JD Vance went back to where he once wore a Marine uniform and tore into the globalists who shipped American jobs overseas.
His critics still sneer that kind of talk is isolationism.
And one throwaway Vance line landed on a problem sitting right next to his old base.
Vance Gave His Old Marine Stomping Grounds a History Lesson
Vice President JD Vance carried his midterm closing pitch to Kinston, deep in eastern North Carolina’s tobacco and hog country, and he skipped the small talk.
The setting meant something to him. Vance spent his four-year hitch with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, just down US Highway 70. He finished as a corporal running media relations for the base, a job the Corps usually hands to Marines with a lot more stripes.
He took the crowd back to the months after September 11, 2001, when flags hung from nearly every porch. Folks flew them, Vance said, “because we loved our country and we wanted everybody to know it.”
Then he got personal.
“When I think about the kindness that the people of North Carolina showed to me, none of them had to do that. They did it because I was a Marine, because they were proud of me, and because that was reason enough to treat me like family,” Vance said. “They understood something that Washington, DC spent 40 years forgetting: that being an American means something, and North Carolina deserves leaders who will never let Washington forget it!”
From there he went after the bipartisan political class that cheered open borders, sent factories to China and Vietnam, and lectured anybody who complained. Vance remembered the insults well. Critics of that arrangement, he said, “got called an isolationist or a protectionist, or accused of ‘economic anxiety,’” as though worrying about a vanished paycheck counted as a mental illness.
And then came a line most of the national press skated right past.
“Being an American means something, ladies and gentlemen. It means that American homes and American farmland ought to go to American citizens.”
The crowd saved its loudest roar for a different sentence: “They saw potential citizens, but they forgot that they were meant to fight for the citizens who were already in the United States of America!”
Fair enough. But that farmland line deserves a second look, because the ground under that rally has a story of its own.
Communist China Already Planted a Flag in Vance’s Old Neighborhood
North Carolina ranks second in the nation for farmland held by Chinese interests, trailing only Texas, at 44,263 acres in the most recent USDA year-end figures. Texas got there largely through wind-energy land. North Carolina got there through hogs.
In 2013, Hong Kong-based Shuanghui International, which later renamed itself WH Group, bought Smithfield Foods, the biggest pork processor in America, for roughly $4.7 billion. Smithfield went back to the Nasdaq in January 2025. But its own SEC filing said WH Group would still control about 93.4 percent of the voting shares afterward.
So the bacon still answers to a parent company operating in the long shadow of the Chinese Communist Party.
Smithfield insists it keeps shrinking its footprint. A company spokesperson put its US farmland at about 85,000 acres in July 2025 and said the total “continues to decline.” The company has also claimed state bans aimed at hostile governments shouldn’t touch it, since a publicly traded company owns it rather than Beijing itself.
The Trump administration didn’t buy the soft sell. In July 2025, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins rolled out a National Farm Security Action Plan built on the idea that “farm security is national security,” and she floated clawing back land held by Smithfield and Syngenta. Trade adviser Peter Navarro tied the plan to both companies by name. Officials stood beside maps showing Chinese-owned farmland near American military bases.
That map hits harder in eastern North Carolina than almost anywhere else. Camp Lejeune, Cherry Point, New River, and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base all sit within a short drive of one another, and Kinston rests well inside a 50-mile circle around Seymour Johnson.
The whole national alarm started in 2022, when a Chinese company tried to put a corn mill near a sensitive Air Force base in North Dakota. Local outrage killed that deal.
Raleigh Needed Three Years to Shut the Barn Door
State lawmakers saw the danger early. The North Carolina House voted unanimously in 2023 to bar adversary governments from buying farmland or land near bases. The state Senate let it sit.
Lawmakers filed fresh bills in 2025, and the House passed its version 111-0 that April. Then the two chambers spent months haggling over how big a circle to draw around each base, with proposals running from 25 miles to 75.
State Senator Bob Brinson (R-Craven), a retired Army aviator, put the stakes plainly. The ban, he said, “deters surveillance and espionage near bases like Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, and it shields North Carolina agriculture from foreign manipulation or market control.”
