazen felon holding court in the Oval Office campaigned on pardoning the “patriots” who bashed, tased and blinded overwhelmed law enforcement officers defending the Capitol, few expected that clemency to include those videotaped beating the hell out of cops in front of the whole world. Former DC cop Michael Fanone was beaten unconscious, suffered a heart attack, concussion and traumatic brain injury:

“I’ve been betrayed by my country, and I’ve been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump, whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming.” He and others who testified in Jan. 6 cases fear for their lives again now that the insurrectionists have been released.

Yet sheeplike Republicans gave Trump a pass on freeing even the most violent Jan. 6 offenders and far-right militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy — “to overthrow, put down or destroy by force the government of the United States.”

Ohio’s newly minted U.S. Senator and Trump bootlicker Bernie Moreno defended the pardon of armed rioters on the seat of democracy — “because nobody’s been treated worse” — then, with a straight face, proclaimed himself and Trump big backers of the Blue.

“Nobody is a stronger supporter of law enforcement than President Trump, myself, or JD Vance. We honor and respect law enforcement. When I walk in every morning, I look at the guards, I say ‘Thank you. Thank you for being here, thank you for helping out.’ But these people [the pardoned police beaters] have been treated horribly.”

No, Bernie, the tried and convicted thugs had their due process in court. The gruesome videos of Jan. 6 document who was really treated horribly by MAGA combatants summoned, assembled and sent to the Capitol by Trump to “fight like hell” over his baseless lie of a stolen election. The police who were dragged down the steps, beaten with everything from flag poles and pipes to fire extinguishers and baseball bats, are the victims Moreno sold down the river with sympathy for their attackers. Thanks for nothing.

Some GOP leaders, including Vance, who had previously argued that “obviously” violent protestors should be excluded from any presidential reprieve, were notably mum after Trump’s sweeping amnesty of the horde that pulverized officers and desecrated, defecated and plundered its way through the Capitol while lawmakers ran for their lives. Other cowardly Republicans, like Ohio’s Jim Jordan, hid their disagreement to Trump’s decision with a walk-off line that the pardon was his to make.

No point in decrying the glorification of political violence in service to a sore loser. Trump might invite the insurrectionists to the White House. Not a peep from Ohio Republicans about the hundreds of vindicated criminals released into communities, including Ohio hometowns, or the emboldened paramilitary leaders who threaten to “bring the heat” on those who held them accountable. One pardoned Ohioan considered his crimes for Trump “an honor.”

It’s sick. The horrendous siege of America’s citadel of democracy on live television repulsed the nation four years ago. Today the man who incited that siege to steal a second term recasts it as a “peaceful day” with skirmishes that resulted in “minor injuries” (not critical injury and death) and portrays his rioting red shirts as heroes imprisoned as “hostages.” George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

Opposition to Trump’s fanciful narrative is nonexistent from Republicans and most of the country doesn’t seem to care. Jan. 6 was bad but whatever. Are we all the walking dead in this country? Trump’s blanket pardons of his most vicious foot soldiers on a mission to forcefully overturn a democratic election was, as an enraged Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur said, “a sacrilege against our republic and our constitution…an affront on decency and a violent attack on the rule of law.” Be outraged.

Take King’s sermon to heart. Stand up for what is right in “the fierce urgency of now” because staying silent on what matters will kill your soul.

It didn’t take long. The new legislative session began in Columbus with Republican chieftains in the state throwing the future of public education in Ohio under the school bus.

First it was the billion-dollar voucher king, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, to hedge his bets on giving Ohio’s 611 school districts what they need to provide a quality education to the 1.7 million students they serve.

Then it was Huffman’s patsy in the executive branch, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who added his two cents worth of wishy-washy about how a leaner state budget ahead means something’s gotta give — like fully funding the education system used by the vast majority of Ohio families and their children. “Sometimes these are very, very difficult, difficult choices,” said the gutless wonder. What leadership.

Educating future generations of Ohioans with high-quality public schools is your job, governor. It’s the No. 1 responsibility of the state to ensure a thorough and efficient system of funding for public schools. ‘Says so right in the Ohio Constitution. It also says, “no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, control of, any part of the school funds of this state.” But DeWine and his puppet master in the Ohio House ignored that part years ago when the state began diverting hundreds of millions of education funds to private and mostly religious schools.

