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The left’s efforts to portray JD Vance as someone who, like the Bad Orange Man himself, is a far-right, neo-fascist gargoyle whom all decent people should shun are in full swing. The intrepid reporters over at Politico, ever savvy, ever unfoolable, have discovered that Vance has “a bunch of weird views on gender,” views that in ordinary times would get you consigned to the looney bin if we had looney bins anymore and that nowadays get you the Republican party’s vice-presidential nomination. Voters: caveat emptor!

The mind reels with lurid possibilities. What are Vance’s “weird views on gender”? Does he think that men can magically turn into champion female swimmers and women of the year? Does he think drag queens should be sent into primary schools to teach children the glories of the latest LGBTQWTF fantasies? Does he think parents should lose custody of their children if they don’t affirm their delusions that they belong to the opposite sex?

Nah. Politico would think all that was as normal as pink hair and nose rings. What Politico finds “weird” is that Vance is “staunchly opposed to abortion” and has even compared the left’s sacramental child sacrifice to slavery, another moral evil that once enjoyed the protection of a Supreme Court ruling. Even worse, as far as Politico is concerned, is the fact that Vance has “promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children.” Good heavens! He wants people to have more children? But what about their carbon footprint?

Vance also “opposes same-sex marriage.” He had the audacity in 2022 to suggest that “the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays ‘shift spouses like they change their underwear’), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children.” This is a canard Vance has heard before, and Politico was minimally gracious enough to include his response: “His campaign said such an insinuation was ‘preposterous,’ but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.”

All this and more situates Vance within “the faction of the American New Right that typically refers to itself as ‘postliberalism.’” Did you know that we had a new right, or more precisely, yet another new right? The idea that there are conventional, respectable conservatives who are challenged by an extreme, radical “New Right” is a decades-old leftist scaremongering trope. Back in 1980 or 1981, I remember my university newspaper running a hysterical piece about the scary evangelical Christians on campus, who were, it said, “inextricably bound to the New Right.” This morning, I looked up the author of that article and discovered that he is a New York Times columnist who lives in the Hamptons with his husband. Figures.

The “New Right” of 1981 is fairly long in the tooth by now, but it’s the same as Vance’s New Right. It consisted then and consists now of people who, unlike the John McCain and Mitt Romney types, don’t want to play by the left’s rules. They don’t want to let leftists set the agenda for everything but instead want to offer a real alternative to the American people.

The idea of a genuine alternative to their own rancid agenda is what scares the left, which is authoritarian to the core and, as the Biden regime has shown again and again, is extremely intolerant of dissent.

JD Vance is scary to leftists because his views on gender are indeed “weird” from their point of view. The entire human race has held these same views for millennia, but the left is in full, unhinged rebellion against them. Politico warns that “while Trump’s sexism has manifested itself as a crude machismo, Vance, along with his fellow New Right travelers, is about to introduce voters to a more conceptual take on sexism — one which many women, and indeed many men, might find even more alarming.”

That’s absolutely true if you find alarming the idea that men are men and women are women and that each has particularities that the other does not have. The left, in the midst of its all-out war against reality, has found in JD Vance a man who lives squarely and unapologetically within that reality. That’s why leftists hate and fear him so much.