State Representative Jennifer Balkcom (R-Henderson), who wrote the House bill, wanted to go further. “If it was up to me, I’d do the entire state,” she said. Balkcom now carries the Republican banner in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District and shared a stage with Vance at a midterm stop in Hendersonville.
The Democrat questions in committee told their own tale. State Senator Jay Chaudhuri (D-Wake) asked whether the bill would stop Smithfield from buying more land, and Brinson said it probably would. State Senator Lisa Grafstein (D-Wake) wanted to know whether a legal resident holding Chinese citizenship could still buy property.
Odd place to aim the worry. The bases weren’t moving.
The final bill cleared the Senate 42-3 and the House 111-2 in June 2026, and Governor Josh Stein signed it in July. It bars “prohibited foreign parties” from buying or leasing farmland or property within 50 miles of a military installation. Existing holders must register with the Secretary of State and can’t add acreage, and some will have to sell.
But here’s the catch. Most of the law doesn’t take effect until April 1, 2027.
That’s four years from a unanimous House vote to a lock on the gate. Beijing plans in decades. Raleigh plans in legislative sessions.
Washington Called It Isolationism While the Land Changed Hands
That gap is the story Vance sketched from the stage, whether he meant to or not. For a generation, the folks running both parties treated every question about who owns America as a character flaw. Ask why a China-based conglomerate should control the biggest hog operation in the country, and some think-tank fellow reached for “protectionist.” Ask why a factory town lost its plant to Asia, and somebody diagnosed anxiety.
Now, a sharp reader could point out that Chinese-linked buyers hold only a sliver of foreign-owned farmland. Canadian investors own far more, and the American Farm Bureau has pegged the Chinese share as tiny. That’s true. Nobody should pretend Beijing owns the Outer Banks.
But a few thousand acres within reach of Seymour Johnson can cause more trouble than a giant Canadian timber tract in Maine. Geography does the damage, not the acreage count.
And Vance said homes, too, not just farms. The National Association of Realtors found Chinese buyers made up 13 percent of foreign home purchasers, and North Carolina ranked seventh in the country for homes sold to them. Every overseas bidder is one more competitor for a young family trying to buy its first place. “I don’t want you to have to be a rich person to afford a home,” Vance told the crowd.
His “potential citizens” line covers the same ground from another direction. Washington treated the whole planet as a waiting list, importing people at nation-changing levels and selling off assets to anyone with a checkbook, then acted puzzled when the folks already here felt like tenants in their own country.
“These are not complicated things,” Vance said. He has a point. Even so, a simple idea took one of the most military-heavy states in America four years to write into law.
So when that registry opens in Raleigh and the names start rolling in, how many of them will sit within an easy drive of the runway where a young Marine named JD Vance learned that being an American means something?
Sources: Breitbart News, “Vice President JD Vance Slams Globalists in Midterm Speech: ‘Being an American Means Something’”; Stars and Stripes, reporting on Vance’s Marine service at Cherry Point; Military.com, “J.D. Vance: What I Learned in the Marine Corps”; DTN/Progressive Farmer, “Trump Administration Unveils Plan to Ban Chinese Ownership of US Farmland and Ag”; Agri-Pulse, “Rollins eyes steps to claw back land held by Smithfield, Syngenta”; Bloomberg via Farmlandgrab, “US acts on foreign ownership of farmland amid China tension”; American Farm Bureau analysis via Missouri Independent; Smithfield Foods Form 424B4 prospectus, US Securities and Exchange Commission; Virginia Business, “Smithfield Foods raises $522M in first day on Nasdaq”; WRAL, coverage of North Carolina foreign land bills and NAR home-buyer data; Carolina Journal, “House passes the Farmland and Military Protection Act”; Yahoo News/NC Newsline, “Bills banning foreign ownership of NC farmland advance”; WITN, “Stein signs law barring foreign adversaries from buying NC farmland, land near military bases”; WCTI12, “New NC law blocks some foreign entities from buying farmland near military bases”; Williams Mullen, “2026 North Carolina Legislative Session Review”; UNC School of Government Legislative Reporting Service, HB 133 bill history; WLOS, Vance Hendersonville rally coverage.