Vice President JD Vance silenced an otherwise raucous crowd Friday after he recounted the harrowing story of Kevin Flanagan, a computer programmer from California.
Vance was giving a speech to support the campaigns of gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) in Middletown, Ohio, when he made the comments.
‘No man is a king if they can’t take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their car jacked.’
“I remember when somebody would come to school and tell me that their dad had just found out that he had lost his job. That the factory that employed their parents was going overseas to China or to Mexico,” said Vance.
“In other cases, American workers didn’t just have their jobs destroyed; they got told they were being replaced by a foreign worker, and then they had to train that worker before they got replaced. Some of these stories made national news, and they stuck with me,” he added.
“A computer programmer, not a mill worker, a computer worker by the name of Kevin Flanagan was let go at the bank that he worked at. And the business, the bank, they told him, ‘You’re only gonna get your severance package if you train a foreign replacement to do your job instead,” Vance said.
“And it’s a heartbreaking story, because he did it; he dutifully did what he was asked to do,” he added. “And on his last day, he packed up his things, he walked to the office parking lot, and he got in his truck and he shot himself.”
The crowd was hushed while processing the story. Vance went on to connect Flanagan’s story to the opioid crisis as well.
“It’s not just Kevin, as you all know. Now economists have measured the ways in which the opioid crisis exploded in the very locations where jobs were shipped overseas,” he continued.
“The open borders demanded by those same people brought some innocent people; of course it did,” Vance added. “But we also know that it brought a lot of cartels. It brought the fentanyl trade, and it left us with millions of orphaned children being raised by aggrieved grandparents.”
Flanagan’s death in 2003 made national headlines. In a note he left behind, he said that he finally felt at home when he got his job at Bank of America.
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He went on to praise the populist message of Louisiana Democrat Senator Huey P. Long from the 1930s.
“Huey Long … once said ‘every man a king’ was the goal of his political program, but no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals,” he concluded. “No man is a king if they can’t take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their car jacked.”
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