In a December 2023 speech, JD Vance defended a notorious white nationalist convicted over 2016 election disinformation, canvassed the possibility of breaking up tech companies, attacked diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and talked about a social media “censorship regime” that “came from the deep state on some level”.
The senator’s speech was given at the launch of a “counterrevolutionary” book – praised by the now Republican vice-presidential candidate as “great” – which was edited and mostly written by employees of the far-right Claremont Institute.
In the book, Up from Conservatism, the authors advocate for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, for politicians to conduct “deep investigations into what the gay lifestyle actually does to people”, that college and childcare be defunded and that rightwing governments “promote male-dominated industries” in order to discourage female participation in the workplace.
Vance’s endorsement of the book may raise further questions about his extremism, and that of his networks. The Guardian emailed Vance’s Senate staff and the Trump and Vance campaign with detailed questions about his appearance at the launch, but received no response.
‘Congratulations on such a great book’
Vance’s speech was given in the Capitol visitor center in Washington DC last 11 December, according to a version of C-Span’s subsequent broadcast of the event that is preserved at the Internet Archive.
The occasion was the launch of Up from Conservatism, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh, the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.
In his introductory remarks on the day, Milikh said the book “maps out the right’s errors over the last generation … on immigration, on universities, on the administrative state”.
The book, however, appears more directed towards supplanting an old right – seen as too accommodating – with a “new right” focused on destroying its perceived enemies on the left.
In the book’s introduction, Milikh writes: “The New Right recognizes the Left as an enemy, not merely an opposing movement, because the Left today promotes a tyrannical conception of justice that is irreconcilable with the American idea of justice … the New Right is a counterrevolutionary and restorative force.”
Also in that piece, Milikh offers a vision of the new right’s triumph, which has an authoritarian ring: “We like to say that one must learn to govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule.”
In his speech, Vance first offered “congratulations on such a great book, and thanks for getting such a good crew together”, and then warmed to themes similar to Milikh’s.
“Republicans, conservatives, we’re still terrified of wielding power, of actually doing the job that the people sent us here to do,” Vance said, later adding: “Isn’t it just common sense that when we’re given power, we should actually do something with it?”
Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, a critical account of Christian nationalism and the host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, said: “Vance, many Claremont people, including some folks in this volume, and especially the ‘post-liberal’ conservative Catholics that he hangs out with, have advocated for a form of big government that will wield its power in order to set the country right.”
He added: “And you may think, well, OK, that doesn’t sound so bad. But here the common good is rooting out queer people, making sure non-Christians don’t immigrate to the country and outlawing things like pornography that are currently a matter of personal choice.
“You end up with this conservatism that promotes an invasive government conservatism rather than a small government.”
Prosecuted for ‘posting a meme’
Vance did allow that government overreach existed, but one of his examples appeared to betray his sympathy with far-right extremists.
He said that “the most egregious and out-of-control part of the deep state in this country is the Department of Justice”, which he claimed to be “actively prosecuting its political opponents”.
“I’m not just talking about Donald Trump, of course,” Vance continued.
“We know that Douglass Mackey is almost at the brink of serving prison time,” Vance added, and then claimed that Mackey was being prosecuted for “posting a meme, for posting a joke. Merrick Garland is trying to throw this guy in prison for what, close to a year, because he posted a joke on the internet.”
Mackey was charged in 2021 with conspiracy against rights over his activities during the 2016 election campaign under the Twitter alias Ricky Vaughn.
Prosecutors said that on 1 November 2016, Mackey as Vaughn produced an image depicting a Black woman standing in front of a sign that said “African Americans for Hillary Clinton”, with a caption falsely claiming that voters could “avoid the line” and “vote from home” via text. Another fine-print caption at the bottom of the image read “Paid for by Hillary for President 2016”.
Prosecutors say that at least 4,900 people texted the candidate’s name to the number on the image in following days, as instructed by the disinformation image.
In March 2023, Mackey was convicted on these charges, and in October was sentenced to seven months in prison. In December, the second circuit court of appeals granted Mackey bond while the conviction is appealed.
At the time of the alleged offenses, Mackey had amassed tens of thousands of Twitter followers and was listed as one of the most influential election accounts that year by MIT’s Media Lab.
