The Utter Incompetence of the US Courtier Class Exhibit 5: J. D. Vance.

After four years of service he left and used the G.I. Bill to gain a BA in political science from Ohio State University. He was rescued from poverty by a state institution, the military, and then gained his bachelors degree due to state funding; he really owes his break to state institutions not his own “bootstraps”. From there it was onto Yale Law School, the entrance point of so many into the courtier class; graduating in 2003 having been given a scholarship by Yale, and also benefitting from state financial aid and state-facilitated student loans.

In 2001 Vance attended a talk on the Yale campus by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who he emailed; establishing a connection that would propel his business and political careers. After spending only two years practising law, working as a law clerk for a US District Court judge and then as a corporate lawyer, in 2015 he took a job with Circuit Therapeutics in Silicon Valley; a firm run by a friend of Peter Thiel. In 2016 the memoir that he had been working on from early in law school, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, was published and landed on the New York Times Best Seller list in 2016 and 2017. This greatly aided his national visibility and social connections, and he was given a column in the New York Times. The accuracy of the book is highly questionable, and Sarah Jones captured the essence of the work as “little more than a list of myths about welfare queens”; providing support for the bigoted elite views of the “lower classes”. Trashing his roots to aid his move up into the courtier class.

Nancy Isenberg, historian and author of the excellent history of the US poor, White Trash, which directly challenges the “self made man” myth that is central to Vance’s memoir, takes apart the book. Pointing to the political-economic and class realities that continuously recreate the poor.

Here he is below, burgeoning his “poor kid made good” image in a Ted Talk, while pointing to “cultural” issues that keep the working class down rather than the reality of an oligarchy that keeps them down; including the destruction of the industry in his Ohio home that used to provide good jobs to working people. A handful of exceptions such as Vance do not disprove the rule of exploitative oligarch domination. This Ted Talk also shows his already well-developed ability to couch oligarchic propaganda within a “grassroots” story. No mention of the of role state institutions played in helping him escape his childhood poverty.

In 2016, Vance began working at Mithril Capital, a firm co-founded by Thiel. In 2017, he joined the Steve Case (co-founder of AOL) investment firm Revolution LLC. A classic oligarch vehicle designed to make the oligarchy feel good through small investments in “underserved” regions; an oligarch vanity project. Vance also became a CNN contributor in 2017 and 2018, and in 2019 co-founded another oligarch vanity project Narya Capital with backing from Thiel and two other Silicon Valley billionaires, Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen. The two vanity projects produced little or no actual benefits for working people. As with Vance’s Our Ohio Renewal, an advocacy group focused on the social ills that he had mentioned in his memoir.

Also in 2019 Vance served on the board of directors of the With Honor Fund, a Super PAC helping veterans to run for office. The same year, he co-founded a conservative political advocacy group Rockbridge Network. He also converted to Catholicism that year. His national visibility was significantly helped by the release of the film version of Hillbilly Elegy in select theatres in November 2020 and then on Netflix.

From 2020 to 2023 he also served on the board of the Project 2025 affiliated American Moment, a networking and training group for young conservatives. Thiel also introduced Vance to Trump in 2021. In July of that year, backed by $10 million from Peter Thiel (the largest amount ever given to a Senate candidate) together with money provided by billionaire Robert Mercer, he ran for an Ohio Senate seat; which he won in November 2022 and he was sworn in at the beginning of 2023. On July 15th 2024, Donald Trump announced that he had chosen Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate; after much support for Vance from Thiel, other billionaire oligarchs, Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation (a US oligarch funded think tank that oversees Project 2025). And so the utterly oligarch created political entity called J. D. Vance was positioned to be one heart beat away from a presidency which may be won by an obese 78-year-old man with a quite unhealthy lifestyle.

It is quite obvious from the above that Vance’s life has provided very little real achievement, or experience, and that his rise is predominantly due to his usefulness for the oligarch class as a youthful “lower class boy made good” who proves that you can “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”; stemming from his highly successful Hillbilly Elegy book. A book that both supported the prejudices of the oligarch class and constructed a very specific fictional image of Vance. An image then burgeoned by oligarch-provided jobs and oligarch money and connections. With Vance showing a ruthless lust for power, as he utterly reversed his stated views about Donald Trump as it became obvious that sucking up to Trump was an avenue to political power. His main sponsor, Peter Thiel, is deeply connected with the security services and the surveillance state through his company Palantir; with the CIA Venture Capital Arm, In-Q-Tel, being the first financial backer of Palantir. A good discussion of Vance, Thiel and Palantir below - from 11.02 to 23.36:

And also this:

Vance is a man utterly unprepared to serve as the Vice President, let alone possibly as the President. The only thing that he is well-prepared for is the role of dutiful courtier to the oligarchs that made his political career; a “House Hillbilly”. And the most important of those is Peter Thiel, a man who has an ideology that even Steve Bannon found extreme; below a good overview of this man who Vance owes his success to:

He is a representative of the deeply conservative libertarian majority of Silicon Valley tech billionaires, that consider themselves to be Plato’s “philosopher kings”.  Also truly an organic intellectual of the US oligarchy, as Gramsci would put it.