Damning Report Links J.D. Vance to Horrific Work Conditions

J.D. Vance helped to fund a startup that was supposed to make things better for working people in eastern Kentucky. But not only did it fail, it provided terrible working conditions, causing employees to flee in droves—only to be soon replaced by migrant workers.

CNN reports that in 2017, in the wake of his successful book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance was hired by AOL co-founder Steve Case to invest in underserved markets. One week later, Vance took a meeting with Jonathan Webb, the founder of a startup called AppHarvest.

AppHarvest’s plan was to create an indoor farming operation growing fruits and vegetables in eastern Kentucky, an economically distressed region close to much of the U.S. population with plenty of land and water nearby. Webb had already drained his savings and maxed out his credit cards to run the startup, and he needed more cash. So he reached out to investors, including Vance.

Vance would invest $150,000 in AppHarvest, with other investors chipping in $50,000 each. While Senate disclosures say Vance was named to the company’s board of directors in March 2017, AppHarvest’s security filings say that he joined in 2020. Vance’s own venture capital firm, Narya, had AppHarvest as one of its earliest publicly disclosed investments.

Over the next few years, Vance helped the startup get millions of dollars in capital, and helped Webb as a pitchman. All the while, AppHarvest was hiring eastern Kentucky locals to help with its crops, having pledged to bring thousands of jobs to “high unemployment areas,” according to a presentation it gave to investors in 2020.

At first, things were going well, said one new hire, Anthony Morgan. He said his hours as a crop care specialist were manageable and that the benefits were better than anything else in the area. But a few months later, production fell behind and workers were put under pressure. The company cut employee health care benefits along with other costs, and hours were increased with breaks cut.

For workers like Morgan, that meant longer days in a very hot greenhouse, which put them in danger.

“I think about the hottest that I experienced was around 128 degrees,” Morgan told CNN. “A couple days a week, you’d have an ambulance show up and you seen people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital.”

As conditions got worse, more and more workers left the company. Morgan organized a sit-in to demand better conditions and was later fired after he took time off to get treatment for an injury that he suffered on the job, he said.

Morgan’s issues were shared by other workers at the company. One other crop care specialist, Shelby Hester, said that the company didn’t provide masks for employees to deal with mold and other contaminants in the greenhouses. Hester corroborated Morgan’s account of workers experiencing heat stroke symptoms, and added that managers disregarded doctor’s notes as a reason to miss work.

With native Kentuckians leaving their jobs, their positions were soon filled by migrant workers coming from countries like Mexico and Guatemala. Politicians and other leaders, like Senator Mitch McConnell, would visit the company’s facilities, only for the migrant workers to be sent away so they wouldn’t be seen.

Kentucky state inspectors visited AppHarvest facilities but didn’t issue any citations, and instead lauded supposed company precautions like mandatory heat breaks and drinks for employees. Nothing would ever happen, and the poor working conditions were documented in a report last year by Grist and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.

The company went bankrupt in 2023 with $341 million in debt, dealing with millions of dollars in lawsuits. Vance left the company’s board in April 2021 before his run for the Senate in Ohio but still had $100,000 invested in the company. With Vance touting his business record as the Republican vice presidential nominee, AppHarvest is another big strike against him and the campaign.

State Republican candidates in North Carolina are hopping onto a nationwide Bible bandwagon that’s pushing for the religious text to be a mandatory instructional element in public schools.

Speaking with an undercover operative from the Democratic super PAC American Bridge at the Republican National Convention, the Republican nominee to become North Carolina’s public school superintendent, Michele Morrow, praised unconstitutional efforts that have made the Bible and its teachings mandatory reading in states such as Louisiana and Oklahoma. She revealed that she has similar intentions for the Tar Heel State.

“I absolutely believe that we need to get elective Bible classes back in every middle and high school—in our schools,” Morrow told the incognito operative, adding that she “absolutely” meant in public schools.

Morrow had previously gained national attention for her questionable social media history, which included espousing QAnon conspiracies and calling for the “pay per view” executions by “firing squad” of several prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and Joe Biden shortly after he won the 2020 presidential election.

But the GOP state superintendent nominee’s political platform is similarly alarming. In February, Morrow advocated for an amendment to get the state Board of Education abolished, a move that would effectively hand the power to craft school policy to the superintendent—and the state’s GOP-controlled legislature.

But Morrow isn’t the only North Carolinian Republican hoping to use the state’s public schools as a vehicle for promoting Christian nationalism. North Carolina lieutenant governor—and GOP gubernatorial nominee—Mark Robinson has suggested that “schools wouldn’t be getting shot up” if Christian teachings were forced into the classroom, and told a congregation at Asbury Baptist Church that public schools had taken a “nosedive” since mandatory prayer had been excised from curriculums.

