Conservative Writer Torches JD Vance After Visit to Springfield: ‘You Can Send Little JD to Yale’ But He’s Still a ‘Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll’

(AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

The Dispatch’s Kevin Williamson dismissed Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance as “Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll” in a scathing piece penned after a visit to Springfield, Ohio.

Vance and his running mate, former President Donald Trump, have in recent days promoted unfounded claims that Haitian migrants residing in Springfield are eating residents’ pet cats and dogs.

Williamson explained that he traveled to the town “to report on a story that isn’t happening.”

After beginning with a description of the Haitians before revealing that he was actually talking about “JD Vance’s hillbilly ancestors,” Williamson made another comparison, this one between between Vance and Nazi propagandist Fritz Hippler before declaring that “You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.”

Williamson went on to acknowledge that while, based on his experience in Springfield ,there have been difficulties with integrating the migrants into the community — they do use a lot of social services, for example — their arrival has coincided with more employment and higher wages.

“When J.D. Vance’s hillbilly antecedents came pouring out of the Appalachian mountains into the factory towns of Ohio, they were looking for jobs and a decent standard of living. They were leaving something behind—something they loved but couldn’t live with. Vance knows all about that: He wrote an interesting and moving book on the subject of moving on. He is an intelligent and energetic man: If he had been born in Haiti, he’d have made it to Ohio a long time ago, and he surely would be thriving there,” he concluded. “But I wonder if Vance thinks about his ancestors in terms of anything other than book sales and political posturing.”

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