It is almost certain that Tuesday night, in the vice presidential debate, Tim Walz will be able to expose J.D. Vance’s positions on abortion, Project 2025, his call for higher taxes on childless people, and a host of other right-wing causes he espouses. But Vance is actually far more dangerous than many of the extreme right-wing MAGA folks buzzing around Trump.
On Monday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow drew some parallels between dangerous fascists of the American past and J.D Vance today that help lay the groundwork for a case showing how dangerous Trump’s running mate actually is.
She started by talking about Charles Walgreen. He was a worker in a shoe factory early in the last century who lost his job and got sent to fight in the Spanish-American War, where he caught Yellow Fever. This inspired him to open a pharmacy of a different type when he returned to Chicago—one that sold sandwiches and milkshakes and some other grocery items, in addition to prescription drugs.
By the 1930s, Walgreen had hundreds of successful stores across the nation, and among many other things, he used the profits from those stores to pay for his niece Lucille to attend classes at the University of Chicago. He became outraged when he found she was being “influenced by free love and communist ideas” at the university. Free love, oh my, not that too!
Walgreen hired Elizabeth Dilling to lead the charge against suppose indoctrination with speeches to the Illinois legislature, where she called for shutting down the University of Chicago. Dilling told the legislators that she had lists of all the communists at the university and that among them was the chancellor, a “communist of the cream puff type.”
Hitler’s Nazi Party paid for Dilling to make frequent trips to Germany, where the local press called her the “American Fuhrer.” The quid pro quo was that she bring back Nazi propaganda to the U.S. She did not succeed in getting the University of Chicago shut down, but another well-known American fascist, Henry Ford, paid her $5,000 to go to Detroit and get the University of Michigan shut down, also for “teaching fee love and communism.”
After that, the Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles had her do the same in that city, and she also went on a speaking tour attempting to shutter Northwestern, Cornell, and other major universities for teaching the twin evils of communism and free love.
Dilling wrote numerous anti-Semitic books, and in 1944 the Roosevelt administration’s Justice Department put her on trial for sedition. The judge regularly excused her from the trial, however, so she could earn money by speaking at rallies of the America First Party, a fascist political movement in the U.S.
Maddow pointed out Monday that Vance follows in that same fascist tradition of trying to shut down universities. Only three years ago, he declared, “We must attack the universities because instead of teaching patriotism and truth, they are pushing communism and liberal lies.”
More recently, he said during a podcast interview, “Go to Harvard and you learn to hate people in the middle of the country, ideas pushed by left-wing radicals and communists.” Maddow said that where fascists failed in the 1930s, Vance hopes to succeed today.
Would be bad enough
If this were the sum of a case against Vance, it would be bad enough, but the truth is the dangers connected with him are far greater.
First, he has called for extending the attack on universities to all kinds of institutions, even businesses. He seeks a shut-down of anything, essentially, not controlled by the extreme right.
When it comes to private companies that don’t toe the right-wing line, he said recently, “Unless you cause them pain, you cannot stop them, you can’t take back the country. We have to go in and do a lot of things that conservatives don’t now feel comfortable with. What is so difficult is that we love this country so much that we don’t realize the extent of damage done to it by the communists and liberals. We don’t realize we are in a late republican period.”
What he was alluding to there was not a late period for the life of a political party but to where ancient Rome was in the late days of the Republic which had to be saved, in his view of history, by ditching it and replacing with a dictator, Julius Caesar.
In another recent podcast, he said, “The garbage liberal leadership of this country has to be rooted out like a tumor, and elections are only a part of this process.”
If the Trump-Vance team is elected, does that not mean then that they will start an extra- constitutional “rooting out like a tumor” of any institutions they dislike? Vance says that when they are “rooted out,” they should be replaced with an “American political religion.”
All of these statements have been made by Vance in just the past few years. When asked where he gets these ideas from, he cited Curtis Yarvin, an extreme right-wing tech person out of Silicon Valley.
Yarvin says that the U.S. government itself “must be deleted” and that what the country needs is not a president but a dictator, which is what a CEO of any successful corporation actually is. Yarvin said that the American people “must get over their ‘dictator phobia’” while Vance says we have to do things that make even conservatives “uncomfortable.”
On the issue of college campuses today, Vance’s mentor Yarvin says that all the employees of the “communist universities” should be retired. He notes that the campuses make lovely tracts of land that a dictator could sell off to developers, no questions asked.
Will Walz talk about the roots and sources of Vance’s poisonous ideas during the debate Tuesday night? If not, the word has to get out anyway. Credit goes to Maddow for starting the discussion about fascist attacks on universities, and People’s World will do the research and the writing to get out more and more of the truth about Vance.
With Trump as old as he is, if he wins the election there is a chance Vance would become president of the United States—a nightmare scenario that democracy here at home and around the world might not survive.
The antidote is the full mobilization during the next four weeks of the massive anti-MAGA majority in the U.S.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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