Political positions of JD Vance

"[41][42] At a 2021 conference hosted by the Claremont Institute, Vance argued that companies support abortion rights because they are "so desperate for cheap labor that they don't want people to parent children".

[55][56][57] Vance has been called a natalist or pro-natalist due to his strong support for the traditional nuclear family, the institution of marriage, and the importance of an active role for the state in encouraging and enabling family-formation and raising the national fertility rate.

"[65][66] In May 2021, Vance declared that people should "go to war against the anti-child ideology" in the U.S. while scorning "sad, lonely, pathetic" "millennial feminist writers" who focus on the benefits of childlessness and disappointments of parenthood.

[67] In a July 2021 speech to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Vance blamed "the childless left" for America's woes, accusing it of lacking a "physical commitment to the future of this country.

[81] At a discussion organized by the Center for Christian Virtue in October 2021, Vance said that "many of the leaders of the left" are "people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me ... Randi Weingarten, who's the head of the most powerful teachers' union in the country—she doesn't have a single child.

[82] Vance made similar remarks in an interview with Breitbart News Daily that month, singling out "next-generation leaders" of the left, like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as people who have no children and "want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation".

In September 2021, while speaking at Pacifica Christian High School in California, Vance discussed divorces being more prevalent compared to generations ago:This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like, "well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally—you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy.

[89][90] In a podcast published in September 2021, Vance asserted that it is "a path to misery" for women to "spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children".

"[97] In an August 2021 interview with Crisis Magazine, Vance said he wanted to ban pornography, adding, "porn, abortion have basically created a lonely, isolated generation that isn't getting married, they're not having families, and they're actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other".

[105][106][107] When Vance was a law student in 2012, he contributed a post to a blog run by his former professor in which he criticized the Republican Party's immigration policies, writing that conservatives "mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens.

"[108] The post, which also criticized Republicans for failing to attract "minority voters for simple and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are tired, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-whites", was taken down upon Vance's request in 2016.

[108] Vance has argued that failing to secure the United States' southern border has fueled the U.S. opioid epidemic by enabling illegal immigration and drug trafficking into the country, "orphaning an entire generation of kids".

[111][112] In a 2021 podcast with Jack Murphy, he criticized the earlier "massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration", saying, "You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that before.

[126] His father accused "morally bankrupt politicians ... JD Vance and Donald Trump" of using Aiden's "death for political gain", saying "This needs to stop now", and wishing that "the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone".

"[135] Vance proposed a bill that would make gender-affirming surgery for minors a federal felony and block taxpayer funds from being used for it, saying, "Under no circumstances should doctors be allowed to perform these gruesome, irreversible operations on underage children.

"[172] In December 2024, responding to a post by Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow Ivana Stradner criticizing Elon Musk's support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Vance sarcastically replied by saying "It’s so dangerous for people to control their borders.

"[186] In a 2024 speech, Vance said that "in 2003, I made the mistake of supporting the Iraq War", which he had served in as a combat correspondent in the Marine Corps, but that he later realized "that I had been lied to that the promises of the foreign policy establishment were a complete joke.

"[197][198] Vance and Trump's special envoy Keith Kellogg said that continued arms shipments to Ukraine and a heavily fortified demilitarised zone would ensure that Russia would not launch another invasion.

[199] In July 2024, after the British Labour Party won a landslide victory in the 2024 United Kingdom general election, Vance said in a speech at the National Conservatism Convention: "I was talking with a friend recently ... what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon?

[229] By February 2018, Vance began changing his opinion, saying Trump "is one of the few political leaders in America that recognizes the frustration that exists in large parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky and so forth".

[230][245] Vance played a key role in establishing the Rockbridge Network, a group backed by Silicon Valley investors aimed at influencing U.S. politics by supporting right-wing media, voter turnout efforts, and election polling.

[28][252][43] He said, "Woke capital is turning our society into a socially progressive hellhole" and "conservatism has to be a counterrevolutionary force" against "liberal elite culture", adding that the country needs "a de-woke-ification program".

[258] But in 2021, he gave a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference titled "The Universities Are the Enemy", calling them "very hostile institutions" devoted to "deceit and lies" and arguing that "we have to honestly and aggressively attack" U.S. higher education.

[270][271][272] Peter Thiel, William Julius Wilson, Robert Putnam, David Autor, René Girard, Raj Chetty, Oren Cass, and Yoram Hazony are also said to have shaped his thinking.

[7] News sources have noted he follows controversial figures such as Bronze Age Pervert, Raw Egg Nationalist, and Lomez on Twitter, and he exchanged text messages with far-right activist Chuck Johnson for almost two years.

[282] He later said in a private speech, "if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.

Politico listed Vance's seven "intellectual" influences as Patrick Deneen, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, René Girard, Sohrab Ahmari, Rod Dreher, and The Claremont Institute.

[287][288] Vance also wrote a blurb for the book coauthored by Joshua Lisec and far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), which argues that those on the political left should be considered less than human.

[11][289][290] Vance's blurb says that "communists … march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people" and that Posobiec and Lisec "show us what to do to fight back".

[11] Vance gave a talk at the book launch for Up from Conservatism, a collection of essays edited by Arthur Milikh, executive director of the Center for the American Way of Life at the Claremont Institute.