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OH-Sen: Politico Takes A Break From "Dems In Disarray" Narrative To Actually Debunk A GOPer's Lie [1]
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Date: 2022-10-31
J.D. Vance (R. OH)
Wow, Politico took a break from their excessive “Dems In Disarray” articles actually did some real journalism yesterday into GOP U.S. Senate candidate, J.D. Vance (R. OH):
x .@JDVance1 got caught lying about his business record.
A Politico analysis finds that J.D. Vance embellished just how many jobs he created in Ohio — more than 60 times over. Yikes. #OHSen
https://t.co/3X4tYvL5GE — Michael Beyer (@michbeyer) October 31, 2022 “My business in Ohio has been involved in investing and supporting the creation of nearly 1,000 jobs just in our state and jobs elsewhere as well,” he said in a recent debate with his opponent, Democrat Tim Ryan. “I believe in investing in our communities, and I’ve actually put my money where my mouth is.” A POLITICO analysis of information provided by his venture capital firm and Vance’s financial disclosure forms suggest that 1,000 may be a bit of a stretch. Since it was founded in 2019, Narya, Vance’s venture capital firm, was part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022. “We’re proud to say that, in just over 2.5 years, Narya has already invested in three Ohio companies that have collectively created approximately 750 jobs,” Vance’s partner, Falon Donohue, said in a statement. “These companies are growing quickly so we anticipate even more hiring in the short term.” Vance and Ryan are scheduled to appear at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday — their final meeting of the campaign. Ryan, who has tried to make Vance’s venture capital career an issue in the campaign, has called Vance a “San Francisco vulture capitalist.” In a recent ad, he highlights Vance’s personal investment in AcreTrader, which Ryan claims sells farmland to Chinese citizens. Vance’s business record, including his job creation estimate, is open to interpretation. Steve Stivers, the former Republican congressman and the president of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, which is remaining neutral in this year’s Senate race, said the state’s rate of job creation has been as low as 1,000 jobs a month so the addition of 750 new jobs is meaningful. “The 750 jobs would be almost what the whole state gained in a month, which is pretty significant,” Stivers said. But Jeff Sohl, director of the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, noted that Narya was just one of 46 firms that contributed to the investments, so it can’t claim credit for directly creating all 750 jobs. “It would be impossible to parse out which investor is responsible for each job created,” Sohl said in an email. “If one assumes that each investor can take an equal share of the job creation (which is a reasonable assumption) then at best Narya can claim 750 jobs divided by 46 investors which equals 16 jobs.” Former AOL Chair and CEO Steve Case, who launched the Rise of the Rest venture fund where Vance worked, told POLITICO that Vance’s political pivot to support Trump “was a surprise and frankly, a disappointment,” but added that “backing more startups in more parts of the country, obviously, is what we’re all about.” A partner at another Ohio-based venture capital fund, granted anonymity to speak freely about Vance’s business record, told POLITICO that “claiming responsibility for creating 1,000 jobs is definitely a reach. We measure job creation based on incremental jobs since our investment.”
And The New York Times today exposed that Vance profits off of Russian propaganda:
x JD Vance backed a company spreading butcher Vladimir Putin's propaganda. He continues to profit off of it.
JD’s said it before: he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine.”
https://t.co/WRu6aboONj — Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) October 31, 2022 In June, two American veterans fighting as volunteers in Ukraine, Alex Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, were captured by Russian forces. They were taken to a black site where they were beaten, run into walls with bags over their heads and hooked up to a car battery and “electrocuted,” the men said after being freed in late September. Between beatings, they told The New York Times, they were interviewed on Russian media outlets, including RT, one of the Kremlin’s primary propaganda organs in the West. “They stayed away from our faces because they knew that we were going to be on camera, that they were going to try and use this for propaganda.,” Mr. Drueke said. “So they wanted our faces to look OK. But they took care of our bodies pretty good.” RT had been largely taken off the air in the United States and banned by the European Union in March after Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s armies invaded Ukraine. But in June, its version of the captives’ story appeared on Rumble, a video-sharing platform that stepped in this year and began carrying RT’s live feed, in addition to its clips. There, a glum-looking Mr. Huynh says they joined the fight in Ukraine after being duped by “propaganda from the West” that “Russian forces were indiscriminately killing civilians.” Rumble has become a leading destination for conservative content by positioning itself as a platform for unfettered speech, an alternative to the content moderation — or “censorship,” to many on the right — of mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Last year, Rumble received a major investment from a venture capital firm co-founded by J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio. The firm, Narya Capital, got a seat on Rumble’s board, and its more than seven million shares place it among the company’s top 10 shareholders, according to securities filings. Mr. Vance also took a personal Rumble stake worth between $100,000 and $250,000, his financial disclosures show. Narya is backed by the prime patron of Mr. Vance’s Senate campaign, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And it was Mr. Thiel who played a leading role in Narya’s Rumble investment last year, becoming what the platform’s chief executive described as its first outside investor. The investment fits into an enduring narrative of Mr. Thiel, who has expressed skepticism of democracy and advocated keeping the airwaves open for hard-right voices since his student days at Stanford. It also helps illuminate the relationship between Mr. Vance and Mr. Thiel, who mentored the candidate in his Silicon Valley business empire and has contributed more than $15 million to his campaign and affiliated political action committees. (Mr. Thiel has contributed another $15 million to support the candidacy of another protégé, the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters.) Asked about Rumble’s hosting of RT, the Vance campaign issued a statement. “J.D. does not play an active role at Rumble, nor does he set Rumble’s content moderation policies,” the campaign said. “It’s a dishonest straw man to suggest that just because someone believes in free speech rights online that they also personally endorse that speech. It’s embarrassing that an industry like the media, which relies on the First Amendment, has so much trouble comprehending that.” Mr. Thiel’s spokesman did not comment.
