Leo Hohmann | July 17, 2024
J.D. Vance is going to deliver the keynote speech at tonight’s RNC.
He’s an unlikely pick for Trump’s vice president given his history as a “never Trumper.”
But who is the man behind the public persona that is Ohio Senator J.D. Vance?
By all accounts, his personal life appears stellar. A family man, a recent convert to Catholicism. All good.
But what about his business ties?
On May 5, 2021, an article appeared in the Columbus Dispatch, one of Ohio’s largest newspapers. The focus of the article was a startup firm called AmplifyBio, a gene therapy company that opened its doors in spring of that year.
The company operates in a 210,000-square-foot lab employing 135 people in Columbus, Ohio, starting out with $200 million in working capital.
Of that amount, $100 million in cash came from a nonprofit, and another $100 million was provided by three venture capital firms, one of which is owned by J.D. Vance.
Maybe I’m wrong but I believe we can tell more about Vance’s belief structure by what he invests in than from whatever he may say on a campaign stump.
Politicians are only as good as the investments that pad their bank accounts.
According to the Columbus Dispatch article, posted May 5, 2021, the team of investors included a Columbus-based nonprofit research entity called Battelle, along with J.D. Vance’s Cincinnati-based venture capital fund, Narya Capital, Connecticut-based Viking Capital and New York-based Casdin Capital.
“We are equal owners with the private investors we brought in,” Lou Von Thaer, president and CEO of Battelle, the Columbus-based nonprofit research and development institution, told the Dispatch.
Battelle has worked in the morally murky area of “life sciences” for years, often handling big government contracts. It also has ties to the federal government backed Moderna, creator of one of the two major mRNA gene-therapy clot shots rolled out in 2021.
The Dispatch reports that, “With private industry contract work in the pharmaceutical realm, notably DNA work with Moderna on its coronavirus vaccine, there was a drive to explore other opportunities in gene therapy, which genetically modifies cells to prevent or treat diseases.”
Then it quoted Von Thaer, who will serve as chairman of AmplifyBio’s five-person board, as saying:
“We really wanted to be able to pivot and take more advantage of a really exciting and hot commercial market where a lot of innovations are happening.”
After evaluating options for the better part of a year and working on COVID-related projects, Von Thaer told the Dispatch it was decided that the gene therapy endeavor would require its own footing in a for-profit commercial setting.
“We decided that we really needed commercial partners. Battelle is a great company, but to run a large commercial-type enterprise is not our specialty,” Von Thaer further explained to the news outlet.
That’s where Vance’s company comes into play.
Outside venture funding for the AmplifyBio deal totals $100 million, with Battelle bringing the other $100 million for a total of $200 million.
J.D. Vance’s company, Narnya Capital, chipped in a portion of the $100 million in venture funding. If the three venture capital firms contributed equally to the pot, that means Vance’s company threw roughly $33 million into a gene-therapy company looking for new commercial applications of an unproven technology that killed or harmed millions in its first rodeo involving Covid-19.
According to an October 25, 2022, article in Rolling Stone, Vance also holds personal investments in AmplifyBio, not just through his venture capital firm.
“In addition to Narya’s holdings, Vance declared he personally owns as much as $100,000 in the company’s non-public stock, according to recent SEC disclosures. The drug-testing firm has been lauded in the local press as part of Ohio’s transition from rust-belt decay to high-tech rebirth. The firm touts its mission as: Advancing Science for Humankind.’”
The conservative movement in America is all excited that Donald Trump had a leaked phone conversation this week with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the dark side of vaccines. Kennedy is seen as perhaps the biggest opponent of childhood vaccines and Trump engaged him in a conversation on that topic. I hope that what Trump said was genuine, but I’m not super hopeful after investigating the business background of his VP pick.
Does Vance sound like a man who would advise Donald Trump to back off of government support of gene-based vaccines for humans and animals, at a time when all vaccine-makers are considering switching over to the genetic versions? The reason they want to switch from conventional vaccines to mRNA-based genetic “vaccines” is because the latter do not take 10 to 15 years to develop and test. They can be turned around in a matter of a few weeks or months, according to Bill Gates, and therefore offer a much higher return on investment. Gates says he has made way more money per investment dollar on vaccines than he ever did on computer software.
J.D. Vance is an investments guy and vaccines represent big money. I don’t think he’s going to side with those who are questioning the morality of using so-called “vaccines” to genetically modify the God-created human genome. These genetic-altering serums also use embryonic material in the testing phase so are morally bankrupt right from the get-go because this cell material comes from aborted babies. AmplifyBio is also known for testing its drugs on animals, including dogs and monkeys. How barbaric.
Will Vance resign from his venture capital firm and dump his investments in the gene-therapy company AmplifyBio if he becomes the elected vice president? Even if he does, will he push for legislation that makes it easier for these companies to put out questionable pharmaceutical products with the idea of going back into that industry after leaving office (this is known as the government-pharma revolving door)?
