J. D. Vance

Some Lesser Known Facts About J. D. Vance

• Vance’s ancestors immigrated from Scotland and Ireland to America. After coming to the US, they started working as sharecroppers, mine workers, and steelworkers.

• Vance’s father abandoned the family when he was a child. This resulted in his mother developing a habit of substance abuse.

  

• Shortly after his father left the family, his parents got divorced. In an interview, while talking about it, he said,
  

  It was the saddest I had ever felt. Of all the things I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures.”

• According to him, his mother used to obtain drugs from the infirmary of a hospital, where she used to work as a nurse. She also used to remain out of the house for a prolonged period.

  

• Vance used to be very afraid of his mother as she used to beat him a lot. According to him, he felt relieved when his mother was taken into custody in 1996 for her drug habit and abusive nature. He, in his book, mentioned,
  

  In that moment I just felt relieved and I thought to myself, Alright I’m going to live another day. I just wanted that situation to end and then I just broke down. I was just really sad and felt very lonely because I’m sitting in the back of this police cruiser, they just arrested my mom, the relief of having survived another day was gone and then I just wanted someone to come and take me away.”

• Later, his grandparents took him and his sister to their home to protect them from his mother.

  

• He was renamed James David Hamel after his stepfather, Bob Hamel, adopted him officially. However, he stopped using the surname Hamel after Bob and his mother separated.

• Vance once revealed that when he was a child, his mother threatened to kill him by crashing the car in which they were travelling into a tree while driving at the speed of a hundred miles per hour.

• As a teenager, he liked listening to classical rock albums by Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton. However, his taste in music was not liked by his elders.

  

• After staying in Ohio for some time, he moved with his grandparents to Kentucky, where he lived in his great maternal grandparents’ house.

• There, he began working at a grocery store as a cashier.

• After completing his school studies in 2003 at Middletown High School in Kentucky, Vance joined the United States Marine Corps (USMC) as a private.

  

• Thereafter, he reported at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina, where he underwent a rigorous military training module. He was commissioned as a Marine Rifleman.

• On 23 December 2003, he was promoted to the rank of Private/E-1, and in January 2004, he once again received a promotion and transferred to Camp Lejeune, NC, for Marine Combat Training.

• In March 2004, he became a Corporal in the USMC while undergoing training at Fort Meade, MD, for Public Affairs training at the Defense Information School.

• In August of the same year, Vance was selected to represent the United States in a UN peacekeeping mission to Haiti.

• In Haiti, he was part of a 100-man team that dealt with an outbreak of unrest after the President of Haiti resigned.

• In 2005, Vance was sent to Iraq, where he worked as a combat correspondent with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing.

• During his tenure in Iraq, Vance was a member of a special team that worked on protecting and escorting civilian journalists covering the war. He also worked closely with the Iraqi polling officials who were working on conducting free and fair national polls in Iraq.

  

• In 2005, he penned an article titled VMGR-252 aircrews make the mission possible in Iraq, which gained a lot of appraisal from the readers.

• After that, Vance was assigned to the Public Relations (PR) department of the Marine Corps.

• Later, he was deployed at the Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, North Carolina, where he served as a media relations officer.

• He left the Marine Corps in 2007. According to him, he never was directly involved in combat operations against the enemy during his service years.

• Thereafter, he attended Ohio State University under the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which provides financial aid to retired service members to pursue professional degrees.

  

• At Ohio University, he studied the works of famous materialist and atheist philosophers like Antony Flew and Basil George Mitchell as their books appealed to his atheistic beliefs as well.

• Vance later graduated summa cum laude from The Ohio State University.

• Vance grew up in a family which was not religious. Her maternal grandmother was a Catholic; however, she did not believe in visiting a church to practice Christianity.

• While undergoing graduation studies, J. D. Vance worked in the office of Bob Schuler, a Republican Senator.

• In 2010, he enrolled at Yale University on a full-time scholarship program, which he received for receiving good grades at Ohio State University.

