Theo van Oostrom

JD Vance represents everything wrong with the Republican party. He should do everyone a favor and retire from politics altogether. He has no principles, only a reading of the polls. In January, as Trump weighed war with Iran, Vance personally asked Rasmussen to add questions on how many American combat deaths the public would tolerate. A regime that has made war on Americans since 1979 is a matter of self-defense. Vance treated it as a matter of public opinion. He defended the war this summer, and now that Republicans have lost seven Senate seats, including his old seat in Ohio, he blames the war and says the party must change its relationship with Israel. The tariffs get none of the blame, because he champions them. He rejects the idea the country was founded on. He told the Claremont Institute that defining America by the Declaration of Independence is over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time, and that men whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have more claim to America than those who say they don't belong. Rights belong to every man by his nature, not by his bloodline. He praised Lina Khan's war on successful companies, and his new memoir has a chapter attacking free market economics. The Republican party does not need an heir. It needs men who will defend individual rights and capitalism on moral grounds, whether the polls agree or not. Ten years of Vance's record show he is not one of them. wsj.com/politics/elections/j…

If by End the War you mean finish off the regime and come home, I am with you. If you mean leave the regime standing and come home, then check your premises, Senator. What is the proper role of government? You answer that well in economics. In foreign affairs you drop the principle. The one job a government exists to do is protect the individual rights of its citizens from force, and foreign force counts. 1. Do you believe that a regime that has chanted death to America for 47 years would hold a nuclear weapon and not use it? 2. Do you believe protecting us from foreign threats is the job of government or not? 3. Is the record below, coupled with a ruling clergy that treats martyrdom as a virtue, not enough evidence that the threat is real and that ending it is the government's job? Nobody here is asking for nation building. The job is to remove the threat and leave. This is also why you have not won a national primary and most will not back you if you run for President. 84 percent of Republicans backed the strikes on Iran in the March Marist poll, and about 8 in 10 say they make Americans safer. That base will not accept the answer that if we just left them alone they would leave us alone. They have read the record below. Voters can tell when a man means it on the deficit and goes quiet on the people trying to kill them. I am not asking you to abandon a principle. I am asking you to apply it all the way. The Iranian record: US Embassy in Tehran seized, 52 Americans held 444 days. Nov 1979 to Jan 1981 US Embassy in Beirut bombed, 63 killed including 17 Americans. Apr 1983 Marine barracks in Beirut bombed, 241 US servicemen killed. Oct 1983 CIA station chief William Buckley kidnapped in Beirut, tortured and killed in captivity. Mar 1984 to Jun 1985 US Embassy annex in Beirut bombed. Sep 1984 Americans kidnapped and held for years in Lebanon by Hezbollah. 1982 to 1992 Khobar Towers bombed, 19 US airmen killed. Jun 1996 Iranian made EFPs used against US troops in Iraq, 603 Americans killed. 2003 to 2011 Plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant. 2011 American citizens taken as hostages for prisoner swaps and ransom. 2007 to present Ballistic missile strike on US forces at Al Asad, 110 troops with brain injuries. Jan 2020 Plots to assassinate Bolton, Pompeo, and Trump on US soil, charged in federal court. 2022 to 2024 Drone strike on Tower 22 in Jordan, 3 US soldiers killed. Jan 2024 Hundreds of missiles and drones fired at US bases across the Gulf, 13 Americans killed and over 300 wounded within a month. Feb to Mar 2026

Mark. Do you hear yourself? You say government doesn't have to make a profit, and that is true. It is the whole problem. Profit is the signal that tells a producer he created more value than he consumed. Government has no such signal, which is why it cannot know whether anything it does is worth doing. That is not a friction AI removes. It is the absence of the one piece of information AI would need. And everyone else in your plan does have to make a profit. The researcher who spends ten years on a molecule that may never get through the FDA. The engineer who designs the scanner. The company that risks capital on a manufacturing line. The doctor who borrowed three hundred thousand dollars for the right to work ninety hour weeks. The nurse. The hospital that has to keep the lights on. Every one of them has to take in more than they put out or they stop, and when they stop, the care stops with them. Government not needing a profit means nothing if the people who make the thing still do. Then there are the people whose money you intend to run through the Treasury. They earned it. They need it. And they have a right to it that does not depend on whether your commission has a good use in mind. A government that doesn't have to make a profit is a government that only has to take, and the taking is the part you keep leaving out of the pitch. You know all of this. You built Cost Plus on exactly these premises. Publish a price, earn a margin, let the customer decide. You just refuse to grant the people who make medicine the same thing you granted yourself.

I understand it too, and I'm not going to pretend the flyswatter work isn't tiring. But consider how fortunate you are. You were born in the one century where a man can read Aristotle, Rand, and Peikoff on a device in his pocket, debate a million strangers from his kitchen table, and check any claim in seconds. Every thinker before you had to argue by candlelight to a few hundred people and hope a copy survived. You were born in the United States, the only country founded on the idea that your life is yours. Everywhere else and every time before, a man with your convictions kept them to himself or died for them. And you had her. Most men go their whole lives without ever hearing the principles explained in a way that makes the world make sense. You got them laid out in full, by the woman who discovered them, while she was still alive to write the footnotes. That is a stroke of luck almost nobody in history has had. The odds are long. They were long for her. She wrote Atlas in a culture that had already decided she was wrong, and the book is still outselling its critics seventy years later. There are more of us than it looks like from inside the swarm, and some of us aren't putting the swatter down yet.