J.D. Vance Praised Extremely Dark Report by Project 2025 Architects

J.D. Vance gave heavy praise to a 2017 Heritage Foundation report that suggested restricting reproductive rights and called hunger a “great motivation” for Americans to work.

Vance wrote the report’s introduction, and was even the keynote speaker when it was publicly released just months after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, according to The New York Times. At the time, Vance hadn’t yet entered politics, and was known as the author of the bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy.

The Index of Culture and Opportunity report consists of 29 essays from people from across the conservative movement, including commentators, members of the clergy, policy experts, and local community leaders. In addition to saying there’s an upside to people going hungry, the essays opposed fertility treatments including in vitro fertilization, calling them harmful to women. The writers also praised state-level laws restricting abortion and hoped the procedure would be “unthinkable” one day in America.

The report seems like a preview of the Republican policies that have been pushed in the years since, with essays calling for women to be pregnant at younger ages and extolling heterosexual couples as “ideal” for raising children. When asked, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance campaign said Vance didn’t edit the essays or have “any input on the commentary.”

But in his introduction to the report, Vance tied economic distress with what he viewed as cultural decline, arguing that Americans needed a return to conservative values along with practical solutions like education and policy changes to fix their lives.

“Culture, in other words, must serve as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, and proper conversation about culture will never be used as a weapon against those whom Christ described as ‘the least of these,’” he wrote in the Index of Culture and Opportunity report. “It will be a needed antidote to a simplistic political discourse.”

Since Trump named him as his running mate, Vance has taken a lot of heat for his past comments, many of which had to do with his views on family life. He’s faced heavy criticism for attacking people without children, not just from politicians but from celebrities. This latest revelation is a reminder of his ties to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which was behind the infamous Project 2025 manifesto that Vance and Trump have unsuccessfully tried to distance themselves from. At this point, Republicans have to be wondering if Vance’s efforts in the conservative movement, considered an asset to the GOP, will hurt their chances in November.