The Escalating Weirdness of J.D. Vance
I'm impressed with how viscerally he is scaring the hoes.
Everything I’ve ever learned about J.D. Vance has been against my will, and anything new I learn about him is worse than the previous thing. There are many salutary effects of the presidential election seeming like less of a grim slog towards authoritarianism; one of them is that millions of Americans have gone to Snopes to confirm whether a literal vice presidential candidate actually confessed to burying an “inside-out latex glove” between two couch cushions and going to pound town. The phrase “J.D. Vance couch fucker” is now listed in my Google Search history. It is a bit of a relief that Vance does not creep around the back of West Elm—which is a very normal thing to have to clarify—even if it remains debatable as to whether he actually looked up “Trans Species Dolphin Porn.” The funniest one I’ve seen is that people are saying Vance is 5’7” when he’s really 6’3”, but the top Google searches still list him at 5’7”. These rumors are entirely plausible because his beard has major covering-up-double-chin energy, and he probably appeals to other people who are cursed to look like chubby toddlers. I can’t tell if he has Civil War General physiognomy or ugly-brother-who-has-pretty-sister physiognomy.
News articles and social media alike are riddled with Vance’s strange public comments in what has been one of the saddest veep launches I have witnessed. It began with his speech at the Republican National Convention, where he recalled a story of discovering 19 loaded handguns scattered across his meemaw’s house after she died, and called it “the American spirit.” There was that clip from a MAGA rally when Vance goes on this awkward and fumbled joke about how Democrats think it’s racist to drink Diet Mountain Dew. And on its merits, movement conservatism is a sham and its policies are pure curdled kitsch, but what we know of Vance’s political beliefs are readily identifiable as extreme even for the hostile manosphere podcast vibes his cohorts give. In 2021, he made a comment about how “childless cat ladies” are ruining America, which has now resurfaced and gone viral, resulting in him beefing with Jennifer Aniston and Swifties. He is also against no-fault divorce and has proposed that parents of under-18 children should get extra votes. He has described a neo-monarchist blogger as a notable intellectual influence while following other Twitter freaks that describe themselves as a “weird race science-based gooning account.” This motherfucker even wrote a blurb for a Posobiec book.
Nobody:
Absolutely no one:
Not a single soul on this Earth:
Forthcoming headlines about J.D. Vance:
Washington Post: “College Roomate Alleges He Walked into J.D. Vance Masturbating to the Powerpuff Girls in 2008”
AP News: “J.D. Vance Promises He Never Googled ‘Help It’s Stuck In a Jar’”
New York Times: “Leaked Videotape Confirms J.D. Vance was Bathing in Skyline Chili After the Republican National Convention”
All of J.D. Vance’s high-flown foibles and incel idiosyncracies are a testament to how utterly bizarre and weird online right-wing culture is to normies. The obsession over gaining political favor among poorly socialized males in their 20s has backfired heavily and in the most hilarious way possible. It’s clear the 2010s were a decade of heavy internet users forgetting they’re all spiritually repulsive freaks. Whenever one of these shut-in misanthropes stumbles out of their Rhodesia-themed gooncave ready to save Western Civilization, they emerge from these murky depths as creatures worryingly translucent and grasping, exposed as shriveled and offputting chuds.
Vance is a greasily servile striver even by the standards of his diseased cohort of sociopathic Republican politicians. He’s an Oxford shirt ripped straight out of the packaging and stuffed to bursting with familiar pastime bigotries and exhausting contemporary Reaction Industry cynicisms. The slimy aesthetic that separates Donald Trump from J.D. Vance is the difference between a misogynist who will smack a woman’s ass as she walks by and a creep who will pour gasoline over you while muttering about his mother. Bro has negative aura. Mostly, Vance is a suck-up desperately trying to be liked in every room he’s in while failing miserably.
