How You Get Recruited By Foreign Powers And How You Resist Them, J.D. Vance and Tim Walz Editions

What David Frum and Amy Chua reveal about the early J.D. Vance

Having now leaked some of the text messages I had with J.D. Vance to The Washington Post, I think it’s important to discuss how you avoid becoming J.D. Vance.

I think it’s also important to note why I told Vance that taking the Vice President nomination was “trap.”

To some extent I helped set the trap, telling various allies of mine in the Republican Party to pick Vance as a way of effectively ending his political career. “Let’s clear the deck,” I said to a particularly close friend of mine still in the Trump camp who agrees with me that Trump is, in fact, taking a dive.

He and I talk often about what a post-Trump Republican Party might look like and if, in fact, that’s even possible. Maybe California’s Democratic dominance may well still happen in the country as a whole. Didn’t FDR have effectively total control?

So why did I warn Vance?

Well I have always believed in giving people a way out of the traps that have been lain for them if for other reason than because it’s the morally correct thing and because I wished others had told me about the traps designed to ensnare me.

“Always give your opponent a chance for a dignified surrender lest he fight to the death” has long been my motto. Call it a consequence of being a grandson of two men who fought in the Pacific.

It’s interesting to contemplate an alternative reality in which Vance had listened to me and politely turned down Donald Trump.

It's likely he would be on the shortlist for 2028. The vibe — if you will — would have been that that this was Trump’s chosen successor.

As it stands now Vance will get blamed for Trump’s loss. Trump can credibly claim that he was leading in the polls until J.D. Vance was selected. He can even blame his son, Donald Trump Jr., who purportedly selected him. (Of course Arthur Schwartz, the Likud asset around Jr., was the real person who suggested Vance.)

As more attention goes into Vance’s associations it’s doubtful that the criminal tech network around him can survive. These arenas of American ambition aren’t particularly American.

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What’s so frightening to me about Vance is how I could nearly have become just like him. To some extent this Substack is designed for those who want a different path. In some respects it’s written for a younger version of myself.

Here are the realities: If you are an ambitious, intelligent young person you will certainly be identified by foreign powers and cultivated by them.

If you come from a strong, healthy family you might well be able to repel them. But if you have a father that’s sick, if you’re poor, if your mom lost her job, they’ll find their way in and before long, they’ll set about trying to own you.

As one gets older one notices certain things about the ambitious people you meet, the ways in which networks are cultivated, the ways in which they are led astray.

Almost all of them start with a crooked mentor. In recent years there’s even a term for it — “groomer.” I suppose we might even call it a Pied Piper but the old fashioned parlance was as a “spotter.”

How do spotters work?

In the film The Good Shepherd (2006) Matt Damon’s character Wilson is recruited by a Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon), who tries to seduce Wilson sexually and lure him into a Nazi sympathizing group. It’s a Tory trap, as so many of these sorts of things are — designed to entice and then destroy an up and coming American like Wilson.

(Think for a moment about those allegedly secret tech fascist group chats that J. D. Vance has joined and you’ll get a sense.)

Alas unbeknownst to Fredericks, the FBI already had recruited Wilson to spy on his activities. Dr. Fredericks is forced to resign from Yale — only for us to meet him later in the film as an MI-6 officer working undercover. Dr. Fredericks resumes being Wilson's mentor and teaches him the nuances of counterintelligence work before being murdered for his homosexual dalliances by the very intelligence agencies to which he pledged his service.

In Vance’s case, I suspect there are two mentors who led him astray. Let’s take them each in turn.

First there’s David Frum. When I first met Frum he asked the sex addict and Likud spy Mytheos Holt if my skills drifted toward “SIGINT or HUMINT.”

Odd question. A spy question if you will.

Frum is trying to deny an association with Vance now but he very much shaped him.

Arthur Bloom has noted as much as well.

There are several interesting things about the Frum interview. Vance was writing pieces about the Iraq War in the early Obama years, pushing back on liberal ideas about it—Frum says he was defending the good conduct of American troops, which is perfectly fair, but the point is he wasn’t questioning the wisdom of the war itself, and writing for the Axis of Evil guy’s website.

Frum lauds Vance’s political talent, but the word he uses is “mirroring,” that he would mimic back the rhetoric he heard. A less condescending way of putting that might be that he was a mentee. Vance also worked for the very neoconservative AEI, long before his change of heart on certain things and around the time they were shilling for the Sacklers, who killed many of his Appalachian brethren.

Vance of course had no time for Trump in 2016, what Frum says is between the election and Trump’s inauguration, Vance’s view changed, and he started to wonder if Trump could be worked with. No problem there.

The problem is we have a very neocon background, a purported change of heart, but then his private views about Benjamin Netanyahu and American strategic posture toward the Middle East are more or less nothing new. He’s rewriting history to claim Bibi was against the Iraq War, when Bibi actually told Congress toppling Saddam would be great.

This whole thing has the aspect of an imposture. Matthew Petti put it on Twitter that he’s trying to gain street cred with a deeply war-skeptical public, while not actually confronting either the Israelis or Saudis. That’s exactly right. Breaking with the Likud line is one of the most credible signs a politician can make that they take American interests seriously. Myself and a few others have been trying to get him to, but the hour is getting late. [Emphasis added]

We shan't be taking a lecture about the Iraq War or military service from J. D. Vance -- a man who solicited the career advice of Israeli-Tory David Frum, author of the "Axis of Evil" speech. Vance even wrote for Frum under a pseudonym. Vance defended the Iraq War in 2010; Walz opposed it from the beginning.

Don't let Frum escape his responsibility for elevating Vance.

As we shall see Chua and Frum get along quite closely. One might even describe them as co-handlers of young politico, J. D. Vance.