Like Morrow, Robinson has also shared a host of his disturbing positions online, including posts in which he minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, claimed a “satanic marxist” had made the movie Black Panther to pull “shekels” out of Black audiences, likened women getting abortions to murderers, and derided gay people as “filth” and “maggots.” Robinson has also expressed archaic views about women’s role in society, telling a Charlotte-area church in 2022 that Christians are “called to be led by men.”

Donald Trump’s campaign has hired Taylor Budowich, a former Trump aide who has been running the super PAC MAGA Inc.

Budowich was a spokesperson for the Trump 2020 campaign, and has found himself embroiled in Trump’s classified documents case and implicated by Congress’s January 6 investigation.

In June of last year, he testified before a federal grand jury in Trump’s classified documents case. “America has become a sick and broken nation—a decline led by Joe Biden and power hungry Democrats,” he said at the time, per CBS. “I will not be intimidated by this weaponization of government. For me, the need to unite our nation and make America great again has never been more clear than it is today.”

Budowich was subpoenaed in 2021 by the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6, which claimed it had reason to believe he had directed roughly $200,000 from undisclosed sources to fund an ad campaign encouraging people to attend the rally that would transform into the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.

When JPMorganChase Bank complied with Congress’s request, turning over Budowich’s financial records, he filed a complaint and restraining order against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House Select Committee and its members, and his bank. His complaint was dismissed by a district court judge, and when he filed to appeal that decision, the case was dismissed again by an appeals court in March 2023—three months after the January 6 committee shuttered its 18-month investigation.

MAGA Inc. is a pro-Trump super PAC that plans to launch a series of ads in swing states that paint Vice President Kamala Harris as a “lunatic,” according to a memo from the group. MAGA Inc. has previously been used to financially buoy the former president’s campaign as Trump hemorrhaged funds across his legal battles, reportedly sending more than $50 million to Save America, Trump’s leadership PAC, in just the first quarter of 2024.

Budowich’s rehiring is the latest in a series of plays by the Trump campaign that signal panic in the former president’s team, which has spent the last month scrambling to mount a solid opposition to Vice President Kamala Harris’s new campaign.

One after another, each of the Trump team’s attempts to regain its footing has proved more disastrous than the last, from Trump’s appearance at the NABJ conference, which devolved into racist accusations; to his rally in Atlanta, where he criticized a Republican governor who’d said he’d vote for him; to his slate of shockingly unfocused political ads and his trainwreck conversation with Elon Musk Monday.

Donald Trump is already receiving pushback after threatening striking workers in his trainwreck interview with Elon Musk on Monday night.

“I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump told Musk. “You walk in, you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”

In response, the United Auto Workers on Tuesday morning filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk, calling the two “disgraced billionaires.”

The UAW accused the men of “illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers who stand up for themselves by engaging in protected concerted activity, such as strikes.”

“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said UAW President Shawn Fain.

Under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike. Threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

It’s unclear which incident Trump was referring to when he praised Musk for threatening organizing workers on Monday. At Tesla, the billionaire Musk has been accused of violating labor law by tweeting that employees would lose stock options if they unionized. A National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Tesla violated labor laws when it prevented Florida employees from discussing pay and working conditions. In California, Tesla violated labor laws by failing to provide meal and rest breaks and skirting overtime pay. Tesla has also faced multiple lawsuits brought forward by Black workers alleging a culture of racism on the shop floor.

In 2023, the NLRB charged Musk with violating federal labor law after he fired SpaceX workers for circulating a letter describing Musk as “a distraction and embarrassment.” At Twitter, Musk fired workers en masse after his takeover in 2022, including unionized janitors who walked off the job for “pay, benefits, and job protections.”

“Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected,” said Fain. “Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”

Meanwhile, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz will speak to AFSCME union members in Los Angeles in his first solo campaign stop on Tuesday.

Roger Stone’s email account was broken into by suspected hackers to try to gain access to the accounts of senior Trump campaign officials.

Microsoft reported Friday that a “former senior adviser” of a presidential campaign had been successfully spear-phished. The next day, the Trump campaign announced that it had fallen victim to a hack in June. The campaign did not initially alert the FBI because the team distrusts the agency, people close to the campaign said.

Multiple sources confirmed to CNN Tuesday that the adviser who’d been hacked was none other than Stone, a longtime GOP operative and self-proclaimed “agent provocateur.”