His influence came from his position at the center of the then ascendant “alt-right” movement, and he employed it to “boost former President Donald J Trump while spreading antisemitic and white nationalist propaganda”, according to the New York Times.
Far-right and white nationalist influencers have defended Mackey since his arrest, with many, like Vance, pushing the false idea that he was convicted over “memes” or his political beliefs, rather than election interference.
These include Tucker Carlson, who claimed when he interviewed Mackey that Mackey had been convicted for criticizing Clinton, and Donald Trump Jr, who during his own interview of Mackey said that Mackey’s Ricky Vaughn “may be my favorite Twitter account of all time”.
As a remedy to the perceived injustice of Mackey’s prosecution, Vance suggested: “Maybe we should be appointing people at the Department of Justice who actually take a side in the culture war, the side of the people who elected us, and not just pretend we don’t have to take sides at all.”
‘It came from the deep state’
Elsewhere in the speech, Vance described an interaction with an audience member at a previous speech in which he had advocated for the breakup of large tech companies.
He claimed that the audience member had approached him after the speech and said: “Look, why do you want to break these companies up, why don’t we just throw all their CEOs in prison?”
Vance added: “My point is that our voters are much, much more willing to invest us with the ability to do something, and frankly, a lot of them are willing to go much further than even I’m willing to go, and I’m probably willing to go much further than pretty much anybody else in this building.”
Later, in a part of the speech he framed as challenging universal rightwing hostility to unions, Vance said: “Why I like the Fraternal Order of Police is because they are the most powerful institution in our society standing between [us and] barbarism.
“When people burn down buildings and loot and murder, it is the police that prevent them from doing so and it’s the Fraternal Order of Police that ensures they don’t lose their job for doing their job.”
Vance subsequently claimed that in a meeting with “one of the leaders of the major American airlines”, his interlocutor had told him that “we’re very committed to the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion in our flying workforce”, and “there are actually people that he would like to be pilots and he thinks they would actually make excellent pilots, but they don’t satisfy the standards that have been set to become pilots, OK?”
Vance then claimed that he responded: “I’m the father of three kids, a six-year-old, a three-year-old, a one-year-old. There are two jobs that I really, really want to be merit-based and nothing else. One is surgeons and two is airline pilots, OK? I want the smartest and the best people.”
Vance’s remarks reflect a then current rightwing obsession with the idea that DEI programs at airlines were reducing the quality of pilots and may have been implicated in safety issues in Boeing aircraft.
In January, on his podcast, Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder, told listeners: “I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like: ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”
In fact, the diversity programs that exist at airlines have not significantly changed the demographic makeup of the pilot workforce, which is 92% white and 92% male in the US, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Later, answering a question from an audience member, Vance peddled a conspiracy theory that tech companies and “the deep state” had colluded in creating a “censorship regime” during the 2020 election.
“It came from the deep state on some level,” Vance told the questioner. “We certainly know that the FBI was explicitly participating in some of the censorship regime in the run-up to the 2020 election, but look, we also know these guys were doing it in part of their own volition.”
‘Free our minds … from the fear of being called racists’
In the book, commended by Vance, a series of authors take reactionary – or “counterrevolutionary” – positions on a number of social and economic issues.
In one chapter, John Fonte writes of disrupting narratives of civil rights progress: “The great meaning of America, we are told, comes from liberating so-called oppressed groups and taming the power of privileged groups. Thus, our history is one of liberation: first of Blacks, then of women, then of gays, and now of the transgendered.”
Fonte retorts: “Not only is this narrative false; it will take us further down the path of national self-destruction … On the questions of slavery, American Indians, and racial discrimination, the progressive narrative is not a historically accurate project designed to address past wrongs, but a weaponized movement to deconstruct and replace American civilization.”
Like other authors in the collection, Fonte offers policy recommendations. He proposes heavy-handed federal intervention into education: “[T]he US Congress should prohibit any federal funds in education to support projects … that promote DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) and divisive concepts such as the idea that America is ‘systemically racist.’”
In his chapter, David Azerrad tells readers: “We need to free our minds once and for all from the fear of being called racists.”
