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.