JD Vance notably served in the United States Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 as a public affairs specialist, MOS 4341 (e.g. MCO 1510.62A 17 February 2000). That means propaganda.
4341.01.05 “DEVELOP PROCEDURES FOR RELEASE OF INFORMATION TO THE PUBLIC” (core task, required by Sergeant)
4341.01.07 “WRITE PROPOSED PUBLIC AFFAIRS GUIDANCE” (core task, required by Sergeant)
4341.05.07 “LOCALIZE NEWS MATERIAL” (core task, trained at FLC, required from Private)
4341.05.11 “WRITE A NEWSPAPER HEADLINE” (core task, trained at FLC, required from Private)
4302.01.08, “COORDINATE THE DRAFTING OF SPEECHES OR ARTICLES FOR PUBLICATION,”
His job was to dominate an information environment. He wrote articles. He shaped narratives. He managed what audiences saw and what they did not see. He was assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Cherry Point, North Carolina, and for six months in 2005 he was in a cushy air conditioned office in Iraq, where he produced content for the public affairs office.
This foreign-focused government work is not a biography separate from what he has been doing since leaving the propaganda operation. It is the key to understanding what he has been caught doing domestically, with the bibliography of bell hooks.
The Doctrine
Joint Publication 3-13, Information Operations, governed the doctrinal framework Vance trained under. JP 3-13 defined information operations:
the integrated employment of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making of adversaries.
Public affairs personnel were listed explicitly as information-related capability (IRC) specialists alongside psychological operations, military deception, and electronic warfare operators.
The 2023 Army Doctrine Publication ADP 3-13 went further. It declared:
all activities have inherent informational aspects that generate effects which contribute to or hinder achieving objectives.
Information is not a separate domain. It is the operating environment itself. Every action, every publication, every title on every book jacket generates effects.
Vance knows this. It was his job then, and apparently he thinks it’s his job now.
The Operation
bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, published two books whose titles JD Vance has replicated almost identically. The collision by an information warrior is no coincidence.
Replicate as in copy. Steal. Obscure. Erase.
She died on December 15, 2021. She cannot respond.
| bell hooks | JD Vance | |
|---|---|---|
| Communion Text | Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) | Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (2026) |
| Elegy Text | Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012) | Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016) |
| Gap between books | 10 years | 10 years |
| Regional claim | Kentucky (born and raised) | Ohio (family ties to Kentucky) |
| Race | Black woman | White man |
| Politics | Feminist, leftist, anti-patriarchal | Antifeminist, right-wing, patriarchal |
| Publisher | University press / independent | HarperCollins |
| Status | Deceased (2021) | Vice President of the United States |
Two title words. Same sequence. Same ten-year interval between books. From the same claimed geography.
Opposite politics. Opposite power imposed.
Author B.N. Russo identified the mechanism: search engine manipulation and keyword appropriation that will result in the detraction from Black feminist thought. Every search for hooks’ Communion now surfaces Vance instead, and he’s pushing his thumb down hard on algorithms. Every search for “Appalachian Elegy” returns Hillbilly Elegy in the results, erasing the provenance.
Vance titles do not just appropriate a Black woman’s language. They colonize her discoverability.
In military doctrine, Vance is using well known tactics:
attacking and exploiting relevant actor information, information networks, and information systems.
That is the definition of operations in the information environment from JP 3-04, the publication that superseded JP 3-13 in 2022. Vance laughs at copyright laws because his weapons are designed to suppress the sounds that would trigger them. He is conducting targeted information operations against a dead Black woman’s intellectual legacy.
The Target
hooks was not incidental to Appalachian literature. She was central.
Her Appalachian Elegy won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Poetry Award in 2013. It recovered the suppressed history of Black Appalachians, the communities that white narratives of the region systematically erased. hooks wrote about Appalachian values as integrity: congruency between what one thinks, says, and does.
Vance wrote about Appalachian values as pathology. He attacked when he wrote that Appalachians are lazy, that they “spend our way into the poorhouse,” that they “choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs.” His book was called “poverty porn” by a political scientist at West Virginia University. An Appalachian lawyer called it “a little snit-fest of a book” that “kneecapped some very serious efforts at economic recovery” by giving the far right excuses not to invest in the region. An entire anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2019 to counter its distortions. It won the American Book Award. People who know, know.
hooks spoke from inside her community. Vance spoke about his entirely from the outside, from Yale Law School, from Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, from the United States Senate, punching down. He took the word “elegy” from her title and attached it to a narrative that blamed her people for their own suffering. Now he has taken the word “communion” from her title and attached it to his conversion to Catholicism.
