Exclusive: Without evidence, JD Vance suggests to St. Louis far-right publication that President Biden opened border to bring in fentanyl to kill MAGA voters

By Paul Wagman

JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, suggested two years ago that President Joe Biden seemed to be deliberately keeping the U.S. southern border open so fentanyl could be smuggled into the country to kill Republican voters, a video posted on the Gateway Pundit website shows.  

The April 2022 interview took place while Vance was seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from Ohio, which he later went on to win. Gateway Pundit is a far-right conspiracy-oriented website owned and operated by Jim Hoft of St. Louis. 

The 22-minute video interview begins with an advertisement for Vance related to the issue of illegal immigration and drugs.  Moments later, Hoft comments that the influx of immigrants across the U.S. southern border seems “purposeful.” 

“Yeah,” Vance replies, “I made this point a few months ago, if you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl.”

Because of fentanyl, Vance continues, the border crisis “has gone all over the country. It’s not just the southern border states that are affected by it. It’s everybody. 

“And it does look intentional,” Vance says.  “It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it. And I should say, Jim, it’s not just drug trafficking, it’s also sex trafficking.

“It’s all just insane,” Vance adds, “and it’s definitely starting to feel intentional. Right, how could they be this stupid? Monkeys flipping a coin could get policy better than these guys have done it, so it’s starting to look like it’s intentional.”

The interview got attention at the time on Twitter, now X, and in the HuffPost, Newsweek and the Washington Post and was recently the subject of a story in the online news site Inquisitr.  But the mainstream media both in 2022 and in the current campaign has largely overlooked it.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, death rates from drug overdoses in 2022, the last year for which data was available, were higher in the Democratic-voting states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island than they were in the Republican-voting states of Texas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. The state with the highest absolute number of opioid deaths— 10,952 — was “blue” California, which also had a higher death rate than “red” Texas.    

Vance is by his own admission “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures,” the Washington Post recently reported.  He has defended Alex Jones, the right-wing radio host who spread lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting.  And he has gained attention recently for having written a positive blurb for Unhumans, a new book by Jack Posobiec that celebrates Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet.  Posobiec is a far-right activist who advanced the false “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that a pizza parlor in Washington, D. C. was being used by high-ranking Democratic leaders for Satanic ritual abuse and child sex trafficking.

“Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected,” Vance said in a 2021 speech to the conservative Teneo Network that was recently published by ProPublica. “Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be okay with nonconventional people.”

Efforts to reach the Vance campaign for comment on this story were not successful. Hoft did not respond to a request for comment.

The Gateway Pundit was one of the leading sources of the election lie that Trump won the 2020 election. Two Georgia election workers are suing him in court in Missouri for having falsely reported that they stuffed ballot boxes in Georgia. An investigation by Republican election officials in Georgia refuted the report within 24 hours, but Hoft has continued to level the charge against them ever since.  

Paul Wagman is a former Post-Dispatch reporter and FleishmanHillard executive who is now an independent reporter, editor and communications consultant.