Let’s talk about JD Vance. Yes, that JD—the Yale Law grad turned cosplay hillbilly turned U.S. Senator with a forehead full of think tank talking points and a heart full of MAGA merch.
In his latest act of performative populism, JD decided to blame his own mother’s addiction on the southern border. That’s right. Not poverty. Not untreated mental illness. Not a shredded safety net or lack of access to evidence-based treatment. Nope. According to JD, it was José from Juárez who somehow made his mom sick in Middletown, Ohio.
This isn’t just intellectually lazy—it’s a slap in the face to the 13 million American children who currently live with a parent battling addiction. Kids who are watching someone they love disappear into a bottle, a pipe, a needle—not because of the “border crisis,” but because we live in a country that treats addiction as a crime until it’s time to wring political sympathy out of it.
JD, you went to Yale. You know addiction is a chronic health condition rooted in trauma, biology, environment, and yes, personal responsibility. But you’ve traded your Ivy League brain for red-state applause lines that sound like crap one would overhear in line at the Walmart Cheeto sale. You know better—but you’ve decided it’s more politically convenient to pander to the rubes with border wall bedtime stories than to actually propose meaningful solutions.
Let’s be clear: America’s addiction crisis is complex. It’s about disconnection, despair, and the industrial-scale failure of our mental health system. It’s about Big Pharmacy and Big Alcohol’s greed, economic collapse in forgotten towns, and decades of bipartisan negligence. It’s not about some poor guy in Tijuana hoping to make it across the Rio Grande to clean your damn hotel room.
Real answers would mean a conversation about the very nature of drug use—what it means, why people do it—and reframing it as a public health emergency, one that isn’t solved by paramilitary hardware and thinly veiled racism. That takes leadership. That takes backbone. What we’re getting from JD is empty calories for the culture war crowd.
Because here’s the rub: JD Vance doesn’t want real answers. Real answers don’t poll well with the Tucker Carlson crowd. Real answers require action, nuance, science. And JD would rather strike a pose than strike a nerve with his donor base.
And while we’re cutting through the performative crap with brass tacks: it’s arguable that power is the drug JD is addicted to, and apparently, he’d sell out his own mother for a fix.
And just for the record—since we’re telling the truth here—he also looks like Teddy Ruxpin. Just wind him up, and he’ll tell you whatever bedtime story the base wants to hear.