More Vance Than Anyone Could Ever Need
Plus: Long live Eric Adams, Electoral College bias, and more...
Vance dossier: On Thursday, X suspended the account of Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist who formerly wrote for The Intercept, due to his sharing of the Donald Trump campaign's vetting dossier on J.D. Vance.
The hefty document was allegedly obtained through an Iranian cyberattack/hack of the campaign's confidential files. Last month, Microsoft reported "that Iran-backed hackers had targeted a high-ranking political campaign official via a spear-phishing email" (per Axios); it came to light that the high-ranking political campaign official was affiliated with Team Trump as the documents began to circulate to major publications.
The dossier published on Klippenstein's Substack and shared to X contained what appears to be Vance's home address and phone number. Sharing the dossier may violate X's hacked materials policy, which was altered in October 2020 (following outcry related to Twitter suppressing the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story, originally reported by the New York Post) but continues to prohibit sharing hacked materials that reveal personal information.
"Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance's physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number," said an X spokesman. But links to the dossier were also banned, contra X's changed policy which says that links should be labeled as hacked materials but that they should not be banned outright. ("Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix," wrote then-CEO Jack Dorsey in October 2020.) Some people who shared links to, or screenshots from, the Vance dossier—even parts which contained no sensitive information—were locked out of their accounts. Case in point:
My colleague @EricBoehm87 posted a single screen shot from the Vance dossier and was locked out of his account. pic.twitter.com/nhPuApgkry
— (Stephanie) Slade (@sladesr) September 26, 2024
And it was a good tweet, too:
One of the most damning descriptions you'll read of JD Vance's economic views comes from within the Trump campaign lol pic.twitter.com/kZIf3ZyE6A
— Eric Boehm (@EricBoehm87) September 26, 2024
Actually he's right: In other news, Vance's critics have dug up a clip of him talking about how car seats may affect birthrates, which the internet and our illustrious fact-checkers have decided to ridicule. Look, there are lots of things to ding Vance for—his economic populism, his callousness, his comfort spreading viral lies and rumors (Haitian pet eating!) even when he knows they're not true—but this ain't it.
Vance was most likely referring to a 2020 study (covered at the time by Reason's Christian Britschgi) that examined car seat mandates and their effect on fertility, theorizing that most cars can't fit three car seats in their back row, so having an additional third kid frequently necessitates the purchase of a larger car, which can put a financial damper on having three kids close in age. "We find that when a woman has two children below the car seat age, her chances of giving birth that year decline by 0.73 percentage points," write the study's authors. "This represents a large decline, as the probability of giving birth for a woman age 18-35 with two children already is 9.36 [percent] in our sample."
Correlational studies have all kinds of problems, and there's certainly a replication crisis in the social sciences, but Vance is in no way making this up, nor is he wrong to point to the many weird regulations and mandates that get piled on parents, ostensibly for the good of the children.
It gets better! In fact, Vance cited this during a March 2023 congressional hearing in which senators were weighing possible new Federal Aviation Administration mandates—promoted by the Association of Flight Attendants union!—that would do away with the longstanding practice of allowing lap infants and instead force parents to buy an extra seat for their babies and use an approved child restraint system (also known as a car seat) on planes.
"Look, if I take my kids from Cincinnati to visit their grandparents in San Diego, that's five hours," said Vance in the hearing. "I mean, try to keep a toddler or a baby in a car seat for five hours. That is torture for everybody, including the baby and certainly the passengers around the baby."
This is possibly the least weird thing I have ever heard from a politician. It's completely relatable and true. And he goes on.
"The second thing, of course, is that air traffic accidents are thankfully, thank God, so much less frequent and less common than car accidents are. And so, what I worry here is that in the name of safety improvements, and I don't doubt that there are marginal safety improvements, we're actually proposing a change that would make things much, much more miserable for parents for very little marginal improvement in safety," finished Vance.
Very few people want to die on this hill, but I'll let you in on a secret: Seatbelts on airplanes will not do anything if you're actually in a severe aviation accident. They pretty much only protect against bumps and bruises in the event of severe turbulence or deceleration. The FAA's regulations surrounding bringing babies on planes are infrequently based on sound science, as I've written about before. And as someone who has taken my almost-2-year-old on 40 flights so far, I can attest to the fact that Vance is properly weighing the tradeoffs in a way only a parent, not a regulator, can: How much is actually gained in safety, and how much is lost in comfort and ease?
Put simply, this is not a dunk-worthy Vance moment. This is him at his best: Understanding the things that are actually making life worse for families with young kids, and smartly articulating why we shouldn't wield the power of the state to make matters even worse. (If only he believed this consistently.)
Scenes from New York: Mayor Eric Adams faces five federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations; he's maintained that he will not be stepping down and that he wants New Yorkers to hear his defense and reasoning (which at this point remains vague).
The indictment says that Adams "sought and accepted improper valuable benefits" starting in 2014, when he was Brooklyn borough president, and continuing until the present day. Luxury travel via discounted Turkish Airlines tickets and free hotel rooms, which Adams tried to pass off as things he paid for, amounted to (honestly) the paltry sum of $100,000. But what exactly did the Turks want from him? Mostly for the New York Fire Department to permit their new consulate despite safety issues, something for which Adams chose to help grease the wheels.
No lies detected:
Trump, Giuliani, Cuomo, Adams. Notable that four of the most venal, petty, authoritarian, generally shitty American political figures in recent American history came up in the world of New York politics and that seems at least as important as what party they belong to.
— Daniel Denvir (@DanielDenvir) September 26, 2024
If I were Mayor Adams, I would have tried to get slightly more luxury if risking legal trouble. Inconvenient layovers in Istanbul in order to have, like, seat upgrades—with a side of possible prison time—seems like a stupid calculation.
Regardless of where he ends up, I know I'll miss his speeches, his sidewalk driving, his obvious untruths (truly), his Curtis Mayfield-paralysis story, his 9/11 gaffe, his rat-drowning bucket, and his dating advice.
QUICK HITS
- "Here at Silver Bulletin, we've repeatedly emphasized the idea that the Electoral College is much more likely to hurt Democrats than to help them—as it did in 2000 and 2016," writes Nate Silver (more from him here). "This is a conclusion borne directly from our model. As of Thursday, our forecast is that Kamala Harris is a 3:1 favorite in the popular vote—but the Electoral College is basically still a toss-up.…At the New York Times yesterday, however, Nate Cohn offered a dissenting view. Cohn isn't predicting an Electoral College split favoring Democrats, but he thinks the penalty Harris faces will likely be smaller this year. On that point, the Nates agree—though we differ on the extent of the difference."
- This is a fascinating article, in which a New York Times reporter interviews J.D. Vance's mom, Beverly Aikins, mostly because the reporter can't quite fully comprehend that millions of people just like Aikins—who isn't really political or ideological, who doesn't really follow the horserace of it all—exist in the world.
- "The ongoing military escalation between Israel Defense Forces and Hezbollah has not only put Lebanon under fire, including the country's Christians, but the situation could also diminish the presence of Eastern Catholic patriarchs from Lebanon at the Synod on Synodality," reports the National Catholic Register.
- Hurricane Helene is battering Florida right now, forcing many to evacuate and others to shelter in place. It's "growing unusually large for a Gulf of Mexico storm, and is now rapidly intensifying," reports Axios.
- Degrowth discourse:
online degrowth is goofy, but real actual degrowth is Britainhttps://t.co/ma2cRBY6ji
— Noah Smith ???????????????????????????? (@Noahpinion) September 27, 2024