• At Yale, Vance worked as an editor of the Yale Law Journal (YLJ). He also was a part of the University’s football team.

• He met his wife Usha while studying at Yale.

• He began working on his autobiography titled Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis in 2010 after being persuaded by his class teacher Amy Chua, a renowned lawyer and author.

• He also began volunteering at several events organised by various NGOs. He used to help the NGOs in preparing food for the needy.

• In 2011, Vance met with the well-known venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

• Later, he worked as an intern at the Capitol Hill.

• Thereafter, he adopted the surname of his maternal grandparents “Vance.”

• According to Vance’s close associates, he had liberal views regarding the LGBTQIA+ community in the US while he was at Yale. However, he later chose a “hardline” viewpoint for the community as a result of which many of his college mates stopped speaking with him.

• After completing his formal education in 2013, J. D. Vance worked in the office of John Cornyn, a Republican politician and attorney.

  

• In the same year, he worked at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky in the office of Judge David Bunning as his law clerk.

• After serving under well-known advocates for some time, Vance began practising law with private firms such as Sidley Austin LLP.

• He later left Kentucky and relocated to California, where he worked in the technology industry as a venture capitalist in San Francisco.

• In 2014, Vance and Usha got married to one another according to the Christian as well as the Hindu rituals.

  

• In 2016, he joined his college mate Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management. There, he worked till 2017.

• He completed writing his memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and published it in 2016. The book was featured in the The New York Times Best Seller list in the same year. The book also received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and Audie Award for Nonfiction in 2017.

  

• Before the 2016 US Senate Elections, Vance declared his candidature against Sherrod Campbell Brown, a member of the Democratic Party. However, he later chose not to contest the elections citing familial reasons.

• In December 2016, Vance planned on relocating to Ohio to start his law firm.

• Vance played a vital role in assisting the firm to raise $850 million in 2017.

• Vance began working with the media outlet CNN as a contributor in the same year.

• Thereafter, he joined the Revolution LLC, an investment firm started by the famous American investor Stephen McConnell Case.

• There, he worked on implementing the Rise of the Rest program, which aimed to bring more investments to the neglected sectors in Silicon Valley in Northern California and New York.

• He gained a lot of experience while working in the Revolution LLC which led to him establishing Narya Capital in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received funding from Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen to establish the firm.

• He generated a lot of profit for his organisation and in November 2020, he received funding worth $93 million.

• In November 2020, a film titled Hillbilly Elegy was released on Netflix, which was an adaptation of J. D. Vance’s 2016 memoir.

• Later, Vance along with a few other volunteers established an NGO named Our Ohio Renewal. Its objective was to help needy Ohio residents get an education and help drug addicts leave intoxication habits.

• The organization was later closed as it failed to appeal to the Ohio residents, leading to a failure in achieving its objectives.

• J. D. Vance was baptized in a Roman Catholic church in August 2019. Vance chose St. Augustine as his patron saint.

• Vance strongly believes in Catholic integralism, which seeks to establish Catholic influence and shape social and political policies in the US through soft power tactics.

• Vance co-founded Narya and became its designated partner in December 2019.

• In 2021, the organisation’s tax filings were reportedly accessed by a media house which claimed that it spent the majority of its funds on providing various types of services to its clients rather than working on its objectives.

• It was also revealed that Vance’s NGO had contacts with big pharma companies on whose instructions he appointed a doctor of their choice to be sent to the Appalachian region of Ohio on a de-addiction campaign.

• In 2021, he and President Donald Trump invested a lot of money in a popular right-wing Canadian video-sharing application called Rumble.

• Vance announced his candidature for the US House of Representatives from Ohio in the same year.

• To support Vance’s candidature, a super Political Action Committee (PAC), Protect Ohio Values, was established in March 2021. It was funded by Vance’s close friend Thiel who donated $10 million to it.

• Reportedly, the prominent businessman David Sacks gave aid worth $900,000 to Vance for campaigning.

