Mar 7, 2023; Washington, DC; Senator JD Vance (R-OH) listens as Jerome Powell, Chair, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, testifies in front of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee during a hearing on the Federal Reserve’s Semiannual Monetary Policy Report. Photo: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY via IMAGN
Mega-MAGA Republican JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, has gotten out over his skis once again wading into foreign policy when nobody asked him to.
Just months into his Senate term, Vance — with no foreign policy bona fides or a seat on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee — used his government position to spread MAGA ideology across the Atlantic in a statement addressed to Ireland’s ambassador to the United States denouncing hate speech legislation pending in the country.
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The letter, sent to Ireland’s Ambassador to the U.S. Geraldine Byrne Nason in December, voiced Vance’s concern over “authoritarian legislation pending in the Irish parliament that would severely undermine freedom of speech in the country.”
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The proposed hate crime and hate speech legislation, an update to Ireland’s Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act (which was originally passed in 1989), would criminalize “intentional or reckless” communication or behavior likely to incite hatred or violence against persons based on their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and other protected characteristics.
Vance claimed in his letter that Ireland’s “Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022,” is full of “vague prohibitions that would chill important public debate,” in particular around what he deemed to be “publicly significant matters” like his Christian Nationalist views on gender and blaming “social ills like crime” on murderous raping immigrants.
In the statement, Vance also asserted there are “only two genders” and linked crime in the country directly to immigration.
Referring to language in the legislation, Vance asked, “Would the prohibition include ‘recklessly’ attributing social ills, like crime, to increased immigration to Ireland? Would it include ‘recklessly’ affirming that gender is biologically determined and that there are only two genders, male and female?”
In a flashing red warning sign about Vance’s inexperience, intellectual sloth and diplomatic naivete, he attributes quotes in the letter from a left-leaning member of the Irish parliament via tweets posted by far-right news site co-owner Collin Rugg, rather than from the lawmaker’s original, publicly available text.
After Vance published his letter on social media, it was widely shared by similarly far-right Irish activists.
Vance’s description of the legislation as “authoritarian” is ironic: His running mate has publicly asserted he’ll be a “dictator on day one” if he wins the election in November. Vance has also said that he would support Trump’s efforts to overthrow a national election.
It’s not the first time Vance, a former tech bro, has used his Senate seat to pollute U.S. government policy with MAGA dogma. He held up than 30 ambassadorial nominations from the State Department for over a year during his campaign to root out pro-LGBTQ+ nominees.