These are all questions we should be asking Mr. Vance.
The man selected to run AmplifyBio as president and CEO even admits there are “no shortage of technical problems to solve across the sector” of cell therapy companies that Vance is so bullish on.
Dr. Jane Ruby posted this to her Telegram channel after Vance was announced as Trump’s pick for VP.
“When it comes to his pocketbook, mRNA drugs are just fine with Vance. The company is actively hiring for scientists with experience in mRNA, and a spokesperson for AmplifyBio confirms the company tests drugs that use such genetics as a delivery mechanism.
“An eager culture warrior, Vance demonizes immigrants, lambastes ‘critical race theory’ and blasts ‘radical gender ideology.’ But the company he invests in is unabashedly woke in its H.R. practices. In job listings for positions in its new South San Francisco office, AmplifyBio seeks applicants from the ‘LGBTQIA+ community’ and says it forbids discrimination based on ‘gender expression’ and even ‘citizenship status.’”
Ruby, in another post, exposed Vance as a player in the field of technopopulism, an area in which technocrats use the same dangerous technology as the globalists, only for applications that seem more appealing, or less oppressive, to the masses. It’s the merging of technocracy and populism.
Vance has connections to mega-technocrat and transhumanist Peter Thiel.
Vance is a prominent figure in the Thiel network, and a significant investor in Rumble, the conservative digital-media platform. Thiel reportedly bankrolled Vance’s successful run in the Ohio Republican senatorial primary two years ago, contributing a whopping $10 million to super PACs working to get Vance elected.
Thiel is the co-founder and chairman of Denver, Colorado-based Palantir Technologies, which provides surveillance technology for intelligence agencies and the U.S. Department of Defense. That places him right smack in the middle of the military-industrial complex and the surveillance state.
Thiel is also on the steering committee of the shadowy Bilderberg Group, a major promoter of elitist one-world government fantasies.
I’m not telling anyone to vote or not vote for Trump based on his pick for vice president. I can understand a person’s reasoning for casting a vote for Trump over Biden, I really do.
But I want Trump’s supporters to know that they should not get their hopes up about Trump suddenly backing off of his rabid support for mRNA jabs, which were rolled out under his first term. Nor should they expect Trump, the president who gave us 5G in his first term, to suddenly decide to pull back on the ever-expanding tech-based government surveillance programs.
I agree with this analysis. It is a very sad development. I read a column by Sasha Latypova who went into great detail about what this means for our future, in a similar vein to Leo Hohman.
It is difficult to know how to square this with Trump’s expressed plans for his presidency which are almost 100% in conflict with all the globalist plans for America going back decades. There is no MAGA policy that overlaps with pro-globalist policies.
In fact, this represents in a nutshell the extreme polarization in the United States: The culture clash consists of globalist policies being pushed by the uniparty and MAGA policies advanced by the American people and Donald Trump.
The fact that a bunch of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have come out for Trump (Elon Musk, and others) compared with Biden doesn’t mean the civil war is over. The Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would have to be brain damaged themselves to support Biden compared to Trump.
Perhaps they think J D Vance will deliver policies they favor. If he does, those policies will be against everything that MAGA stands for.
Trump has been booed at rallies whenever he talks about the “vaccine.” He knows his people see the gene therapies as killers.
Which brings us back to the question as to why he chose J D Vance as his Vice Presidential pick.
To bring in campaign money from Silicon Valley? He won without it in 2016.
To choose a millennial to who will carry the torch of MAGA forward for a number of years to come? If so, why choose one with so much baggage?
To appeal to Big Pharma+Deep state? This would be totally out of character for him: all his policies are focused on improving the lives of everyday Americans, not improving the lives of billionaires.
I would really appreciate someone asking Trump in detail what led to his choice.
Why not Ben Carson? He and Carson share very similar Christian values. Some have said that Ben Carson is not a “fighter” he is gentle and very respectful. I have listened to J D Vance and he comes across similarly to Ben Carson, not as a “fighter,” but as a thinker.
Ben Carson, however has values much more consistent with those in the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement is God centered, and focused on integrity, honesty, and making sure one’s government is not run by a bunch of criminals.
We are faced with the possibility that Trump has chosen unwisely, and if so, has brought a deep state plant right into the White House as he did with Pence.
The other more hopeful possibility is that he has vetted J D Vance and sees him as someone planning to do right by the American people.
It would be interesting also to find out if he made the choice after having been shot. That was extremely traumatic for him and could have led to a decision made following a near death experience. That would have other implications for the choice he made.
I join with Leo Hohman and others in feeling a great deal of concern about this choice, but I also feel that all I can do in the absence of knowing J D Vance myself is to keep my mind open, and continue to observe his words and his actions, until such time as these data create a more coherent picture of him.