Unearthed photo: Teen JD Vance poses with 3 girls at urinals

I'm no fan of Vance, but I'm really struggling to see why this photo matters.
- He supports criminalising people of the 'wrong' gender using the wrong bathroom.
  
  That really isn't what's happening in the photo, as I've said in more detail elsewhere in the thread, and pretending that's what's being depicted makes the attack look foolish and desperate.
- His hypocrisy between what he’s done and what he says.
  
  I dunno man, downvote me or whatever, but this really feels like it's reaching? This is literally just him fucking around as a kid in high school. Who cares?
  He's a piece of shit no doubt, but hate him for the stupid shit he's saying and doing now and recently. Not for some random photo of him from over 20 years ago.
  
  "So one day you're posing with girls in the boys bathroom and 22 years later you're against it. WHICH IS IT VANCE???"
  I guess it's just another Phone-it-in-Friday.
  Edit: Shit I'm tired. Forgot what damn day it was.
  
  This really isn't that, though. These women aren't using a men's room, they're posing for a photo. They certainly aren't trans men using a men's room, as is their damn right should they wanna.
  It's high schoolers being silly.
  Vance is a deplorable man with deplorable ideologies but this doesn't demonstrate any hypocrisy.
  This kind of "gotcha" is uncritical, unserious, and looks desperate.
- It shows he's changed: he's no longer cool, man.
- He's pushing for laws that make what you see in that pic a crime.
  
  This is a picture in a High School yearbook.
  It's not a picture of trans people exercising their rights to use a bathroom that fits their gender.
  It's ridiculous to make those things equivalent and say it demonstrates some hypocrisy makes the author look foolish and desperate.
- I totally agree with you about right wing hypocrisy and bigotry, I just don't think this will serve as a good example of it. Being transphobic wouldn't preclude him, or anyone that could be swayed to vote for him, from thinking that gender bending (mocking trans people) comedy is funny... not all performances are endorsements. Things like minstrel shows and blackface were also considered funny at a point in time and it's not because anyone involved thought blacks were people or deserving of equal rights.
  
  I mean sure. But if anyone sees their pleas as anything other than a smoke screen, I don't think we are in the same game. I have no way of taking them as anything other than just gaslighting.
- I tend to agree and give a ton of leeway to stupid, offensive stuff from years past that people have evolved from. We all said and did stupid stuff that we regret. However, this isn't offensive, and that's to highlight that Vance either A. regressed in his values from being normal to being weirdly pro-hyper-traditional gender roles or B. has no true beliefs and is just saying what he says because he thinks it wins him votes.
- Thank the gods they didn't have the internet in my younger days. Still, fuck that guy.
- So JD Vance has proven to be one of the most hypocritical people in politics, which is a lot to say, like saying he is the one of the people with most guns in Texas or something like that.
  This pic, and others like it, are basically checking ALL boxes on the stuff he seemed to be OK with before but now denounces because he is a weird hypocrite.
  
  Now all we need is for those who support people like him to care about their leaders being exposed as hypocrites, but they've proven over and over that they don't, so this kind of story has zero impact on them.
- Because he's purportedly a man of family values and that includes strict gender lines.
- Not everything has to "matter".
  
  Also, Lemmy is not the target audience that these revelations are meant for.
- I came here to say this. I'm not a fan but who fucking cares about this shit? It just seems petty and desperate.
- Careful i said something similar about the 'yep' comment from 2020 and i got some aggressive replies on here. (Apparently im an enlightened centralist or something haha) I agree with you though theres so much worse out there on this weird fella
  
  I'm a fan of the semi-newish tactic of making the RNC look like hypocritical weirdos. It's effective and there's plenty of material to work with. These kind of reaches look desperate and that's really not the position the DNC is fighting from nor needs to.
  
  It's like Trump and the Koi fish feeding nonsense. Or Obama and Tan Suits. Just weird shit to fixate on
- It’s just plain weird

Are we a week away from a picture of him in blackface?
- I just about guarantee such a picture exists somewhere.
- and about 17-21 days from legitimate gay sex
- Party with Trudeau?
- That may get him more votes

I went to a summer camp in the 80s and 90s and we had this big event where the camp was separated into groups and each given a country. There were a ton of events, but some of the events were writing a song about the country and then another where you would act out some spirit event for the country. Always points for being dressed up with "traditional" clothing from the country.
It was a wretched hive of cultural appropriation and stereotypes. The song I remember the most is about how everyone was starving in Ethiopia. I saw some pictures of us all dressed and man oh man, if I were running for office those would be incredibly embarrassing.
Know what I know now, I realize how wrong the whole thing was and doesn't represent me at all 30 years later. In fact I even stand against these things now.
One could easily look at these and claim im some massive hypocrite. But the reality is that I was a dumb teen having fun and now I've grown up.
On some level, I feel bad for people who think we should hold shit that happened as a teenager against us...like were you not out having fun being an impetous dumbass? Is these nothing you did as a teenager that you wouldn't do now or think is wrong?
- I basically agree with you, but the subtext is a little different.
  I don't think this photo is damning in any way. It looks like some kids having fun in a pretty typical way. It's pretty normal for kids to "joke," and play around with gender. But this dude had some fun as a teen and now he's trying his damnedest to ensure no one ever gets to express themselves in a way that is incongruous with their agab. It's worth pointing out that that's shitty for some specific reasons.
  