Clearly, the politicians calling the shots in state government have no regard for the state constitution. Adhering to the rule of law is optional when political power is absolute. Huffman, who thumbed his nose at the Ohio Constitution on fair redistricting (to pull off even more egregious gerrymandering in legislative and congressional districts) is doing the same thing on adequately funding public education.

He’s looking to cut revenue to public schools while spending a ton of tax dollars on private school vouchers — with aspirations to fund more private school facilities to increase demand for those vouchers. Call it the Great GOP Phase-out of Public Education. Last week, Huffman dropped a calculated bombshell to prepare Ohio’s public-school districts for another financial hit from the state. The Lima Republican said the state couldn’t afford to fully fund public schools or finally fix a school funding formula ruled unconstitutional nearly three decades ago. The Ohio Supreme Court’s 1997 ruling said the state’s failure to provide and distribute sufficient resources for public education and its over-reliance on local property taxes to cover that shortcoming violated the law.

Yet Ohio lawmakers never remedied the problem. School districts had to keep going back to voters just to maintain and operate local schools. Homeowners carried the weight of school funding, not the state. They were/are understandably tapped out on school levies, especially as changes in property evaluations jack up tax bills.

But in 2021, after years of collaboration between former Republican Ohio House Speaker Bob Cupp, former Democratic state Rep. John Patterson and scores of public education stakeholders, Ohio came close to meeting its constitutional obligation of ensuring a thorough and efficient system of funding for public schools. “What we really wanted to do was figure out what it really costs to educate a student and then what a district can really do to support its fair share, and then the state would compensate with the rest,” said Patterson.

The Cupp-Patterson spending formula, known as the Fair School Funding Plan, was enacted as part of the 2021-23 state budget. The new system weighed a district’s expenses to come up with the base per-pupil funding amount — instead of a blanket amount of state funding for all schools — and changed the way the local community’s share was measured depending on property tax value and the income of local residents.

That was a big deal and a significant step forward to address the long-running inequities of an unconstitutional school funding system that had failed generations of K-12 students. The quality of their education often depended on where they lived. Wealthy school districts in Ohio had every advantage over high poverty districts that struggled to pay for even basics in the classroom.

The Fair School Funding Plan initiated a level of fairness and reliability in state support that past spending programs lacked. Complete state funding of the FSFP (around $2 billion altogether) was to be phased in over a six-year period through two-year budget cycles. The goal was to continue expanding state funding for districts in successive biennial state budgets until the Fair School Funding Plan was fully funded.

The last installation, or third phase, was to be paid in full in the upcoming 2026-2027 operating budget. But that expectation hit a wall when Huffman nixed increased spending to public schools as “unsustainable.”

His excuses for not making good on fully funding Cupp-Patterson — less state revenue to work with, less federal pandemic relief money, more scrutiny needed for school money already allocate — don’t apply to his expansive voucher outlays to religious schools that reached $966.2 million for the 2023-2024 school year. Enough to fully fund Fair School Funding Plan.

But Huffman is laying the ground to shave more off the FSFP and showing his utter indifference to the acute financial challenges facing countless districts. Tough luck for the nearly 90% of Ohio students who attend public schools with slashed opportunities. It didn’t take long.

The 39-year-old from Cincinnati, rocking a pretentious pompadour, got carried away with himself last week. Vivek Ramaswamy presumed his sizable net worth, amassed from biotech and financial investments, and his inflated sense of self-importance, gave him latitude to be a jerk online. Gave him permission to flip the MAGA script on all immigrants are bad to some are better than Americans. Bound to happen to a rich guy high on his own supply.

A year ago, the wealthy Wall Street speculator was so impressed with himself that he indulged in the ultimate ego trip. Ramaswamy ran for president not so much to win, but to market his emerging brand as a slick provocateur in the MAGAverse willing to take smarmy to next-level obnoxious. After his failed campaign, Ramaswamy hopped aboard the Trump train and wormed his way into the Dear Leader’s inner circle.