The assistant professor and research fellow at rightwing Hillsdale College, and former Heritage Foundation director and Claremont Institute fellow, also claims that conservatives have been too conciliatory on race: “For too many conservatives, the goal is to outdo progressives in displays of compassion for blacks … yet blacks continue to vote monolithically for the Democratic Party and progressives have only ramped up their hysterical accusations of racism.”
Azerrad continues with white nationalist talking points on race, crime and IQ, writing: “It is not racist to notice that blacks commit the majority of violent crimes in America, no more than it is to incarcerate convicted black criminals … There is no reason to expect equal outcomes between the races … In some elite and highly technical sectors in which there are almost no qualified blacks, color-blindness will mean no blacks.”
Elsewhere, Azerrad writes: “[C]onservatives will need to root out from their souls the pathological pity for blacks, masquerading as compassion, that is the norm in contemporary America … This is most obvious in the widespread embrace of affirmative action (the lowering of standards to advance blacks) and the general reluctance to speak certain blunt but necessary truths about the pathologies plaguing black America – in particular, violent crime, fatherlessness, low academic achievement, nihilistic alienation, and the cult of victimhood.”
In April 2022, Azerrad gave a speech at St Vincent College, a Benedictine college in Pennsylvania, entitled “Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria in Contemporary America”, in which he reportedly argued that Black people in America have more “visible” privileges and that there is a “consensus amongst our elites” that “Black citizens should not be held to the same standard of conduct as white people”.
The college president was forced to issue a statement in the wake of the speech, describing it as “not consistent with our Benedictine values of hospitality and respect”.
‘Do not subsidize childcare’
Helen Andrews, meanwhile, offers “three things we could do right now that would put a big dent in the multiplying lies that have come from feminists for the last forty years about women and careers”.
Her first proposal is to “stop subsidizing college so much”, since, according to Andrews, in the 22-29 age group, “there are four women with college degrees … for every three men. That is going to lead to a lot of women with college degrees who do not end up getting married.”
“Second,” Andrews continues, “the Right can do more to promote male-dominated industries. Reviving American manufacturing and cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices isn’t just an economic and national security issue; it’s a gender issue.”
Her third proposal is “do not subsidize childcare” – since the fact that “many working moms are struggling” with childcare costs “might actually be good information the economy is trying to tell you”.
Andrews is the print editor of the paleoconservative magazine the American Conservative and has previously written sympathetically about white supremacist minority regimes in Rhodesia – renamed Zimbabwe after white rule ended – and South Africa.
Scott Yenor claims in his chapter that before the 1960s, America lived under a “Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives”.
Yenor is a political science professor at Boise State University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute.
He then claims: “We currently live under the Queer Constitution”, which “honors all manner of sex”, and under which “laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional”.
Yenor claims: “These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.”
Yenor says the state should intervene in citizens’ sex lives: “In the states, new obscenity laws for a more obscene world should be adopted. Pornography companies and websites should be investigated for their myriad public ills like sex trafficking, addictions, and ruined lives. The justice of anti-discrimination must be revisited.”
In a separate essay co-written with Milikh, the editor, Yenor advocates in effect destroying the current education system and starting again. The essay includes a recommendation for school curriculums: “Students could start building obstacle courses at an early age, learning how to construct a wall and how to adapt the wall for climbing … Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals.”
They also counsel the abolition of entire disciplines from college curriculums: “[A]ny university major with ‘studies’ associated with its name is guilty unless proven innocent and should be defunded … Disciplines like sociology and social work must be jettisoned from public universities.”
The Guardian has previously reported on Yenor’s role in founding the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal – a men- and invitation-only, far-right fraternal order – and his orchestration of a far-right propaganda site focused on Idaho politics.
Onishi, the academic and podcaster, said that while the kind of proposals contained in Up from Conservatism had little electoral appeal, the New Right often envisioned a process of imposing them from above via a president – like Trump – keen on wielding immense personal power in a government packed with loyalists.
“They want a government that expands the executive branch in order to bypass the processes that are often arduous in the legislative and even in the judicial branches,” he said. “If you can expand the executive branch, and then get the agencies under the purview of the executive to operate on a loyalist basis, then you can do all the things that folks in this volume want to do by way of a president who is almost a king.”