Since I started writing about J.D. Vance in 2022, I’ve repeatedly noticed his use of a certain rhetorical technique that I’ve come to think of as his trademark. He’ll claim vehemently to agree with one of Donald Trump’s various provocative or absurd claims—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, for instance. Then he’ll explain himself using internally coherent language and reasoning that sounds well informed and registers as substantive … but that in no way supports the extreme premise he started with.
The reason I bring up this go-to move is that he is using it to justify false claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who were not eating cats. But first let’s look at the “stolen election” argument as an instructive example. Vance does not believe that there were millions of votes cast in 2020 by illegal immigrants or that “ballot vans” made midnight drop-offs in Milwaukee and Detroit to tilt the race. He doesn’t make any of the dozens of other claims of global-sabotage conspiracies and preloaded voting-machine algorithms that other MAGA figures have endorsed.
Instead, he says the election was “stolen” by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (because Zuckerberg donated money to a group that helped pay for COVID safety measures at voting locations in a manner that, according to Vance, made it disproportionately easier for Democrats to vote) and by Twitter (because the service briefly obstructed the distribution of stories about material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concerns that the information may have been fabricated or obtained illegally by a foreign government).
AdvertisementBoth of those things—Zuckerberg’s underwriting of COVID voting support and Twitter’s laptop-story block—did happen. They might have helped Democrats a bit, for all we know. But do they constitute stealing an election in anything like the way that Trump means the word? No. Legally speaking, as endeavors of private individuals and companies, would they have justified reversing the results of the........