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IN PRIVATE SPEECH, J.D. VANCE SAID THE “DEVIL IS REAL” AND
PRAISED ALEX JONES AS A TRUTH-TELLER  
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Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented
July 16, 2024
ProPublica
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_ Vance may these remarkes in a private speech to the secretive Teneo
Network. The GOP vice presidential nominee has been a member of the
Leonard Leo-backed group, which seeks to cultivate conservative
influence in business and culture. _

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Sen. J.D. Vance, whom Donald Trump named as his vice presidential
running mate Monday, told a group of influential young conservatives
in a closed-door speech in 2021 that they should stand up for
“nonconventional people” who speak truth, such as Infowars founder
Alex Jones.

“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview
that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday
and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent
insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen
to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational
financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our
society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts
too.”

Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a
hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”

He said that every person in attendance for his speech believed
“something that’s a little crazy.” In his case, he said, “I
believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our
society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very
well-educated people in this country right now.”

Vance made these remarks at a September 2021 gathering of the Teneo
Network, an invitation-only group of young conservatives
[[link removed]] that
counts elected officials, pro athletes, financial executives and media
figures among its members. Vance joined Teneo six years ago.
ProPublica and Documented obtained a video recording of his 30-minute
speech and question-and-answer session, which has not been previously
reported.

Vance’s remarks at the conference — which you can read a
transcript of
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watch in full below — give a rare unvarnished look at his thinking
and illustrate how aligned he is with various factions within the
conservative and MAGA movements. “I’ll throw out the standard
campaign speech,” he began his Teneo talk. “[I’ll] actually just
try to level with you guys about what I do see is the big — a few
big problems that are in our country right now.”

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According to tax records
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the Teneo Network’s chairman is Leonard Leo, the legal activist who
built a pipeline of lawyers who interpret the Constitution based on
the “original intent” of the framers
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the meaning of the words in the text when they were written. One of
the most influential conservatives of the past three decades, Leo
helped confirm all six conservative justices currently serving on the
U.S. Supreme Court. Leo-aligned judges have pushed to restrict
abortion rights and rein in the government’s power to regulate
corporations.

Leo has said he views the Teneo Network as a way to extend his
influence beyond the judiciary to industries including finance, media,
government and Silicon Valley
[[link removed]].
The network identifies and cultivates conservative leaders in “other
areas of American culture and American life where things are really
messed up right now,” as Leo put it in a Teneo video.

According to internal Teneo documents, Vance joined Teneo in 2018
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several years before he ran for Senate in his home state of Ohio. His
book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” had already become a bestseller, and
Vance was a commentator for CNN while running his own nonprofit
and investment fund
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startup companies outside of Silicon Valley.

“JD Vance has been part of the organization for at least five years
and his appearance at the 2021 Teneo Retreat was well received by many
young professional leaders in attendance,” Leo said. A spokesperson
for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.

By the time Vance spoke at Teneo’s 2021 conference, he had joined
the race to fill outgoing Sen. Rob Portman’s seat. Despite his past
criticisms of Trump, which included calling the former president an
“idiot” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, Vance won Trump’s
endorsement
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2022 and cruised to a comfortable victory.

Vance’s connection to Teneo could form a bridge between different
factions of the Republican Party that seem to be at odds. Previous
news stories have reported that Trump and Leo, who advised the former
president on judicial nominees during his administration, are no
longer as close as they once were
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Russ Vought, a Trump ally, publicly denigrated the Federalist Society
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the legal networking group Leo and others built into a juggernaut.

Adding Vance to the ticket bolsters the connections between Leo’s
network and the Trump 2024 campaign. It also strengthens ties between
Trump’s reelection bid and the Project 2025 blueprint, which
outlines plans for a second Trump administration, including firing
thousands of career civil servants, shuttering the Department of
Education and replacing ambitious goals to combat climate change with
ramped-up fossil fuel production. In a recent TV interview, Vance
said the document contained “some good ideas”
[[link removed]] but
claimed that “most Americans couldn’t care less about Project
2025” and that the Trump campaign wasn’t affiliated with it.

In his Teneo remarks, he bemoaned that decades ago major corporate
CEOs reliably donated money to Republicans but now they give heavily
to Democrats. He lamented that conservatives had “very few oligarchs
on our side,” had “lost every institution in American society”
and needed to make corporations “taking the side of the left in the
culture wars feel real economic pain.”

“So we’ve not just lost the academy,” meaning universities,
“which we’ve lost for a long time; we haven’t just lost the
media, which has been on the side of the left for a long time; we now
find ourselves in a situation where our biggest multinational
corporations are active participants in the culture war on the other
side,” he said. “It’s really been a few of us over the past few
years who have recognized that the big corporations have really turned
against conservatives in a very big and powerful way.”

He argued that conservatives needed to take action against
corporations that, say, defended abortion rights or punished employees
who spoke out against abortion access. “If we’re unwilling to make
companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars
feel real economic pain, then we’re not serious about winning the
culture war,” he said.

He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and
“point out the obvious,” including that “there are real
biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men
and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender
thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”

Shortly before he spoke at the Teneo conference, Vance drew criticism
when he tweeted
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Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel
Maddow.” Jones, founder of the online show Infowars, gained a
following with his promotion of conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11
terrorist attack. More recently, judges in several states ordered him
to pay $1.5 billion
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the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which
Jones had called a hoax.

Read More

WE DON’T TALK ABOUT LEONARD: THE MAN BEHIND THE RIGHT’S SUPREME
COURT SUPERMAJORITY
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TRUMP’S COURT WHISPERER HAD A STATE JUDICIAL STRATEGY. ITS FULL
EXTENT ONLY BECAME CLEAR YEARS LATER.
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INSIDE THE “PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL” CONSERVATIVE GROUP THAT
PROMISES TO “CRUSH LIBERAL DOMINANCE”
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Vance told Teneo members that he was “just trolling” with his
defense of Jones, but added “that doesn’t mean what I said is in
any way untrue.”

“Look, I think there’s a not-terrible chance that one of you is
going to be sharing cellblock 12A in Premier Harris’ prison
detention camp in a few years,” he explained, seemingly referring to
Vice President Kamala Harris. “If we’re going to all end up in
that place, we might as well have a little fun while we get there.
It’s OK to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths. But,
look, I do think what I said was correct.”

If the conservative movement was going to survive, he continued, its
members needed to “speak for truth.” He mentioned donors in Ohio
who had asked him if he would condemn inflammatory remarks made by
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“And I say, ‘Why? Why do you want me to denounce this
person?’” Vance said. “‘Well, she believes these crazy
things.’ Who cares?”

He went on, “Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether
somebody should be rejected. Believing important truths should be the
mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy
things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be OK with
nonconventional people.”

UPDATE, JULY 16, 2024: This story has been updated to include comment
from Leonard Leo.

_Andy Kroll is a ProPublica reporter covering voting, elections and
other democracy issue. Do you have any information about J.D. Vance
or the Trump campaign’s plans for 2024 that we should know? Andy
Kroll can be reached by email at [email protected]
[[link removed]] and
by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203._

_ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces
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* J.D. Vance
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* Leonard Leo
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* Alex Jones
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