Both times, the appropriation runs in the same direction: from a Black woman to a white man, from a feminist to an antifeminist, from a Kentuckian to an Ohioan, from the dead to the living.
Vance is at war, and he keeps his dropping dirty bombs on innocent Americans.
The Precedent
The United States government has conducted information operations against Black intellectual life many times before. Just one example was called COINTELPRO.
The FBI’s counterintelligence program ran from 1956 to 1971 with an explicit directive from J. Edgar Hoover: “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” Black leaders and organizations. The 1967 “Black Nationalist Hate Groups” program ordered agents to “prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement” and to “prevent groups and leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them.”
The methods were information operations.
The FBI planted false stories in newspapers. It forged letters to create internal divisions. It contacted employers and landlords to get activists fired or evicted. It maintained over 500,000 domestic intelligence files. It did not primarily arrest people for crimes. It destroyed their credibility, their relationships, their ability to be heard.
The scale is different. The method has been updated. But the function is identical: Vance is running militant operations to prevent Black intellectual voices from reaching their audience.
COINTELPRO used newspaper plants and forged documents. Vance uses title appropriation and search engine displacement.
COINTELPRO targeted living leaders. Vance targets a dead one who cannot fight back.
COINTELPRO was covert. This is conducted in plain sight by a sitting vice president, published by HarperCollins, reviewed in the mainstream press without anyone in the publishing chain raising the question of why both his book titles match a deceased Black feminist’s bibliography.
The Information Environment
Military information doctrine distinguishes between three dimensions of the information environment: physical, informational, and cognitive. The physical dimension is infrastructure. The informational dimension is content. The cognitive dimension is where meaning is made, where audiences process information and form judgments.
Vance operations are running all three.
In the physical dimension, he occupies shelf space. His books are published by a major house with full retail distribution. hooks’ books remain in print through university presses with smaller marketing budgets and narrower distribution channels.
In the informational dimension, he occupies search results. Google’s algorithm privileges recency, authority signals, and commercial weight. A sitting vice president’s new memoir from HarperCollins will outrank a 2002 feminist theory book from a university press on every search engine metric that matters.
In the cognitive dimension, he overwrites meaning. “Elegy” attached to hooks means mourning for what was taken from Black Appalachians. “Elegy” attached to Vance means mourning for white cultural decline. “Communion” attached to hooks means women finding love and solidarity under patriarchy. “Communion” attached to Vance means a powerful man finding God. The same words now point in opposite directions. The audience searching for one will encounter the other. Over time, the commercial weight wins.
This is what ADP 3-13 calls “creating and exploiting information advantages.” It is what JP 3-13 called “usurping the decision making of adversaries.”
Black feminist thought is being defined as the adversary by Vance in order to justify his attacks. The decision being usurped by him is the reader’s choice of whose voice to encounter when searching for these ideas.
The Public Affairs Officer
Of course someone will say this is coincidence, because that’s the laziest defense. Two common English words. Communion is a Catholic sacrament. Elegy is a poetic form. Anyone might use the same words in exactly the same way.
However, public affairs specialists who go to Yale do not name things by accident. Naming is the job. Message discipline is the training. A Marine Corps combat correspondent learns to choose words that serve institutional objectives, to construct narratives that shape perception, to control what the audience encounters and what it does not.
Vance went from military public affairs to Yale Law to Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital to the bestseller list to the United States Senate to the vice presidency. Every step was in fact a militant narrative operation to assert white male power.
Hillbilly Elegy was not a memoir. It was a positioning document. It falsely established Vance as an authoritative voice over a region he did not grow up in, and did not even understand, at the expense of the people who actually lived there. His new book continues the operation against the same target: the Black feminist intellectual tradition that spoke about the same places with more authority, more integrity, and more humanity.
hooks wrote this about Appalachian values:
living with integrity, being a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says, and does.
Vance’s career is the exact opposite of her definition. He said he totally opposed Trump, and called Trump an American Hitler, then supported him (perhaps because of it). He claimed Appalachia, then left it behind. He decried censorship in Munich, then presided over exactly that with book removals from Pentagon schools. He took the titles of a Black woman’s life work and stamped his name on them.
That is not communion.
That is a militant information operation waged against Black America conducted in broad daylight by a man trained to do exactly this.