J.D. Vance Bashed Immigrants With Podcast Host Who Advocated for Rape

J.D. Vance’s 2021 appearance on a podcast episode is drawing some negative attention thanks to the extremist views of its host, as well as Vance’s own comments. 

The podcast, Jack Murphy Live, interviewed Vance before his run for the Senate in Ohio. The host Jack Murphy, whose real name is John Goldman, has a history of expressing abhorrent views on rape and immigration.

In one since-deleted blog post, Murphy wrote that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” adding that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.”

In another post from 2017, Murphy wrote about an alleged rape of a 14-year-old Maryland girl by two immigrants from central America and said  “sanctuary cities” were the problem for “defying the federal government” by “welcoming massive numbers of immigrants into their neighborhoods.”

“However, the tragedy of a young girl getting raped in the bathroom at school just might be what turns the attention of limousine liberals from the brainwashing narrative of the Democrats and towards a more sane approach to immigration,” the post read. Later in 2017, the charges were dropped against the immigrants in question.

In 2018, Murphy’s posts got him in trouble with his employer, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, where he was the senior manager of finance, analysis, and strategy, and was placed on administrative leave. He has since denied accusations that he is a white nationalist or part of the extremist “alt-right” movement.

Vance’s comments on Murphy’s podcast also decried what he believed were the negative aspects of immigration.

“You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences,” Vance told Murphy. “You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.”

How is Vance going to explain odd, if not xenophobic, comments about white, European immigrants from the early 20th century? Much like his remarks about “childless cat ladies” or his thoughts on “the postmenopausal female,” he’s going to be spending some time trying to put these comments in some kind of context.

Elon Musk is pouring his heart and soul (and cold hard cash) into electing Donald Trump this November.

New Federal Election Commission filings on Wednesday show that Musk’s pro-Trump America PAC has ramped up its operations, spending an initial $5.8 million. Most of that money, $3.6 million, has gone toward canvassing and field operations.

The political action committee has thus far raised $8.8 million with donations from Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and the crypto tycoons the Winklevoss twins. Meanwhile, America PAC is under investigation in North Carolina and Michigan for collecting personal data under the guise of registering voters.

Musk initially seemed to promise a monthly donation of $45 million to the Super PAC, then in July told Jordan Peterson that the rumor “is simply not true.” He did donate to the PAC last month, but the amount will remain unknown until the political action committee’s next quarterly report with the FEC in October. Put another way, we currently know very little about how much Musk is spending to influence the November election.

What we do know, however, is that Musk is sinking time and energy into getting voters to polls for Trump. According to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this week, Musk has been attending hour-long weekly meetings with his America PAC, with the goal of raising turnout for the former president in battleground states and bringing out 800,000 voters to the polls. According to a new FEC rule, campaigns can consult with Super PACs on get-out-the-vote initiatives.

J.D. Vance is possibly the least popular vice presidential candidate of the twenty-first century.

Directly after Donald Trump first announced Vance as his running mate, the Ohio senator’s net favorability was low, but not by too much. On July 18, three days later, 28.9 percent of voters viewed him unfavorably while 25. 6 percent viewed him favorably, leaving his net favorability at -3.3 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates national polls.

As Vance rose in the public eye, the number of respondents who viewed Vance both negatively and positively has slowly risen. As a result of his botched rollout, which included widespread backlash for his egregiously sexist comments and low-energy speaking events marred by gaffes, Vance’s net favorability dropped even lower.

Vance faced a net favorability of -9.3 percent on Wednesday, with 42.4 percent viewing him unfavorably, and only 33.1 viewing him favorably, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Vance is officially less liked than Sarah Palin, who is widely regarded as one of the least popular vice presidential candidates in recent history, according to ABC News. Palin was initially well liked after her nomination, but as the campaign went on, she saw her unfavorability shoot up by a whopping 20 points. Despite her catastrophic drop in polling, her net favorability was only ever -2 percent, while Tim Kaine’s was -4.

Vance certainly hasn’t seen the kind of flip-flopping Palin experienced, but that’s partially because he was never that well liked in the first place. Palin at least started off with a favorability rating of 47 percent.