Trump and Vance are two goofs who belong together insofar as they are both crushingly status-conscious and gnarled by vanity and grievance that are entirely unsympathetic. Vance made his name with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which traded in acidly cynical conservative pablum about values and morality, and this midwit piece of nonfiction became insufferably popular with “reconciliation” liberals and standard-issue center-right columnists who were happy to receive a written justification for MAGA that could be passed off as something more sophisticated and articulate than the braindead slop that normally saturates right-wing political commentary. He then smoothly pivoted to the speed-addled futuristic Caesarism of Silicon Valley’s community of increasingly reactionary adult libertarians. Vance isn’t in any kind of vanguard here. He is a capricious and shameless climber with no moral core and a bitchy mouth, who once worried in 2016 that Trump could be “America’s Hitler” and has since done an ultra-unctuous change in his opinion of either Trump or Hitler.
As that super-class of demented tech freaks stopped seeing the majority of Americans as insignificant and began seeing them as something less than human, Vance changed his coloration in lockstep. He is a disconnected rich person’s idea of the deserving poor. He has spent the last 15 years greasing deep into the colon of the ruling class as a venture capitalist for Peter Thiel, which has made him oblivious to how startlingly inauthentic his populism is. There are various scrims draped over his spiels, some stuff about tradition and working people and the old stuff about values and faith, but all of it is transparently cosmetic. None of it makes any sense, and all Vance has done to bolster his “working class” bonafides since becoming an elected official is gesturing toward his party’s musty bigotries and advocating for toothless alternatives to unions. He just comes across as a mercurial never-trumper who looks like he listens to podcasts, and he certainly does not have the verbal charisma nor the interpretive fluency to repackage and deliver BAP talking points to a deeply unprepared mainstream audience. Vance’s schtick is immediately played out.
Vance’s politics is a messy jumble of self-loathing for being a boring coastal reptile and an obvious frustration with his post-Holler Midwestern culture’s genuine oppression. There is a cringing tension between his need to seem like a champion of people like his opiate-addicted mother (not like his fellow clean-cut Yalies) and his disdain for people like his mother for not providing the type of middle-class upbringing that could support his dream of being good at homework. Vance says things that should be interesting, but everything he believes is manifestly uninteresting. American conservatism, as an intellectual movement, is just like this. It is incoherent because there is no ethical or philosophical foundation upon which to build; it has never been anything but the rich mediocrities who bankroll it wanting to wind the clock backwards and then stop it in place, for it to be impossible for anything in America to ever be different. Vance’s gambit is to affirm that the people stifled and suffering under all this—those he alternatively claims are His People in his memoir and public persona—deserve all that suffering and more, and that people like his lazily vicious Silicon Valley patrons deserve all that they have and more.
Any of the Thiel-backed ghouls should be kept as far removed from the levers of power as possible. They’re not half as smart as they think they are and they are animated only by refracted spite and seething contempt. Only a supremely unhealthy culture could’ve produced a Trump-Vance presidential ticket, but there seems to be a belief among Republican strategists that Vance represents an esoteric racist incel future of the party, likely basing their calculus from Pepe memes circulating around the prags and proles of alt-right Twitter. All Kamala Harris had to do with her Veep selection is go with the Glen Powell strategy; just walk up to a line of dudes waiting to see Deadpool & Wolverine and pick a bland middle-aged white guy. And given that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz can enact progressive legislation and speak about working-class issues without sounding like someone you’d reply “WHO HURT YOU” to, he is a relatively and exceedingly normal veep nominee.
It is pretty wild that a profoundly monstrous, so eat-the-world vicious and so annihilatingly petty and vengeful man can be a boring nothing weirdo that is perfectly in the model of other supposed rising stars put in their place by the irrelevance of the vice presidency. There isn’t an ideology to find here, but there is a lesson. Vance’s rise shows how deep these idle freak tendencies will go and how far they will run, how fast a sufficiently servile apparatchik can rise, and how a howling weirdo can become terribly and terrifyingly significant in today’s Republican Party.
It's because of him that there is now a class of Republicans that has chosen to support the other team instead!
Are we surprised when politicians flip flop like gasping fish? Remember when Harris wiped the floor with Biden at the primaries? And then becomes his VP. Remember when the media thought VP Harris was a losing proposition and now she's the darling of the Dems? These people will do or say anything to rise to power.