Long before he was the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance was just another anxious law student at Yale trying to figure out where he fit in. He was a guy with a keyboard and a lot of opinions. He actually ran two different blogs back in the day, and looking back at them now feels like opening a time capsule from a completely different political era.
Honestly, the transformation is pretty wild.
The first one, started during his 2005 deployment to Iraq, was titled The Ruminations of JD Hamel. At the time, he was using his birth name, JD Hamel, and the tone was exactly what you’d expect from a young Marine—raw, a bit self-serious, and, as he put it, "like a diary, only far more masculine." Then came the more famous one, The Hillbilly Elite, which he launched in 2010 while navigating the ivy-covered walls of Yale Law School.
Why The Hillbilly Elite Still Matters Today
Most people know Vance from his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, but The Hillbilly Elite was where those ideas first started to breathe. It was a space for him to process the weird friction of being an "Appalachian white boy" training at one of the most elite institutions on the planet. He wasn't the polished politician we see on TV in 2026. He was a 26-year-old trying to bridge the gap between his Kentucky roots and his New Haven reality.
Some of the stuff in there is genuinely surprising if you only know his current platform.
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For instance, in a 2010 post, he was actually railing against both parties for not being aggressive enough about cutting Social Security and Medicare. He called the GOP "the party of the aging white person." That’s a far cry from the populist, "don't touch entitlements" stance he’s taken alongside Donald Trump. It shows a version of Vance that was much more aligned with the old-school, fiscal hawk wing of the Republican Party—the kind of stuff you'd hear from Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan.
The Evolution of a Never-Trumper
You've probably heard the clips of Vance calling Trump "America's Hitler" or "cultural heroin." While some of those specific zingers came from interviews and texts to his law school roommate, Sofia Nelson, the sentiment was baked into his writing during that period.
His blog posts and early essays weren't just about policy; they were about a deep-seated fear that the Republican Party was becoming a "totem" for people who had lost their way. He admitted in his later writings for The Lamp that he initially clung to neoliberal economics because it was the most "respectable" way to be a Republican among his elite peers. He was overcompensating. He wanted to prove he wasn't a "rube," so he became the ultimate meritocrat.
- 2005: Writing as JD Hamel in Iraq.
- 2010: Starting The Hillbilly Elite at Yale.
- 2016: The peak of his "Never Trump" phase.
- 2021: The pivot toward MAGA during his Senate run.
What Most People Get Wrong About the "Reinvention"
It’s easy to call it a flip-flop. It's the simplest narrative. But if you read the old blog posts carefully, you see a guy who was always obsessed with the idea of "decline." Whether he was blaming the culture of the working class (his "tough love" phase) or blaming the "liberal elites" (his current phase), the underlying anxiety about America falling apart has stayed the same.
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The blogs show a man who was deeply uncomfortable with his own success. He felt like an outsider at Yale, describing it as a "nerd Hollywood" where everyone else had the "key to the black box" except him. That chip on his shoulder? It’s been there since 2010.
The Religion Factor
One of the most fascinating things buried in his old digital footprint is his journey with faith. He went through a "brief flirtation with libertarianism" and a period of atheism. He basically admitted he became an atheist because he wanted to fit in with the "educated" crowd who saw religion as provincial and stupid.
He wrote: "I didn’t think to myself, ‘I am not going to be a Christian because Christians are rubes.’ Socialization operates in more subtle, but more powerful ways."
By the time he converted to Catholicism in 2019, he had fully rejected that "meritocratic master class" mindset. The blog posts act as the "before" picture in a long-form spiritual and political makeover.
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Actionable Insights: What We Can Learn from the Archives
If you’re trying to understand the current political landscape, looking at these old blogs isn't just a "gotcha" exercise. It’s a roadmap of how the American Right has shifted over the last two decades.
- Watch the terminology. Notice how he moved from using "personal responsibility" as a primary solution to focusing on "systemic elite failure." That is the core of the MAGA shift.
- Look for the "outsider" thread. Even when he was at the top of the world at Yale, Vance wrote like he was behind enemy lines. This "insider-outsider" dynamic is key to his appeal.
- Check the dates. Most of his most "moderate" or anti-Trump takes vanished or were deleted right around 2021. When someone is moving into a high-stakes primary, their digital history becomes their biggest liability.
Basically, JD Vance's old blog isn't just a collection of dead links. It’s the original script for a political drama that is still playing out in real-time. Whether you think he’s a pragmatist who grew up or a careerist who sold out, the evidence of who he used to be is still out there, hidden in the archives of the "Hillbilly Elite."
To get a full picture of this evolution, your next step should be to compare his 2010 blog posts on fiscal policy with his 2024-2025 vice presidential speeches on industrial policy. The contrast reveals exactly how much the Republican party's center of gravity has shifted from Wall Street toward the Rust Belt.