Vance’s net favorability was similar to Trump’s on Wednesday, with 53.2 percent viewing the former president unfavorably, and 43 percent viewing him favorably, giving him a net favorability of -9.2 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Meanwhile, Vance’s opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, whose favorability has also dropped, had a net favorability of 4.7 percent on Wednesday.

A dumpster overflowing with books was spotted outside the New College of Florida, one of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s pet projects.

The public liberal arts college was throwing out hundreds of books, including texts on LGBTQ+ issues and religious studies. The dumpster was located outside the Jane Bancroft Cook Library on Tuesday, brimming with books from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center, reported the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Students that spoke with the paper said the books were marked with the college’s seal and carried a “discard” label on their spine. Students were also informed by officials that the books could not be donated due to a Florida statute that prevents the donation of books purchased with state funds.

Amy Reid, the faculty chair and a representative on the board of trustees, told the Herald-Tribune that throwing away books is akin to throwing away democracy.

The book dump is just one of many growing pains since DeSantis decided to give the proudly unconventional school a conservative makeover.

Under DeSantis’s supervision, the school has added six sports teams along with new scholarships and laptops. It’s also overhauled the school’s board of trustees, replacing six seats with DeSantis allies, while ousting the college’s president and replacing her with the administration’s former education commissioner, Richard Corcoran. The school has suffered a faculty exodus, the elimination of the college’s diversity office, and the firing of its academic librarian.

What DeSantis once described as a culture of “woke indoctrination” now experiences censorship instead: Student murals have been painted over, and student orientation leaders were no longer allowed to wear pins expressing support for Black Lives Matter or the LGBTQ+ community, reported The New York Times.

The federal Department of Education is also investigating a complaint that the new version of the school discriminated against disabled students, reported CNN. Another federal complaint filed last year claimed that the school’s new leadership discriminated against LGBTQ+ students, effectively driving them out from the campus.

That led to 186 students—or 27 percent of the school—dropping out. Still, the school’s total enrollment was up from the 2022–2023 school year, bringing a record 325 students to the revamped college, according to the New College’s fact book. That may be in part because the school has lowered its standards for admission, reported the Herald-Tribune last year, which cited lower grade-point averages and test scores of incoming students than those of previous classes.

But the problems plaguing the New College are just a sampling of DeSantis’s conservative vision for the future of the state’s education programs. In the last few years, DeSantis has banned classroom discussion of gender and sexuality, gutted DEI programs within the state, and allowed unlimited challenges to which reading texts can be accessed by Florida students.

Many of the books targeted under DeSantis’s signature 2022 legislation dealt with topics such as race, gender, and sexuality, but others were anything but controversial. Some of the challenges have been over cartoon illustrations of naked goblin butts and even the dictionary.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s dig at Tommy Tuberville didn’t go over well with the Alabama senator.

Walz said at a Boston fundraiser Wednesday that “I feel like one of my roles in this now is to be the anti-Tommy Tuberville, to show that football coaches are not the dumbest people.”

While coaching football at Mankato West High School in Minnesota, Walz won the state championship in 1999. Tuberville coached college football for 21 years, including nine years at Auburn University, where he won an SEC championship after going undefeated in 2004.

On X (formerly Twitter), Tuberville called Walz “an embarrassment to the Coaching profession” in response, and didn’t stop there, hurling several accusations at Walz, from questioning his military career to using the epithet “Tampon Tim.”

Tuberville resorting to the lowbrow attacks other conservatives have lobbed at Walz over the past few weeks seems to have proved Walz’s point. Plus, Tuberville’s record hasn’t done him any favors, either. He couldn’t identify the three branches of government in a 2020 interview, and last year he blocked hundreds of military promotions for almost a year to protest reimbursing soldiers traveling out of state for abortions, only to give up and concede defeat.

During that one-man debacle, Tuberville complained about a weaker military, failing to realize that his effort was contributing to the problem, and also lost the respect of his Republican colleagues for his futile effort. He mocked President Biden’s age and walk despite having his own stumble, trip, and fall down some stairs. He has even lied about the details of his own father’s military service in World War II.

In his short political career, Tuberville has already made several blunders, which still haven’t humbled him. Perhaps he should remember the adage, “Better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”