J.D. Vance is no white supremacist. But you wouldn’t know that if you read one of the most jaw-droppingly dishonest opinion contributions published by the Washington Post in, well, a couple of weeks. (They did allow Talia Lavin to equate Ben Shapiro, an orthodox Jew, to Richard Spencer, a literal neo-Nazi, not long ago.)
In a piece titled “How white nationalists aligned themselves with the antiabortion movement,” Marissa Brostoff writes:
Even ignoring the glaring problem with her piece’s premise, which is the fact that white supremacist eugenicists birthed the abortion movement in the first place (pun intended), Brostoff’s screed is unconscionable for calling Vance a racist. Far from a preacher of the white supremacists’ “replacement theory,” which hypothesizes that people of color are somehow coordinating to replace white people, Vance stands as an embodied rebuttal to that theory.
For starters, Vance has a biracial son. His wife is an Indian-American lawyer who once clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. If Vance really believed the drivel that whites are at war with procreating people of color, then having a nonwhite son would certainly impugn his dedication to the cause, no?
Furthermore, the very idea that Vance was referring to anyone other than “Americans” of all races when denoting “our people” is contradicted not just by Vance’s entire career, but by the very piece that Brostoff linked but very dishonestly took out of context.
“There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the most important way to measure a healthy society is by whether a nation is having enough children to replace itself,” Vance said in his speech, just moments before the line quoted in the Post. “Do people look to the future and see a place worth having children in? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a good roof over that kid’s head, food on the table, and provide that child with a good education? By every statistic that we have, people are answering ‘no’ to all of those questions.”
There’s not a shred of an insinuation here that Vance is excluding any citizen of this country from his definition of a nation. Brostoff would know this if she had familiarized himself with an iota of Vance’s work, let alone that single paragraph from Vance’s speech. The Hillbilly Elegy author’s primary and public grievance with the libertarian strain of conservatism has everything to do with protecting Americans already here and left behind by globalizing free trade and cultural trends. It has nothing to do with the hateful grievances of the aforementioned King and Stewart, who specifically seek to exclude nonwhite Americans.
The entitlement apparatus we’ve tethered our country to requires that American workers replace each other, generation by generation. A steep dropoff of our birth rate has brought us to the brink of Social Security insolvency, and save for scrapping Social Security or its benefits, having more children per capita is required to keep enough workers funding the Ponzi-like scheme of retirement insurance.
Libertarians like myself would rather dismantle the system entirely and leave adults to decide how many children to have on their own, but populists from left to right must promote increasing the birthrate to keep their entitlements and risk pools financially viable.
Based on this and a variety of other unconscionable errors, it’s hard not to conclude that Brostoff’s piece was an intentionally vicious attempt at character assassination. The Post ought to amend the piece to include Vance’s remarks in their entirety and allow him the opportunity to correct such dishonesty in its opinion section.