He became a Trump surrogate on steroids to ingratiate himself with the convicted felon and sexual abuser who would be president. Ramaswamy was a hardliner on Trump’s signature campaign issue — scapegoating Black and Brown immigrants. The candidate fumed that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country” and had to go.

Ramaswamy amplified that anti-immigrant message because it supercharged the MAGA base. The dehumanizing rhetoric put a target on undocumented workers but played well at Trump rallies. Crowds roared, “Send them back!” Promises of mass deportations of terrified families provoked thunderous applause. Ramaswamy, son of Indian immigrants, fanned the fear and hate of other immigrants.

He told his xenophobic audiences he was committed to universally deporting undocumented immigrants and using the military to stop migration at the southern border. He cruelly vowed to limit the number of immigrants — fleeing persecution in their home countries and desperately seeking asylum in America — to “I would say zero, darn close to zero.”

Ramaswamy, who was born in the U.S. to two noncitizens (which means he gained citizenship through birthright), also pledged to end birthright citizenship for “kids of illegal immigrants in the country because their parents broke the law.” He was against even a special visa program (H-1B) that temporarily allowed highly skilled foreign workers in the country — until he wasn’t. Hold that thought. The wealthy Millennial, who now lives in an enormous mansion in Columbus, attached himself to the Trump campaign as a zealous crusader for the anti-immigrant cause. He bet his abject sycophancy would pay off and it did. Ramaswamy was appointed to a vague government efficiency initiative with the richest oligarch in the world. Must have been a heady moment for the young poser striding through the U.S. Capitol with his commission co-chair, the billionaire becoming trillionaire Elon Musk.

But Ramaswamy gave away the game. He told the world what he and the hi-tech titan really thought about the rubes who bought the Trumpian propaganda about immigrants as an evil to be eradicated. “America is for Americans and Americans only!” screamed Stephen Miller, anointed architect of Trump’s mass deportation plans. Immigrants stole American jobs. They must be stopped, not managed. No exceptions. Ramaswamy found some.

Immigrants who work as software engineers.

Silicon Valley and high-tech companies, with powerful allies like Ramaswamy and Musk, want more of them — even if they steal American jobs and depress wages in high-tech industries. Besides, and this is where young Ramaswamy let the cat out of the bag, Americans are too dumb and too lazy to compete with foreign tech workers.

Vivek let his disdain for MAGA loyalists fly. In a moment of pique during the holiday lull, Ramaswamy caused Trump World to wince and go to war with itself. He revealed his inner contempt for Americans as slackers with a superficial culture that “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

In a post on X, Ramaswamy bizarrely placed part of the blame for the mediocre masses (or his fellow citizens) on 90s sitcoms “that venerate Cory from “Boy meets World” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters.”

The best tech workers are Indian and Asian immigrants, ranted the rich man-child, not culturally depraved ‘native’ Americans. Discounting decades of American innovation and ingenuity, along with scores of homegrown engineering graduates with high tech expertise, Ramaswamy suggested skilled visas for select immigrants in high-tech jobs were critical considering the lousy pool of American applicants.

The Ohio finance bro, who made bank off capital gains, not invention, dripped with derision about “a culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian” and produces average talent. Methinks a nerdy Vivek, with a huge chip on his shoulder, felt underappreciated as a schoolboy know-it-all. Ramaswamy was wistful the Trump presidency could start an American culture that prioritizes “hard work over laziness.” Please.

This guy doesn’t get us. At all. And he’s reportedly eyeing a run for Ohio governor in 2026! His home state boasts first-rate universities and colleges that train top notch engineers, software developers, data scientists, systems analysts, computer architects, and plenty of highly educated professionals. Ohio industries, from automotive to aerospace and advanced manufacturing technologies, embody innovation and resilience.

But the smug pompadoured prince posted scorn and showed his cards. A losing hand for Ramaswamy.

Why, when presented with verifiable facts, did Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance double-down on lies that have subsequently terrorized his constituents in Springfield, Ohio with threats to more than 20 places so far? Why did the Republican candidate running against Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, Bernie Moreno, pile on to those lies with comments about “illegal” immigrants flooding the southwestern city when he also knew the vast majority of the Haitian immigrants were there legally?

