On July 15, two days after having survived an assassination attempt, Donald Trump chose U.S. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential running mate for the November 2024 election. The infamous Peter Thiel has played a key role in promoting the political career of Vance. EIR.news took note of this when Vance won the 2022 Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Ohio, which launched Vance to the national stage. Reneé Sigerson wrote of Thiel’s big-bucks intervention to get Vance as a Senatorial candidate, “The Real Story on Peter Thiel and the Ohio Primary, Not The New York Times Version.”
Vance, a 39-year-old Republican, now in his first term in the Senate, was raised in Ohio, north of Cincinnati, but still in the “Ohio [River] Valley” and his mother and her family were from the Kentucky side in the Ohio Valley. He made a name for himself with his memoir, the 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy—a kind of romance-of-Appalachian-poverty personal history, where he recounts his grandparents’ alcoholism and abuse, and his unstable mother’s history of drug addictions and failed relationships. Vance’s grandparents eventually reconciled and became his de facto guardians. Vance’s strict but loving grandmother pushed him, and eventually Vance was able to leave Middletown to attend Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and graduated in 2013 with a juris doctor degree.
Since the moral lesson of the book is that family stability is essential to upward mobility, it gave Vance—playing the identity politics card—a reputation as someone who could help explain Trump’s appeal in middle America, especially among the working-class, rural white voters who helped Trump win the presidency. American Conservative contributor and blogger Rod Dreher expressed admiration for Hillbilly Elegy and the New York Post columnist and neocon editor of Commentary John Podhoretz described the book as among the year’s most provocative. (Longtime residents and historians of the Ohio Valley have a different viewpoint.)
While promoting his book, Vance carried disdain for then-candidate Trump, whom he called a “moral disaster,” comparing his candidacy to “cultural heroin.” Between 2016 and 2017, he served as a principal of Mithril Capital, a global investment firm founded by Ajay Royan and Peter Thiel, at that time a Trump backer. Vance’s ties to Thiel began in 2011, when Thiel gave a talk at Yale Law School, where Vance was a student, about the “stagnation” of technological innovation in the U.S. “He was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met,” Vance later wrote about that day. Vance credits Thiel for his own subsequent conversion to Christianity and joining the Catholic church at age 35. “He defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists,” Vance wrote.