Yes, this all adds up with Vance being a fraud:
J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican Senate candidate, states on his campaign website that he “fiercely defended working-class Americans.” In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate hopeful, sports a plaid shirt and jeans in a campaign ad, as he shoots guns of varying sizes. Guitar twangs in the background complete the scene. Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist and best-selling author, and Dr. Oz, the heart surgeon and TV personality, aren’t alone in their self-presentation as ordinary Joes. As November’s midterm elections near, many Republican candidates are all about pickup trucks, bluejeans and guns, as they perform the role of champions for the working stiff. Scratch the surface, though, and it’s a different story. This Republican working-class veneer is playacting. Their positions on workers’ rights make that crystal clear. Nationwide, most Republicans rail against liberal elites and then block a $15 an hour minimum wage, paid leave laws and workplace safety protections. They stymie bills to help workers unionize, and top it off by starving the National Labor Relations Board of funding, even as it faces a surge of union election requests. Several Republican attorneys general have sued to stop wage hikes for nearly 400,000 people working for federal contractors. Republicans also opposed extending the popular monthly child tax credit that helped so many working families afford basic necessities. The “issues” section on the campaign websites of Mr. Vance and Dr. Oz contain virtually no labor policy. Howling about China, as they do, isn’t a comprehensive labor plan.
Ben Matthis-Lilley at Slate has been following the Vance campaign and sums it this way:
I had spent weeks in various parts of Ohio while visiting in-laws—mine, not J.D. Vance’s—wandering around and asking what was up with J.D. Vance. A baby-faced 38-year-old, Vance had come to prominence as a friendly, Trump-skeptical conservative intellectual and coastally based venture capitalist. Then he moved back home and did a seeming heel turn to secure Trump’s endorsement for his 2022 primary campaign. But despite being vouched for by the MAGA king in a state that went for Trump over Biden by a nearly 8-point margin—and then narrowly winning the primary—Vance has struggled in the general election race. What was expected to be an easy Republican victory has turned out to be a tight competition with a Democrat, the Youngstown-area Rep. Tim Ryan, who has cast himself as a quasi-independent who agrees with Trump on trade, and who has an easier time claiming Ohio bona fides because he has served as a representative there for 20 years. The enthusiasm with which Ryan has praised Trump and attacked the national Democratic Party seems to have taken the Ohio GOP by surprise. In press releases, in TV commercials, and in person, they seem almost hurt by it, as if they can’t believe he wouldn’t just play fair and tell everyone that he’s a regular old liberal. But it was not outlandish of J.D. Vance to think that he could win this race from the start. (Indeed, he very well may.) When Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016, it was a gigantic hit, spawning a movie, selling several million copies, and making him a star on the ideas-conference circuit. Its publication was perfectly timed with a surge of national angst about the country’s white working class. (“I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks,” he made sure to note in the book. “This is not a story about why white people have more to complain about than black people or any other group.”) After Elegy was published, Vance—whose day job was in San Francisco at the time—announced he’d be moving back to Ohio. When he resurfaced last year as a competitor in the state’s overcrowded Republican primary, he was running with a nastier crowd. He appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, did an interview with 2020 election conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, and did a campaign appearance with Marjorie Taylor Greene. He complained online that eBay had stopped letting users buy Dr. Seuss books that included racist caricatures, suggested that QAnon believers might be right that many celebrities and politicians are pedophiles, and signed a pledge to subpoena Anthony Fauci for “numerous and demonstrable lies.” Although he’s stopped short of endorsing D’Souza or Greene’s more florid theories about events in 2020, he nonetheless said that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from Trump, said that he had been wrong to believe Trump would be a poor president, and flew to Mar-a-Lago to successfully seek the big man’s endorsement. He suggested in a tweet that some feminists believe “it’s bad for women to become mothers” but “liberating” for them “to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs.” He defended comments he’d made in 2021 about the potential upside, for one’s children, of sticking out an abusive marriage.