Why did Ohio congressman and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, tweet about “illegal aliens” taking over Springfield when he, too, knew his home state had welcomed the legal Haitians to the city under a temporary protected status (TPS) allocated to them because of the violence and unrest in their country?

Why did Ohio’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Dave Yost dismiss the response of Springfield’s mayor, city manager, police chief and others who refuted as “baseless” a vile, online falsehood about Haitians abducting and eating local pets? Yost suggested the ugly, evidence-free smears circulating on Facebook (that painted the Black outsiders as savages) carried more weight than hard evidence to the contrary.

“Why does the media find a carefully worded City Hall press release (on the facts in Springfield) better evidence?” Yost asked incredulously. What the state AG implied was that the unsubstantiated, racist rumors amplified to scare people were just as legit, if not more, than the substantiated reality easily determined by authorities. Astounding.

Yost knows, as do Jordan, Moreno and Vance, that the influx of immigrant workers to Springfield was crucial to reviving the local economy. Area factories and businesses were desperate for workers after labor shortages in the wake of the pandemic. Certainly there were challenges to the city whose population quickly swelled by 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. It is an ongoing problem.

After state and national Republicans put Springfield in the crosshairs of a fringe, groundless, viral claim, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced new state support to offset the city’s depleted resources. More assistance is critical. But clearly the immigrants from Haiti have helped revive the struggling Ohio town. That’s a good thing.

Supporting Springfield’s turnaround economy with adequate funding and infrastructure to accommodate growing pains is obviously in the best interests of constituents. But what best serves Ohioans who live in the municipality is not in the best political interests of Vance, Moreno, Jordan, Yost and, unsurprisingly, the Republican presidential nominee who blurted out “They’re eating the dogs!” during last week’s presidential debate.

Vance is closely aligned with the architects of Trump’s potential policy agenda, Project 2025. As is Trump, as it was written by dozens of his former advisers. Vance is acutely aware of its religious-right goals to severely restrict abortion rights, override state laws like Ohio’s, use the 150-year-old Comstock Act to prosecute health care providers for mailing abortion pills and block access to contraception. But he and other shameless Republicans joining the chorus to malign human beings of color in Springfield needed a distraction.

Project 2025 promises a radical agenda in a second Trump term to strip away freedoms, undermine elections, workers and union rights, shred climate protections, disband federal agencies including the Education department, replace civil servants with party loyalists, suppress dissent, ban books, encourage censorship, etc. The Springfield lie gave extremists cover from the unpopular policies they embrace.

Besides, the truth about hard-working immigrants saving a declining Ohio city doesn’t fit their narrative of Black and Brown immigrants invading and destroying America. On Saturday, Vance twice reposted a viral video from the man who invented the critical race theory nonsense that showed a seemingly staged video of a skinned animal on a backyard grill purportedly in Dayton. Despite Dayton officials denouncing the post as BS, the Republican vice-presidential candidate tweeted, “Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves. Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”

Except it didn’t, and he knew it.

On Sunday, Vance slipped up on a network news program and told the truth about Springfield (before catching himself) by saying if he has to “create stories so the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He later claimed this referred to putting the spotlight on issues not inventing them. Never mind the real harm he has done to Ohioans suddenly besieged with multiple bomb threats and gripped by terror that he and (former immigrant) Moreno continue to seed to stoke fear and loathing of “others.”

Exasperated Springfield native, singer-songwriter John Legend, implored those tearing his city apart with despicable lies to honor the Christian ethos of treating “strangers as though they might be Christ.” He added, “How about we love one another?” and “when we talk about immigrants moving to our communities we don’t spread hateful, xenophobic, racist lies about them?

Too tall an order for Vance & Company. Why? Because we’re talking about Haitians eating dogs instead of a national abortion ban and a menu of lost freedoms.

It was the kind of juvenile stunt you’d expect from a frat boy being a jerk. But the problem child pulling the bizarre maneuver on an airport tarmac in Wisconsin last week — to stalk Vice President Kamala Harris — was none other than Senator Cringeworthy from Ohio, or J.D. Vance, his latest alias.

