Thread by @DavidPepper

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True story:

How much disdain does Vance have for Ohio?

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After law school, Vance went to California. When he moved back to Ohio, he announced it in a NY Times op-ed. (Who does that?!?)

But even worse, in that op-ed, he tried to make it look like he was making…

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…a big sacrifice to come to Ohio.

He acted as if he was taking one for the team by gracing us with his return. (“It wasn’t an easy choice. I scaled back my commitments to a job I love because of the relocation.”….“not every motivation is rational”).

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He and his wife apparently worried about the “unpredictable weather” here.

But, he suggests , coming home despite those worries was his way of making a choice that was best “for the country.”

My response: if you think this is taking one for the team, stay where you are

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But Vance also said something else in that op-ed: “I’m founding an organization to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic.”

Phew.

JD to the rescue on THE issue ravaging Ohio families and communities.

How did this critical work go?

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Well, this non-profit turned out to be as scammy as Trump University.

As the NYT summarized: “Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group raised only about $220,000, hired only a handful of staff members, shrank drastically in 2018 and died for good in 2021.”

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“It left only the faintest mark on the state it had been meant to change, leaving behind a pair of op-eds and two tweets. (Mr. Vance also started a sister charity, which paid for a psychiatrist to spend a year in a small-town Ohio clinic. Then it shuttered, too.)”

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Wouldn’t you know it?

Instead of dealing with the opioid crisis, the nonprofit seemed awfully focused on political matters: “some of the nonprofit group’s own workers said they had drawn a different conclusion:

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They had been lured by the promise of helping Ohio, but instead had been used to help Mr. Vance start his career in politics….During its brief life, Mr. Vance’s organization paid a political consultant who also advised Mr. Vance about entering the 2018 Senate race….

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…It paid an assistant who helped schedule Mr. Vance’s political speeches. And it paid for a survey of “Ohio citizens” that several of the staff members said they had never seen.”

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And yes. Vance was considering running for Senate as early as 2018, so that “nonprofit” survey seemed well-timed.

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Overall, according to Business Insider, the non-profit “spent more on ‘management services’ provided by its executive director Jai Chabria — who also serves as Vance's top political advisor — than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse.”

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One other thing: when it wasn’t spending money for what looked to be political maneuvering and staffing, the nonprofit’s actual opioid work was hugely problematic.

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At one point, according to the AP, its “addiction specialist” was a doctor “tainted by ties [to] the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.”

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She had previously published articles “questioning the role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis.”

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Sounds really helpful….for Big Pharma.

And not Ohioans, who were in the epicenter of the prescription drug and pill mill crisis, which most certainly fueled the broader opioid and heroin crisis that’s devastated communities ever since.

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Think about that…when he claimed to be heroically moving home to improve the country, Vance picked THE issue he knew was most roiling Ohio lives and families, and used THAT as his cover story when he was actually focusing his time on getting politically positioned.

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Using the opioid crisis as your cover story IN Ohio is about as sick as it gets.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that a guy that cynical and calculating is now doing what he’s doing re Springfield.

Or engage in all the other disturbing things he does.

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Let’s defeat this guy in November, folks. He has no business anywhere near the White House.

Then let’s be sure he never gets elected from Ohio again.

More details here: open.substack.com/pub/davidpeppe…