David Frum, writing for The New York Times, praised Chua for writing about "the no-go areas around which others usually tiptoe” in her 2018 book, Political Tribes.

The second mentor is Amy Chua who spotted Vance Day of Yale Law School and helped him get a literary agent and a publisher.

The question you’re not supposed to ask is “why did she do that?”

I had heard of Chua by reputation long before I was introduced to her.

A Yale Law student I had dated in college told me that Amy Chua slept with her students. I found that peculiar and made a note to keep my eye out for her. Chua was a Federalist Society recruiter who, along with her Netanyahu-backing husband Jed Rubenfeld, threw raucous parties to compromise the Yale elite. Rubenfeld was even sanctioned for his behavior and barred from teaching on campus. It was a whole thing and written about in that breathless way that so many scandals at Ivy Leagues are written about. Pretty weird stuff to use an overused phrase.

Chua helped get up and coming students jobs as clerks as she did for Usha, J. D. Vance’s wife. Despite her professed liberalism Chua came to the defense of Brett Kavanaugh who had allegedly worked opposite her husband Jed on the Clinton impeachment. (I suspect that this was the Israelis running both the impeachment and the defense of Bill Clinton, who vowed not to be blackmailed by the Israelis.) Vance attended the wedding of Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, who was rewarded for her mother’s defense of Kavanaugh with a clerkship with Judge Brett Kavanaugh!

It’s strange then, isn’t it, that in The Washington Post text messages Vance only admits to knowing one Chinese-American — Amy Chua.

Some obvious questions present themselves:

Didn’t Vance live in San Fransisco, one of our more Chinese-American cities? Out of the five million plus Chinese-Americans Vance only knows one Chinese-American and its the lead recruiter at Yale Law School for the Federalist Society?

Was Vance not allowed to speak to other Chinese-Americans so as not to encounter a view of Chinese Americans which differed from the Chua line? Could his BJP family be to blame? Or perhaps his Russian investors?

You get a sense of the Chua-Vance relationship from the opening ten minutes of a Politics & Prose event where they go on about their very odd student-teacher relationship before discussing a drunken fight J.D. nearly got into before being backed up by Chua’s husband. “We have a lot of stories,” says Chua, laughing nervously.

In 2019, Chua agreed not to drink or socialize with students outside of class for a limited time. In 2021, Chua was accused of drunkenly partying with students and federal judges. She agreed to a one-year restriction of her teaching duties as a small group professor.

Is this just innocent partying — or is this grooming? I wonder…

For what it’s worth I’ve always read Chua’s work as actually encouraging the kind of ethnic strife she supposedly is against.

Chua’s first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), explores the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by disproportionate economic and political influence of "market dominant minorities" and resulting resentment in the less affluent majority. Of course there’s not really any discussion of ethnic nepotism or the way in which foreign governments might use these ethnic minorities to undermine the main country. Nor is there any real discussion of responsibilities that these ethnic minorities might have to the main country which took them in. Chua’s second book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance – and Why They Fall (2007), examines seven major empires and posits that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities — a rather convenient cover if you’re trying to argue in favor of ethnic mafias.

Of course everyone knows Chua from her book about Asian parenting and the Tiger Mothers. As fate would have it I was working at the Wall Street Journal when that book was published and the Journal blurbed it. There was all kinds of inorganic traffic on the Journal’s website that day. I didn’t realize it at the time but the book — Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother — was an op. It sought to replace Battle Hymn of the Republic as the American creed. “Be more Asian — or die trying” is the message.

But how much China’s supposed dominance comes from their “culture” and how much comes from their theft of intellectual property and looting of Africa is never really discussed.

Chua’s hyper focus on ethnic minorities and conflict can be seen as a sort of playbook for the Chinese deep state which uses its Chinese Diaspora and these ethnic tensions to gain control of resources.

You can see that race science interest throughout Vance’s own book — a book that Chua actively encouraged, promoted and even edited. Just how much is Vance and how much is Chua (or the literary agent she introduced Vance to) is something you’re not really allowed to talk about.

To what extent was Chua’s or Vance’s book a legitimate bestseller and to what extent were other buyers promoting these books because they wanted to promote Chua and Vance? It’s hard to tell.

Chua’s niece, Amalia Halikias, was also interested in this sort of stuff when I met her at a Claremont Institute event. She went on to be the campaign manager for Blake Master’s losing Senate campaign and currently works at the Heritage Foundation — the place where Vance is writing a foreword for a very controversial book that has since been delayed.

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Having correctly predicted that Tim Walz would become Kamala’s pick for Vice President I have made a careful study of him.

Too often when there’s a new candidate we plumb the candidate’s biography and look for clues. With Walz there’s a robust record.

Whereas Vance has only one Chinese-American friend Tim Walz understands China because he’s been to China more than thirty times. He already has direct personal relationships with the Dalai Lama and with Hong Kong protestors.

Vance defended the Iraq War in 2010; Walz opposed it from the beginning.

Walz was talking about investing in alternatives to oil in October 2005 and deeply skeptical about the Iraq War.

While Walz opposed the Iraq he supported infrastructure funding in Iraq because when people have "electricity, water, sewage, and jobs... they tend not to blow things up."

Tim Walz said Republicans got us into Iraq "under false pretenses and now all they tell us is 'buck up.'"

Let’s say you had done your 24 years in the Army National Guard and were planning on a political life. You’re a school teacher. There’s not much you can do about the Iraq War.

Or can you?

I would argue that the most patriotic thing you can do to help your soldiers is to resign from the military and work to end the illegal immoral war they were being sent to fight. Tim Walz did just that and repeatedly and enthusiastically opposed the Iraq War when he ran.

Both Walz and Harris understand the threat that Bibi Netanyahu presents. Vance does not.