NOT HOLDING BACK

Vance’s New Book Ripped by Conservative Reviewer

The vice president’s book was plagued by “egregious sloppiness,” writes a columnist at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal.

Vice President JD Vance’s new book has been picked apart in a brutal review from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal.

Communion, which Vance is touting as a spiritual memoir about his conversion to Catholicism in his mid-30s, did not impress Journal columnist Barton Swaim, who wrote Tuesday that the book suffers from “egregious sloppiness.”

Among Swaim’s issues is Vance’s shifting position on who was to blame for his rough upbringing, marred by addiction and domestic violence. Vance said in his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy that these problems “were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else,” but by themselves.

Now, Swaim writes that Vance has conveniently changed his position.

“Mr. Vance now holds that governments and corporations did create [his problems], namely by free trade and offshoring,” wrote Swain, who previously was the opinion editor at the conservative Weekly Standard. “As for the state’s role in welfare dependency, Mr. Vance no longer has much to say about it.”

Swaim likened this change in heart to how Vance’s political opinions—such as his views on President Donald Trump, whom he once suggested might be “America’s Hitler”—have shifted as he has climbed the political ladder.

“These changes of mind more or less tracked his altered views on Donald Trump, which went from scathing in 2016, when Mr. Vance had a book to sell, to laudatory in 2022, when he needed the former president’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race,” Swaim writes.

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Swaim said Communion, which totals 304 pages and was promoted by Vance in a messy media blitz this week, reads as “part religious memoir, part campaign book.”

“Readers familiar with books by ambitious politicians will assume the author of this one has an eye on 2028,” he adds.

Swaim accuses Vance of flip-flopping on his beliefs at opposite ends of Communion, in which he writes in its second chapter that economic policies like minimum-wage laws are more complex than they appear and warrant humility. By the book’s 11th chapter, Swaim writes that Vance abandons that nuance and attacks free-market economics using oversimplified caricatures.

Vance was accused of “egregious sloppiness” later in his 11th chapter. Swaim writes that it was either “laziness or dishonesty or something else” that led Vance to portray an opinion of Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, inaccurately. The issue at hand was about parental leave.

“A review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women,” Calder wrote in a paper cited by Vance. “This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing, which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies.”

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Vance said that he has never read a “purer distillation of our worship at the altar of commerce.”

Swaim says that Vance did not display the whole picture.

He writes, “If he had read the paper more carefully, or even the next sentence, he would have noticed Ms. Calder’s argument: that mandated parental-leave laws discourage companies from hiring women at all, and that a host of other reforms would give them the freedom to start families without encouraging firms to penalize them.”

Swaim concluded, “Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes.”

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