A group of hackers were able to break into Stone’s email account in June, with the hopes of accessing his vast network, and using phishing emails as a means of entry into the Trump campaign’s inner workings—and it seems they were successful.

The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Politico have all reported receiving stolen files from the Trump campaign, but as of yet have not reported on the contents of their bounty.

“Mr. Stone was contacted about this matter by Microsoft and the FBI and continues to cooperate with both,” said Grant Smith, Stone’s lawyer, per CNN. “Mr. Stone will have no further comment at this time.”

In a brief statement, Stone told the Post that he’d been informed by authorities that “a couple” of his personal email accounts had been accessed by the hackers. “I really don’t know more about it. And I’m cooperating. It’s all very strange.”

Donald Trump, for his part, has blamed the hack on Iran, citing Microsoft’s report as its evidence. Microsoft declined to comment to NBC, citing its policy of not sharing client details without permission.

While Iran has denied allegations that it was connected to the incident, the techniques associated with the hack are consistent with those used by Iranian hackers, according to CNN.

Ultimately, it seems like Stone should’ve known better, given his prior brush with massive, campaign-damaging email hacks.

It has been theorized that Stone allegedly knew about the 2016 hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, before they were ever published by WikiLeaks, thanks to his “backchannel communications” with Julian Assange.

This story has been updated.

The day after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s choice for vice president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a crowd of lawmakers in Louisville, Kentucky, that a Harris administration would spell certain doom for the Republican Party.

“Let’s assume our worst nightmare—the Democrats went to the White House, the House, the Senate,” McConnell said during his keynote speech at the National Conference of State Legislators Legislative Summit last week, according to Spectrum News. “The first thing they’ll do is get rid of the [Senate] filibuster. Second, you’ll have two new states: D.C., Puerto Rico. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity.”

Puerto Rico will vote on a nonbinding ballot measure in November to determine the territory’s future political status, with voters being given three options, all of which would change its official status: statehood, independence, or independence with free association. It will be the seventh time that the island’s 3.2 million people vote to define their political relationship with the United States. Harris has not yet taken an official stance on the vote.

McConnell insisted that next on the historically moderate Democrat’s agenda would be to place as many liberal justices on the Supreme Court as possible, noting that doing so would be “unconstitutional”—while apparently ignoring the fact that that’s exactly what Donald Trump did to achieve SCOTUS’s current conservative supermajority.

“If they get those two new states and pack the Supreme Court, they’ll get what they want,” McConnell said.

Ultimately, McConnell believes that the Harris-Walz ticket “represents the far left of the Democratic Party.

“And by the way, that’s most Democrats today,” he added.

Following the address, Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers broke down the Republican perspective on why Harris turned to Walz as her right hand.

“They’re trying to appeal to a rural voter that they have not appealed to in years,” Stivers said, reported Spectrum. “Now, whether they can or they can’t, that becomes a good question, and I think that will be based on the policies that they put forward. And hopefully, that’s what we get into.”

Donald Trump told Elon Musk during their livestreamed conversation on X Monday night that if the election goes poorly, “we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela because it will be a far safer place to meet than our country.”

Trump made the statement after mentioning that “crime rates all over the world are going way down,” an odd statement to make before bringing up Venezuela, where postelection protests have left 23 dead and more than 2,000 people arrested, according to the United Nations.

It seems that Trump is claiming that crime rates would be so high if he isn’t elected president that authoritarian Venezuela would seem safer by comparison. As president, Trump did not have positive ties with the country or its leader, Nicolás Maduro, casting doubt that Trump is actually serious about planning to flee to Venezuela. Either the convicted felon and former president perhaps was being facetious, or it’s another sign of his cognitive decline.

Unlike North Korea, where Trump and its leader Kim Jong Un infamously exchanged gushing letters, Trump and Venezuela were on bad terms from the start of his presidency. He refused to rule out a military intervention to confront Maduro in 2017, and two years later, Trump recognized Juan Guaidó, the leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, as the interim president of Venezuela, causing Maduro to cut ties with the United States.

Musk doesn’t have any favorable ties with Venezuela either, with Maduro banning X last week and accusing Musk of promoting hatred in the country after its recent election. Musk, in turn, accused the self-proclaimed socialist of “major election fraud.”

In short, Trump probably isn’t going to flee to Venezuela if he loses in November, especially since he’s now a convicted felon and barred from leaving the country at least until he’s sentenced for his hush-money crimes. Venezuela probably wouldn’t take him unless there was some kind of revolution or coup in the country. But stranger things have happened, especially since Musk has remarked in the past that “we will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,” regarding a 2020 coup d’état in nearby Bolivia. But surely Trump isn’t dumb enough to bank on something like that, right?

