17
Vance is a venture capitalist with deep ties
to Silicon Valley, but says knowing the industry
will help him figure out how to fix it. He answers
charges of hypocrisy by pointing out that Thiel is a
conservative outlier: “It’s not like I’m being funded
by Mark Zuckerberg.” When I ask if any of the
policies he favors would affect Thiel adversely, he
replies, “Oh, absolutely, I think Peter should pay
higher taxes,” and lets out a big laugh.
In his Middletown speech, Vance excoriated
corporations for not paying their fair share to the
country that’s given them so much: “Who built the
roads and bridges that allow you to do your busi-
ness?” The sentiment echoes Obama, but when the
former President said, “If you’ve got a business,
you didn’t build that,” in 2012, conservatives lam-
basted his “demonization” of industry.
Vance supports free markets, but only to a
point. “This is a mistake of the modern conserva-
tive movement, to say, Well, these are private com-
panies; we have to keep our hands off,” he tells me.
“I do generally think that cutting people’s taxes
is a good thing. On the other hand, when there
are companies that have effectively rigged the
economy such that they pay a lower tax rate than
my middle-class sister, that’s not fair.”
Vance favors punitive tariffs and pulling out of
Afghanistan, and he’s taken up the faddish right-
wing crusade against critical race theory. He won’t
say the 2020 election was stolen, exactly, but con-
tends it was “unfair.” “I think Josh Hawley did the
right thing,” he says of the Senator’s objection to
certifying electoral votes on Jan. 6. Nor does he
think Trump deserved to be impeached over the
insurrection. “There were some bad apples on
Jan. 6, very clearly, but most of the people there
were actually super peaceful,” he says of a riot that
left five dead and more than 100 police officers in-
jured. “Some of them were, like, let into the Capi-
tol by the police officers!”
As for his evolution on Trump, Vance describes
it as an awakening. “It’s sort of a—what is the word
people online use— blackpilling or redpilling or
whitepilling,” he says. “I’m not trying to cop his
style. But when you stop trusting what the press
is saying in the same way, it does have a transfor-
mative effect on the way you see not just Donald
Trump the man, but the whole movement.” □
‘There
were
some bad
apples,
very
clearly,
but most
of the
people
were
actually
super
peaceful.’
J.D. VANCE,
on the Jan.
riot at the
U.S. Capitol
JEFF DEAN—AP