  He's a piece of shit because his policies are terrible. Whether or not his current actions are congruent with his actions as a teen, which is true for most all of us, are two separate things.
  I don't believe he's genuine, but if he is, like I am with my current beliefs, stupidity as kid shouldn't be held as some evidence against who he is now.
  Don't get me wrong, when I first saw this my reaction was "he's the gift that keeps on giving" but after some introspection, the more I think about it, the less I like it.
- I agree with the teen stuff. At some point, we expect that people quit the dumb, attention seeking behavior. If they don't learn, it becomes weird. It also is why the weird meme sticks so hard. It is MAGA signature brand.
  TLDR: Kleenex became synonymous for tissues. MAGA is weird in the same way.
- I've always said that you can't just take one piece of a person's life out of context to judge them. You have to look at the complete picture. You from 30 years ago doesn't represent who you are today. BUT...it can inform a complete picture.
  Remember the news articles about teenaged Mitt Romney holding a classmate down and forcibly cutting the kid's hair? By itself, it just said Romney was a jerk as a kid. If Romney turned into an upstanding person over the years, it would be unfair to judge him based on what he did as a teenager. But we have the family dog incident and the numerous Bain articles to add to his teenaged antics, and we can build a complete picture of him, a picture that shows year after year, he was a jerk that liked to lord it over 'inferiors'. We harped on that, all the way to his 47% comment, to illustrate that he thinks people who aren't multi-millionaire hedge-fund conservatives should shut up and take the boot to the face. We convinced enough people in 2012 that despite Obama's handling of 2009 through 2012, Obama should get a second chance rather than let "Better Than Thou" Romney get into office.
  JD Vance (and his boss) fit in the same boat. We're NOT just hammering him based on the fact that he did stupid stuff as a kid. We're pointing the hypocrisy of getting all up in other people's business while having some really weird shit going on in his business. And his history of telling other people what to do extends all the way to the present day.
  In short, Vance hasn't changed, so his teenage antics are fair game.
  
  I don't see how this picture shows that he was getting up in other people's business while a kid. Besides, why not just focus on the BS he is doing now? That should be enough.

~~“Kamala Harris created inflation that’s crushing American families, caused a historic crisis at our southern border, and allowed deadly fentanyl to flood into communities across our country,~~ (complete bullshit) and this is what the media is worried about,” a spokesperson for Vance told The Daily Beast in a statement when asked about the photo.
“A goofy high school yearbook from over 20 years ago? Get a life,” the spokesperson concluded (I actually 100% agree with this.)
This is just fucking stupid. There are half a billion more important things to discuss, we don't need this kind of stupidity in the national conversation.
- You might actually be right for all the wrong reasons, actually. This IS a critically important issue for many voters, as JD Vance is making the subject of this photo strictly illegal with criminal charges for minors or even justifying "self-defence" style assaults on minors.
  However, anybody who cares about this issue likely isn't a swing voter, we're not going to attract moderates with this sort of publicity.
- no you get a life

Why did this matter? At all?
- For normal people? It doesn't matter in the slightest.
  For MAGA? Who knows. Probably something something trans ruining society
- Ironic because well known fact Vance always sits to pee
- Yeah who cares

JD Vance puts his cast iron in the dishwasher pass it on
- These were his early years, where he was only experimenting with dry humping ottomans.
- Whoa! Too far
- Jorkin Depeanus Vance uses sugar substitute in his sweat tea. Pass it on

Weird photo.
I mean I don't care about the bathroom stuff, he's just weird.

who cares about this? I mean if it's something he's still into yeah but teenagers will take lots of photos that are not to be taken seriously

The three other girls in the picture were the president, treasurer, and secretary, according to the outlet.
Are they trying to bait him??!! 😂

He's so classy, no wonder Yale wanted him.
- I’m convinced at this point that these so called elite institutions are fertile grounds for most of the rich sociopaths that are root cause of majority of current problems
  
  And the entry requirements are mostly money.

This is high school stuff. Humorous for the yearbook, not a big deal even with his current position on trans people. I'm far more concerned about him being supportive of book writers on fascist movements. As Obama has said in the past, stay focused. We don't need to make things more than they are when there's bad stuff readily available to attack.

Hahahaha perfect
- this shit just keeps getting better and better

Seeing this picture of JD Vance made it all make sense.
The suits, the apparent eyeliner, the sudden radical changes of viewpoint, the book, the sucking up to fascists as long as they will keep paying his bills and tell him he’s acceptable. All of it. It just kind of all clicked into focus.
No hate for people who were big and awkward in high school. It’s all good, and you don’t have to grow up into the modern monstrosity that is Vance just because this is where you started. He’s actually clearly smarter than a lot of the people in that orbit. He should know better; that’s one of the things that made it all weird and hard to understand. I’m just saying that seeing where he started makes it make sense all the little incongruities about where he ended up, as of now.

18-year-old JD Hamel
The HAM

Bruh, this 'journalist' is fucking struggling with the point of his work.

Paywall.
- Archived version

He's a big ol' boy

If only there were tampons in that bathroom, then it would be less weird.

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Ghod, I hope "Occupy Democrats" doesn't run with this. They made a big deal out of Josh Hawley's cross-dressing photos, and I was like "no, that's one thing that should be totally fine"
- Did you read the piece? Although they claimed they were chastising him for "hypocrisy", they never pointed out that cross-dressing is, in fact, ok -- and the salacious way they treated it made it clear that the author thought him cross-dressing was scandalous.