Donald Trump compared a photo-illustration of Vice President Kamala Harris to his wife, Melania, Monday night, seeming to call his opponent a “beautiful woman.”

During Trump’s two-hour, trainwreck conversation with Elon Musk, which took place on the technocrat’s glitchy X Spaces, the former president made several strange comments—but by far the weirdest was the creepy compliment he gave his opponent.

“She’s terrible, but she’s getting a free ride. I saw a picture of her on Time magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. I—it was a drawing,” Trump said. He was referring to Neil Jamieson’s photo-illustration of Harris, which accompanied the magazine’s latest cover story.

From there, his strange flattery only got weirder.

“Actually, she looked like our great first lady, Melania,” Trump said.

“She looked, she didn’t look, she didn’t look like Camilla [sic], that’s right. But of course, she’s a beautiful woman so, we’ll leave it at that,” Trump continued, mispronouncing Harris’s name into an entirely different name. Throughout the interview Trump struggled with a soft lisp, which his team inexplicably denied in the most hostile way possible.

While it’s unclear whether he is calling Harris or his wife “beautiful” at the end, this comment, in addition to his past comments about women’s appearances, makes clear his gross obsession with women’s looks.

Last week, Donald Trump launched a strange attack on Vice President Kamala Harris through an even weirder lie: that he had survived a helicopter crash in 2018 with Harris’s old beau, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who Trump claimed was no longer a “fan of hers” by that point.

Moments after the presser ended, the truth came to light: Trump had fabricated the entire story, with Brown denying having ever ridden in a helicopter with Trump. The copter’s actual passengers at the time—former California Governor Jerry Brown and current California Governor Gavin Newsom (both of whom are white)—called the whole thing “complete B.S.”

But Trump did survive a near-death helicopter experience sometime in 1990 alongside another Black California politician: the former California state senator from Los Angeles Nate Holden.

“If he were confused, which I’m not sure he was, then he could be giving misleading information intentionally,” Holden told CNN Monday night. 

“But if he were confused, Willie Brown is the—I shared with him four years in the legislature, he was in the assembly, I was in the state Senate. There was never any misidentification of us during that time period.

“Willie Brown was a short, intelligent, sharp guy [from the] San Francisco area, and I’m the taller guy from Los Angeles,” Holden continued. “Maybe to Donald, we all look alike.” 

Trump’s former executive vice president of construction and development Barbara Res was also on the terrifying flight, and recalled the white-knuckle encounter in her 2013 book, All Alone on the 68th Floor. She confirmed that Trump, his brother Robert, and Holden were all on board the aircraft as it lost control of some of its instruments and was forced to make an emergency landing in a New Jersey airport.  

“We may not have gotten much business done, but it sure as hell was memorable,” Res wrote.

But regardless of whomever Trump had misremembered on the flight, Holden affirmed to Politico on Sunday that no one had criticized Harris like Trump claimed.

“He either mixed it up,” Holden told Politico. “Or, he made it up. This was just too big to overlook. This is a big one.”

After Donald Trump’s bizarre livestreamed interview with Elon Musk Monday night, Kamala Harris’s campaign released a biting statement that touched a nerve with the Trump camp.

The statement called out the glitches with the livestream, as well as Trump’s extremism and association with the heavily criticized Project 2025. In response, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung called the Harris campaign “f****ing cowards.”

The statement is a sign the Trump team is likely fuming behind closed doors after a trainwreck interview on X. When the interview wasn’t facing technical glitches and Trump wasn’t slurring his words, the former president made one crazy statement after another. Trump said he’d welcome climate change because he thinks he’ll “have more oceanfront property,” praised Musk for firing striking workers, and told Musk that “if something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela because it will be a far safer place to meet than our country.”

Trump came back to X Monday, likely to help promote the livestream, after only posting once in the three years since January 2021, when he was banned from the platform for inciting violence during the Capitol insurrection. Musk helped promote Trump’s return, pushing new advertisements from Trump on the platform and elevating the hashtag #TrumpIsOnX ahead of the interview.

Trump’s posts on X came at the expense of his social media venture, Trump Media & Technology, which saw its share price plummet after the former president and convicted felon returned to the platform that banned him more than three years ago. But Trump is desperate after seeing his polling advantage disappear with Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election and Harris’s ascent.

The Harris campaign’s popularity has skyrocketed in the last month, and it experienced another boost after she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Those close to Trump are worried about the campaign’s 2024 strategy, and the stable genius himself is going nuts over how well the Harris campaign is succeeding. Cheung’s response shows that even Trump’s inner circle is getting agitated.