• To consolidate his candidacy as Senator from Ohio, Vance established an exploratory committee. The committee also campaigned for donations from the residents of Ohio to support Vance’s candidature.

• By 2021, as per sources, Vance had earned more than $475,308 from his book.

• In 2021, Vance protested against the necessity of getting vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic in a column written for a national newspaper.

• The Republican Party announced Vance as a candidate on 1 July 2021 due to a sharp rise in his popularity.

• In the 2022 Senate primary elections, J. D. Vance received 32 per cent more votes than other candidates and emerged as a winner.

• In the same year, while giving a speech at a high school in Ohio, Vance gave a statement in which he said that people should not end their marriages even if it gets violent as it would impact their kids’ emotional and mental health. For this, he has often been termed as a natalist.

• In the general elections that were held on 8 November 2022, Vance defeated his Democratic Party rival Timothy John Ryan by receiving a total of 53 per cent of votes.

  

• With his victory, Vance became the first politician from Ohio to enter the Senate without any prior Congressional experience since 1974.

• In June 2023, he went against his party’s Senator and voted against the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. This bill aimed at raising the debt ceiling of financial institutions.

• In the same year, when a train derailed in the East Palestine village of Ohio, Vance did not address the public regarding the issue, which led to him receiving a lot of criticism.

• He wrote an article in 2023 in support of implementing Donald Trump’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a $953-billion business loan program established to help small businesses and NGOs. He received criticism from his party members as they were against this bill.

• In the same year, he along with other Senators from Ohio presented a bill seeking adjustments in the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of the US Railways to avoid train derailments.

• Vance, in 2023, presented a bill in the Senate seeking a prohibition on sending medicines for abortion via courier services. He also presented the Freedom to Breathe Bill which sought to remove the requirement of wearing a face mask while visiting commercial places.

• Thereafter, Vance filed a complaint with US Attorney General Merrick Garland against a pro-Democrat journalist named Robert Kagan who wrote an article against Donald Trump.

• In July 2024, Vance co-represented three important bills in the Senate aiming at reducing the price of Insulin for diabetic patients, imposing up to twelve years in prison for providing gender-affirming care to minors, and increasing penalties on banks for failing to take accountability for losses incurred.

  

• While serving as a senator, Vance once proposed a bill aimed at removing the option of a third gender while applying for a passport. He called it a “waste of taxpayers’ money.”

• During the early days of his political career, Vance opposed Donald Trump’s views on many issues. He once referred to Trump as America’s Hitler. However, as time passed, he became one of the closest allies of Trump.

  

• In 2024, President Trump announced Vance to be his running mate for the Presidential elections. Following the announcement, speculation arose that Trump would nominate J. D. Vance as his successor in the 2028 Presidential elections.

  

• Many sources claim that Vance was chosen for the post of Vice President due to lobbying by prominent industrialists such as Elon Musk, David O. Sacks, and Tucker Carlson. Elon has reportedly pledged $45 million to his vice presidential campaigning.

• Donald Trump’s elder son Donald John Trump Jr. (also called Don Jr.) is considered to be a close friend of Vance. They both have known each other since 2016.

• In many interviews, J. D. Vance has confirmed his political ideologies to be neo-reactionary, national conservative, right-wing populist, and paleoconservative. He claims that political philosophers like Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, Curtis Yarvin, and J. R. R. Tolkien played a vital role in shaping his ideology.

• He is an avid animal lover and owns a German Shepherd and a Plott Hound.

  

• In an interview, Vance claimed that the term Christian nationalism, often associated with an ultra-nationalist American movement, was improperly perceived.

• In 2022, J. D. Vance expressed his support for a national abortion ban, but in 2024, he stated that the decision to ban abortion should rest with the state government, not the federal government. ^[5]CNN He also claimed to support the availability of the mifepristone drug used to induce abortion.

• He has often referred to illegal immigrants as “invaders” and has called for immediately deporting them without any trial.

• Vance has supported the creation of different types of unions in the US so that the neglected fields can voice their opinions to the government.

