JD Vance: To infinity ... and beyond parody

Washington Post

02-06-2025

JD Vance, it is well known, contains multitudes. He once described Donald Trump as 'morally reprehensible' … and now is his vice president. He's a tough Marine who served in the Iraq War … as a public affairs officer. He's the author who wrote 'To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart' … yet has a curious antipathy toward immigrants (his wife's parents presumably excepted), and evidence for his Scots-Irishness is sketchy.
Now Vance has added to his multitudiosity: He's a historian of the U.S. space program … who barely grasps the history of the U.S. space program. Last week, Newsmax interviewer Greg Kelly took a break from slathering Vance with praise to delicately broach the possibility of a 'brain drain' from American universities if researchers decamp for more hospitable institutions overseas. The White House, as you might have heard, is working energetically to dissolve arrangements between several research universities and the government that for the past century helped make the United States the most powerful and innovative country in the world. (That this anti-science campaign is being sanctimoniously conducted under the guise of punishing schools for fostering antisemitism on campus — which many did! — adds a nauseating angle.)
'I've heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear, that we're going to have a brain drain,' the voluble vice president told Kelly. 'If you go back to the '50s and '60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens, some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent. This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject that.'
There's a lot to unpack here, as they say. First of all, Kelly didn't mention anything about the nationality of researchers who might leave the United States (or are downloading their boarding passes right now). Foreign governments and universities are avidly courting any and all U.S.-based researchers who feel unloved, but Vance seems to think a defunded brainiac who happens to be an American citizen is going to tell a recruiter from Aix-Marseille University, 'You can keep Provence. I'd rather work on nanotechnology in my garage. U-S-A!'
Let's cut Vance some slack about the scientists coming over 'during' World War II: The Jewish ones came beforehand, for obvious reasons, and the German ones afterward, because they'd been busy building V-2 rockets to rain ruin on London and elsewhere. But 'some' scientists came over? The war's end touched off a mad scramble by the United States and the Soviet Union to scoop up German and Austrian scientists, engineers and technicians, without being too picky about their Nazi connections.
It was a sordid exercise, but the Cold War was kicking off. The Americans' Project Paperclip and other efforts eventually brought over hundreds of these experts, including, most famously, the German rocketry mastermind Wernher von Braun. Their knowledge was employed mainly by the military for nuclear ballistic missile development, then urgently redirected, in the mid-1950s, to create the U.S. space program. Von Braun and his many, many colleagues were instrumental to U.S. space supremacy — and, according to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, most of them became naturalized citizens in 1954 or 1955.
But being a naturalized U.S. citizen apparently doesn't make you an American, by Vance's lights. This raises the age-old question: How many generations back do you have to go — who counts? Mayflower arrival? Obviously. Great-great-grandad fought in the Civil War? Pretty good. Ellis Island arrival? Hmmm. Afghan evacuee who aided U.S. soldiers? You've got to be kidding (and, sorry, we're probably not letting any more of you in). A suggestion: Vance should ask his boss to issue an executive order appointing Ancestry.com as a special adviser to the president, in charge of issuing gilt-edged True American membership cards to all deemed qualified.
Then Vance can turn his attention to reeducating those who subscribe to 'this idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things.' Remember, he just rejects that. Which is peculiar, because he invented it, in the service of scoffing about the significance of U.S. universities losing a bunch of foreign eggheads when their funding evaporates. (Also: servants?) This might be a good moment to note that one of the greatest rocketeers the world has ever seen is a South African immigrant working out of Starbase, Texas.
Earlier in the Newsmax interview, Greg Kelly marveled at Vance's performance as vice president soon after taking office. 'It just seemed like you were born for the role,' Kelly said. 'It was just, it came so easy to you. And I guess, I know this sounds corny or whatever, but when did you realize that you could operate at that level? Do you know what I mean?' Oh, yeah, we know.