And Rep. Tim Ryan (D. OH-13) has been running one hell of a campaign to prove the haters wrong:
A typical Democrat wouldn’t be here. It’s the final stretch of his Senate race, and Tim Ryan is spending one of the campaign’s last Saturdays in Allen County, where Trump won by a mammoth 40 points two years ago. Most in his party believe the white working-class voters here have been permanently lost to the GOP. But Ryan made his way to this cavernous union hall in northwest Ohio because he hasn’t given up. On stage, the 10-term congressman stood before a crowd of just a few dozen. He talked about ending a “broken economic system” in which workers “work six or seven days a week to make ends meet.” He lambasted trade deals that sent American manufacturing jobs to China — and criticized his GOP opponent, J.D. Vance, for raising “all that money from the big corporations who shipped our jobs overseas.” He said the word “Democrat” only four times during his half hour of remarks — and almost always in a negative context. It was probably a wise approach in a county that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ryan is nevertheless convinced his voters are at union halls in counties just like it across Ohio. Over the last 18 months of campaigning, has held hundreds of similar events throughout he state — including a second one at a building trades hall in East Toledo that evening. “That’s the coalition,” Ryan tells me, bleary-eyed and slumped in a chair at the Toledo stop. “You’ve got to get those guys back.” In national Democratic circles, it hasn’t been fashionable since Trump’s 2016 win to “get those guys back” — at least not with Ryan’s vigor. A vocal faction responded to the shock of Trump’s victory with a strategy to increase turnout in Sun Belt states, believing that the emergence of a younger, more diverse electorate held greater promise for the party. Those efforts paid off in 2020, when states like Arizona and Georgia — which hadn’t cast their electoral votes for a Democrat since the 20th century — went for Joe Biden. But that shift in focus pushed former working-class Democratic strongholds like Ohio, where Trump twice won by 8 points, farther down on the party’s list of priorities. Ryan vehemently objected, and he has demanded his party rebuild the so-called “Blue Wall” that Trump breached. His mission has sometimes included self-destructive tactics, such as challenging Nancy Pelosi for House Democrats’ top leadership post. “That’s an insane thing to do, for anybody,” Ryan admits. But it was necessary in the Trump era, Ryan reasons: “Somebody had to have that conversation of how screwed up it is that this demagogue can come out of nowhere and bullshit everybody.” The vacant U.S. Senate seat in Ohio has allowed Ryan to put his best ideas to the test — and wildly exceed expectations in doing so. Most recent polls have shown Ryan, who is running to replace retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R), in an effective tie with Vance, a venture capitalist whose campaign was buoyed by millions of dollars in support from Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. That competitiveness caught Republicans flat-footed, forcing the party and its allies to spend $28 million on advertising in a state where it hadn’t planned on spending much at all. More than simply a Senate race, what’s unfolding in Ohio is a redemption arc for a congressman who has been ignored, marginalized and maligned by his own party for his out-of-vogue political prescriptions. If Ryan wins, he proves a Democrat can win on the backs of voters his party has forsaken. If he loses, he likely demonstrates a willingness among those voters to return to the Democratic fold — so long as the party courts them as acutely as Ryan has. Neither outcome is likely to settle his party’s debate over winning tactics, but Ryan will have nevertheless proved his point, donning his fellow Democrats’ doubt as a badge of honor.
He’s even picked up the endorsement from the conservative leaning Columbus Dispatch Editorial Board:
x “A lot is at stake this election as Republicans and Democrats battle for control of... the Senate… That person should put the good of Ohioans above political aspirations and loyalty to party. That person is Tim Ryan.”
Thank you, @DispatchAlerts.
https://t.co/l0tYWPdr1M — Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) October 31, 2022 A lot is at stake this election as Republicans and Democrats battle for control of the U.S. House and the Senate. The person Ohio sends to Washington to replace Portman will help decide what we will become. That person should be capable and willing to represent all of us. That person should put the good of Ohioans above political aspirations and loyalty to party. That person is Tim Ryan. We urge you to vote for him on or before Nov. 8.
FYI:
x It’s time we level the playing field for Ohio workers–join us in Toledo THIS Wednesday to help us get out the vote before November 8.
https://t.co/qQP9unuhoJ — Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) October 31, 2022
Click here to RSVP.
Click here on how you can vote early.
Health and Democracy are on the ballot this year and we need to get ready to flip Ohio Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Ryan and his fellow Ohio Democrats campaigns:
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