National Review Nails JD Vance on Flip-Flopping With JD Vance’s Own Writing in the National Review

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Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance may have won the Republican nomination for the Ohio Senate race after a bitter campaign battle, but the Donald Trump-endorsed conservative is still plenty controversial among Republicans.

Only hours after the race was called in Vance’s favor, National Review published a column asking, “Will the real J.D. Vance Please Stand Up?” The Jim Geraghty-written piece accuses Vance of being a flip-flopper, which is nothing new for the man who once said he was a “never Trump guy,” but the outlet also published stories previously written for them by Vance, asking if the “new” Vance proves he has some kind of split-personality disorder.

“How well do you know the Ohio Republican Party’s new Senate candidate, J. D. Vance? I suppose I should specify whether I mean the old J. D. Vance or the new J. D. Vance, because they seem like two drastically different guys. Maybe he has a split personality,” Geraghty asks.

There are then six excerpts from past Vance National Review pieces from 2013 to 2016 displaying a very different rhetoric than that deployed by Vance during his Senate race — in which some pundits claim the late endorsement and campaigning from Trump helped Vance clear the win and keep from getting dragged down by Republican critics.

In a 2016 piece for National Review, Vance writes about the relationship between Black Americans and the police, saying any fear of such authority is derived from experience.

The reality is not that black Americans enjoy special privileges. In fact, the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Last month, for instance, the brilliant Harvard economist Roland Fryer published an exhaustive study of police uses of force. He found that even after controlling for crime rates and police presence in a given neighborhood, black youths were far likelier to be pushed, thrown to the ground, or harassed by police. (Notably, he also found no racial disparity in the use of lethal force.) No other study of comparable rigor exists on the subject, and its conclusion is clear: that black youth derive their fear of police from experience. The injury done to our black citizens is important and no respectable party can ignore it.

While Vance hasn’t dismissed these views and the thoughts remains up, his rhetoric has noticeably changed, connecting rising crime rates to police being “afraid” to do their jobs in the modern cultural climate in 2021.

In the time between his 2016 piece and his more recent views was the phenomenon of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, as well as the rise of the Defund the Police movement.

In a 2019 piece, the author advocates for more work by the government to intervene on corporate interests that may be negatively affecting society, referencing the fentanyl crisis.

All of these entities are doing what the market demands, and in some ways, it’s hard to blame them. But shouldn’t our laws and policy make life harder for them? Or should conservatives cry “small government” every time someone suggests an intervention and stick our collective head in the sand, pretending there’s no relationship between market actors and the civil society we say we believe in?

Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy dives deep into the effects of the fentanyl crisis in Middle America, but he has more recently been labeled a conspiracy theory by critics for suggesting in a recent interview that perhaps President Joe Biden is letting fentanyl come through the Souther Border to punish MAGA voters.

“It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it,” he recently told The Gateway Pundit.

The excerpts contrasted with the modern Vance led Geraghty to ask: where is the guy who used to write for National Review?

“I don’t know about this guy who’s been running around Ohio saying things like, ‘Honored to have Marjorie [Taylor Greene]’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags” and ‘I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,'” Geraghty writes, adding concerns about Vance’s campaign interviews with conservatives like Steve Bannon and Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft.

Instead of the conservative writing about his own familial experiences with the fentanyl crisis, Vance is now speculating that “the Biden administration is deliberately helping fentanyl across the border ‘to punish the people who didn’t vote for him, and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it,'” Geraghty writes.

Ultimately, the former National Review writer has become “the embodiment of the worst aspects of modern populism” with his embrace of certain rhetoric and Republicans who seem opposed to the calm and collected style of Vance in past years.

One way or another, Vance’s run for Senate is very real now and the Trump bump appears to have worked in his favor, at least in his Republican primary race.

The former publisher of Vance now asks about the upcoming race: “which J. D. Vance is running for Senate?”