Republican Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance shot a fiery retort at his opponent, Democratic representative Tim Ryan, during a debate Monday when he accused him of peddling the “great replacement theory,” which posits that Jews are conspiring to displace white Americans with minorities and foreigners.
Vance, author of the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and now his home state’s GOP nominee for the Senate, quickly rejected Ryan’s suggestion that he sympathizes with such dogma. He reminded his rival that his children are people of color, as his wife is an Indian American, and that such bad-faith insinuations harm his family.
“Here’s exactly what happens when the media and people like Tim Ryan accuse me of engaging in the great replacement theory,” Vance said.
“You were peddling it! You were peddling it,” Ryan interjected.
“What happens is my biracial children get attacked by scumbags online and in person because you are so desperate for political power that you’ll accuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism. We are sick of it,” Vance said. “You can believe in the border without being a racist. You can believe in the country without being a racist.”
Ryan claimed Monday that Vance has been “running around with” people who espouse replacement theory, which ultimately motivated the shooter who terrorized a grocery store in a black-concentrated neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., killing ten and wounding three. Ryan said he believes Vance agrees with many of the writings that the gunman consulted as inspiration.
“There’s no grand conspiracy. This is a country that’s been enriched by immigrants from all quarters of the world,” Ryan said, claiming that Vance’s purported cronies, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Ted Cruz, are replacement-theory proponents. “All these guys, they just want to stoke this racial violence,” he added. “We’re tired of it, J.D.”
Espousing an “America First” position on immigration, Vance has been a major advocate of border security for both the sake of defending national sovereignty and also keeping out deadly narcotics, given the drug epidemic that Ohio and other states in the Rust Belt have struggled with. Last week, it was revealed that Ryan, who has criticized Vance for his allegedly dubious advocacy against drug addiction, received thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from drug firms involved in the national opioid crisis.
A PAC affiliated with Cardinal Health Inc., a multinational health-care services company located in Ohio, has given Ryan $21,000 since 2007, including $5,000 this August. The PAC of McKesson Corp. Employees gave Ryan $5,000 in 2012, and the PAC of Amerisource Bergen Corp. gave him $1,000 in 2019. The opioid crisis was ongoing during these years, the Associated Press reported.
Ryan’s campaign has countered that Vance’s anti-opioid nonprofit, Our Ohio Renewal, is a “sham” that “didn’t fund a single addiction program” to combat the opioid epidemic but supported measures that “made it worse.”