If someone were to ask me what the very lovely Amanda Marcotte hates the most, Republicans, Donald Trump, Christianity, Donald Trump, pro-life people, Donald Trump, conservatives, Donald Trump, pregnancies, J D Vance, or Donald Trump, while it wouldn’t be hard to say that she hates President Trump with a white-hot, #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-inflamed passion, she seems almost equally outraged by everything else.

I had just posted my previous article on Vice President J D Vance’s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, when the thought occurred to me, “I wonder what that hater of all things Christian thinks of his book.” Miss Marcotte had already published an article entitled Divorce him already, Usha, claiming that “JD Vance and his wife really seem to loathe each other,” while also laughably claiming that Salon, her publisher, is “a journalistic outfit,” a rather callous call to make the then three Vance children fatherless, only to wax wroth when Mrs Vance, along with Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, announced their pregnancies at about the same time.

So, naturally, I checked Salon, and was unsurprised by what I found:

JD Vance’s sad book tour shows why his 2028 hopes are fading

In “Communion,” the vice president assumes people still care about Charlie Kirk

By Amanda Marcotte | Monday, June 15, 2026 | 6:45 AM EDT

JD Vance is famously addicted to social media, to a degree that one wonders if he has any job duties as vice president at all. It’s almost certain that he’s well aware that the late Charlie Kirk has not become the movement martyr MAGA hoped for. On the contrary, the memory of the Turning Point USA founder has become a joke on social media. The cringeworthy efforts to deify Kirk are irresistible bait for online jokesters, who spent months turning his image and even an AI-generated song about him into fuel for irony-drenched memes mocking the deceased right-wing leader. Trying to shove Kirk on the public backfired for MAGA, causing most people to rebel with mockery.

But even though most Republicans have quietly moved on, Vance is still hoping to get enough juice out Kirk’s death to sell books. In early June, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Vance’s latest memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which is officially released tomorrow. In it, Vance credits Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk — who is even more hated than her dead husband — for convincing his wife, Usha Vance, to have a fourth child. No, it’s not as a response to the embarrassingly intimate hug Erika Kirk and JD Vance shared at a TPUSA event last November, despite online gossip speculating otherwise. Instead, the vice president claims “Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie,” and that’s what changed his wife’s mind.

Well, we know that Mrs Kirk is hated by Miss Marcotte at any rate, given that her hyperlink is back to her own article! And to no one’s surprise, while she gave us the title of the Vice President’s new book, she chose not to do anything really radical like include a hyperlink to buy it.

It’s hard to oversell how nauseating the entire excerpt is, especially since it’s replete with Vance’s overbearing efforts to inject religious language into every beat of his story about his allegedly great friendship with Kirk. It’s hard to read sentences like, “Charlie taught me to love all parts of our Christian communion,” while imagining Vance’s voice, especially as his only gear as a public speaker is to use a snide tone, even when talking about his supposed higher aspirations. But these are granular annoyances. The real question is why did Vance choose a passage about Kirk, who is beyond old news, as a represenation of a book people are supposed to want to buy now?

Uhhh, wouldn’t you expect “religious language” from the author when he was writing a book about his religious conversion? But Miss Marcotte is vocally an atheist, and like so many — not all, of course — atheists, she has a visceral dislike and distrust of those who have religious beliefs, and an active dislike of those who publicly express such. The object of her greatest obsession and hatred, President Trump, only rarely and generically expresses anything about religion, and almost never darkens the door of a church. Vice President Vance? He comes without the personal baggage of Mr Trump, but, for the Salon writer, that might be even worse: he is at least trying to live his religious faith.

Then there is possibly her worst bugaboo of all: the Trad Wife. The Trad Wife, or traditional wife, supports traditional sex-specific roles, of husbands who provide for and protect the family, and wives who mostly stay at home, caring for the home and rearing children. In far too many families, economic realities require wives to work outside the home as well, but, unlike the way the feminist left see things, those wives are mostly not career women striving for or having achieved the “C” suite offices, but regular working-class women, toiling as convenience store clerks, hourly-wage office drones, or unpromotable teachers. The feminists see women in health care as medical students and doctors, areas in which their numbers have significantly increased, but the majority of women in health care are nurses and nursing assistants and housekeeping and food service workers. Mr Vance is seen as supporting the Trad Wife role, and, for Miss Marcotte, far, far, far too many women would like that role, if only they had husbands who could afford it.

In that, Miss Marcotte is like so many others on the left: they support freedom of choice on exactly one thing, and see people taking choices of which they disapprove on other things as personal attacks. Robert Stacy McCain wrote, on another topic:

What is implicated in this incident, I would argue, is what I’ve called the “Compulsory Approval Doctrine” of the LGBTQ movement. That’s the whole point of “Pride Month,” after all — to compel everyone to join the celebration, or else be targeted for denunciation, as when baseball players don’t want to celebrate “Pride.”

The element of coercion in such activity is impossible to ignore, once you look at it objectively, from the perspective of personal liberty. Other people are free to do as they please, but their liberty does not deprive me of the freedom to criticize whatever it may please them to do. What “Pride Month” and other such LGBTQ activism is really about is depriving us of our freedom to disagree with whatever policies they advocate or to express disapproval of their behavior in any way — to make themselves exempt from criticism: Disagreement is HATE!

But, of course, the left do not look at things “from the perspective of personal liberty,” or at least not the personal liberty which allows those who disagree to take choices with which the left disapprove. “Disagreement is HATE!” is the weapon they have, because they don’t have the power to do more, at least not yet. The United States is not Soviet Russia, in which Yuri Andreievich Zhivago had to warn his father-in-law, Aleksandr Gromyko, not to break into his own dacha, which had been seized by the Communists, saying, “They’ll call you a counter-revolutionary! They shoot counter-revolutionaries!”