The Republican vice-presidential nominee is seemingly hellbent on reinforcing his odious public image as a weird piece of work from The Handmaid’s Tale. No wonder the Gilead-curious Vance is soaring off the unlikability charts as more voters discover what Ohioans already have about the fringe right-winger with patriarchal fever dreams.

Like the No. 1 man on the GOP ticket, the No. 2 man apparently has a problem with strong women who wield power. J.D.’s insecurities were on full display as he marched (uninvited) up to Air Force 2 on the tarmac to smugly “check out my future plane” and to “say hello to the vice president and ask her why she refuses to answer questions.”

Unclear what questions the off-putting frat boy had in mind with his cheeky disrespect and overt menacing of the vice president of the United States. But Vance was oddly pleased with his performative obnoxiousness. “I had a bit of fun,” tittered the floundering running mate of a convicted felon. “Don’t think the vice-president waved at me as she drove away, but I’m glad to have done it.”

Vance’s puerile ‘bit of fun’ stalking the woman who is now the Democratic presidential nominee backfired. His faux attempt to “confront” Harris was widely seen as both weird and creepy. Mary Trump, the estranged niece of the ex-president, even suggested Vance should be slapped with a restraining order by Secret Service agents “the next time JD tries to get within a mile of the vice-president’s plane.”

You’d think Trump’s historically unpopular veep pick, whose net favorability rating with voters is under water and getting worse by the day, might course correct. But Vance struts with an invincibility borne of arrogance and a ruthless drive for power. The 40-year-old project of alt right tech billionaire Peter Thiel is deep into delusions of autocratic grandeur.

Vance — and the anti-democratic Silicon Valley neo-reactionaries of the New Right — long to impose their new world order on the masses (as outlined in the alarming Project 2025 edicts). The Ohio Republican wrote the foreword to an upcoming book by the architect of that GOP manifesto, Kevin Roberts, that concludes, notably, with a call for revolution. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

And, declared Vance, Roberts’ Christian fundamentalist views of “culture and economics” that recognize “virtue and material progress go hand in hand” will be an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” Interestingly, the release date of the book, including Vance’s prominent affirmation of its dystopic premise, was abruptly changed from September to after the election to squash scrutiny of its burn-it-all-down rage against American democracy.

Vance appears to be a true disciple of Roberts’ dystopian vision of a homogeneous, hierarchal society of power, status and freedom where cis white men naturally reign supreme. To be sure, the Ohioan bankrolled into fame and fortune by Thiel is as phony as a three-dollar bill, but he owes everything to the rich wingnuts who buttered his bread, bought him a U.S. Senate seat and catapulted him to the Republican presidential ticket.

So Vance embraces the extreme orthodoxy of his far-right community that would have women return to traditional social roles — homemaking and child-rearing — and surrender social agency and bodily autonomy to the men in charge. The first-term senator’s recently resurfaced comments disparaging “childless cat ladies” and disregarding people with unconventional families were no blunder.

They reflected the regressive agenda of a wistful patriarchy that wants to weaponize “family” as a cultural imperative and build a society around the white nuclear family with lots of white babies and women who secretly want to be subjugated. Vance derided leading Democrats as inferior because they had no biological children. He ridiculed them as less than childbearing tradwives.

“You look at Kamala Harris, [transportation secretary] Pete Buttigieg, AOC [congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make any sense that we’ve turned over our country to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.” Vance was unapologetic about his disparagement of those who don’t measure up to his metrics as proficient breeders.

Days ago, he again doubled-down in defense of his personal attacks against Harris, (who is a stepmother to two children) Buttigieg, who adopted two children with his husband, Chasten, and Ocasio-Cortez who does not have children — like millions of other Americans. Vance clumsily attempted to defect growing disgust over his rank misogyny by blaming the media that “wants to get offended about a sarcastic remark I made before I even ran for the U.S. Senate.”

Oh, J.D. It’s not the media you offended when you belittled those without children or weirdly stalked a powerful woman running for president like a self-impressed jerk. It’s the people who will cast a ballot in three months. “Women are paying attention,” warned a Harris spokesperson, “and will use their power at the polls.”

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