• He is an avid supporter of the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution which allows citizens to keep arms. He has also spoken in favour of increasing taxes as well as the minimum wage.

  

• J. D. Vance has often positioned himself against the LGBTQIA+ community.

• In his book, Vance mentioned that when he was a child, he believed he was gay as he did not make female friends and considered a male friend of his to be very close. He also changed his name twice due to this.

• Vance has often spoken against giving economic and military aid to Ukraine in its war against the Russian Federation as he believes that it has “unnecessarily prolonged a bloody war that Ukraine can not win.” President Zelensky, while replying to his stance, in an interview, said,
  

  I am not sure that he understands what’s going on here. And we don’t need any rhetoric from people who are not deeply in the, you know, in the war. So to understand it he should come to the frontline to see what’s going on, to speak with the people.”

• As per sources, he follows many far-right online personalities such as Bronze Age Pervert, Raw Egg Nationalist, and Lomez.

• His grandmother owned 19 handguns.

• In 2024, Liz Shuler, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ President, claimed that even though Vance supports labour unions in his speeches, in reality, he is against such unions. He also claimed that Vance had received an undisclosed amount of donation money from many industrial giants.

• In the same year, Vance voted against a subsidy act named the Inflation Reduction Act, which was introduced in the Senate by President Biden. Under this act, the US government would have provided compensation worth billions of dollars to manufacturers for the losses they incurred during the coronavirus pandemic.

• He has often voiced his opinions against the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act, also known as the PRO Act. It protects the rights of employees to ask for betterment in their working conditions from their employer.

• Unlike the common notion of the Americans, who see the Russian Federation as a prominent threat, Vance believes that the military and economic build-up of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the main threat to the US.

• He supports Israel and has voted in favour of many Senate bills seeking increased military and economic aid to the country in its war against terror. He has often criticised President Biden for denying the provisioning of sophisticated American weaponry to Israel.

  

• According to sources, Vance believes that if Israel defeats Hamas and takes over the disputed Gaza strip, it would pave the way for Israel and other Sunni Arab countries to make a military coalition against Iran.

• In his book, Vance claimed that he initially supported the United States’ actions in Iraq during the Iraq War in 2003; however, he later became sceptical as he believed that the government lied about the actual reasons for going to the war. He said,
  

  In 2003, I made the mistake of supporting the Iraq War, [but] a couple of months later, I also enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. And I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to. [I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”

• J. D. Vance has often spoken against the environmental crisis issue. He has also claimed that the US has outsourced jobs, where Americans could have worked, to different countries due to environmental regulations.

• Since Vance is often invited to speak at various institutes and events, he reportedly earns $70,000 annually.

• He has invested in the Huntington National Bank ($250,000 – $500,000), Robin Hood checking account ($100,000 – $250,000), Five Goldman Sachs CDs ($500,000 – $1.05 million), QQQ Exchange Traded Fund shares ($500,000 – $1 million), 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF shares ($100,000 – $200,000), Bitcoin through Coinbase ($100,000 – $250,000), and Walmart stock ($50,000 – $100,000).

• After Vance was announced as the running mate of President Trump in 2024, the United States Secret Service, an organisation that protects the President and the Vice President, gave him the codename “Bobcat.”

• In an interview, Vance revealed that he used to smoke marijuana while growing up to deal with the childhood trauma that he received because of his mother’s abusive nature.

• He has also served as the President of the Yale Law Veterans Association and as a Research Assistant to Professor George Priest at Yale. He was also appointed as the Coker Fellow there.

• Some of his popular political articles for newspapers are Why Trump’s Antiwar Message Resonates with White America for the New York Times (2016), Trump Speaks for Those Bush Betrayed for USA Today (2016), and Consigned to “Assistance” for the National Review (2014).

• In the same year, a photo of J. D. Vance went viral in which he was seen passed out during the New Year’s Eve celebration in the corner of a room. The photo was taken when he was pursuing graduation in Ohio.