this piece is a warning, and people should take it very seriously. even if the future of the party isn’t vance, himself, this is where they’re headed and there’s no one within the party who has the desire or influence to divert it. they have to be decisively beaten, full stop.
“Trump will, at most, serve four years in the White House. There is a big question about what comes after him.”
Every morning dozens of Republicans look into the mirror and say "I am the heir to Trump" and he will grind all of them to dust to make the point that no such thing exists while he lives.
The minute I read he'd converted to Catholicism in 2019 I thought "yep, that tracks". The only thing worse than a trad Catholic white guy is one who looked at it as an adult and thought "well that looks like a good fit for me."
It's clear once Trump is gone the party will try to find another one, and JD Vance thinks he can be that guy. I think he has a decent shot but he doesn't have "it," whatever it is.
I want to commend this reporter for looking beyond the style of Vance and his focus on theory to unpack just how dangerous his ideas are. I think many other reporters might sanitize Vance's views, or not interrogate them as rigorously. This is a great piece of political journalism.
Vance's primary go-to guy, Peter Thiel, has stated he has come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." That's an odd go-to guy for Vance, and his views are not what Ohio MAGAs who value freedom and/or democracy would expect to hear from their Senator.
His pitch is that the globalist goal of homogenization is good for business, and therefore must be bad for the working class... But that was also a project of ending war. Who does he think sufferers most when the world goes back to constant regional war?
The future is here. If you're a sane republican, you're like a straight dude deciding to try out a glory hole with a bunch of guys: you've already changed, just a question of honesty to yourself.
my takeaway from this piece is that Vance is an unprincipled, unscrupulous fraud & also genuinely dangerous. to the extent that he believes in anything it is a politics of domination — here i will suggest that his memoir does provide some insight here — where the state secures the right hierarchies
Weirdo incel-eugenics drug-addicted (if nicotine is the only thing you think they’re on, I have a bridge to sell you) freaks are just what Youngstown needs to fix its economy.
Eh. He's not more radical than MAGA. He's very much like Trump, no real principles, but willing to make deals (up to a point obvs) and say anything to get ahead. Slithery but not necessarily shrewd.
I do think that these guys missed their window, but that's a "because people have realized who they are too quickly" thing, not a "so we shouldn't worry" thing.
And *this* article is what I'm gonna throw in people's faces the next time someone pooh-poohs the notion that the Republicans have a long term plan for taking over the country, no matter how the electorate feels.
vance was wrong about trump becoming america’s hitler and as far as i can tell, what he learned from that is that there was an opening. i think he’s potentially the single most dangerous senator in the entire caucus.
Politico softballing fascism made obvious 4yrs ago & initiated 20yrs ago:
"By 2017, the Republican Party has made its stance regarding executive power at any cost clear"
"At this point, salvaging the party from its relentless & desperate grasp for power seems unfathomable." (2020)
Yeah, Project 2025 will just get renamed Project 2029. I'm very concerned that even a second Biden win, even one with a miraculous Democratic trifecta, won't do what needs to be done (i.e., court reform, nuking the filibuster, admitting D.C. and Puerto Rico, etc.).
Vance is one of the most pseudo of pseudointellectuals. He has yet to top Chris Rufo in an ability to make fascist craziness sound like deep thought, but Vance’s strategy is just to play trumper in public & do his Rufo imitation mostly in dark rooms & on phone calls with fellow travelers like Thiel.
//A few minutes later, during the question-and-answer portion of the event, a woman in the crowd shouted, “We’ve got to find out the truth about Jan. 6!”
Vance nodded solemnly. “That’s maybe the most important thing that [Trump] needs to do when he’s elected president,” he replied.//
Fuck's sake.
That profile includes one of the craziest asides I've heard, putting forward the deep state trickling Bush on WMD as one explanation for the Iraq war bsky.app/profile/char...
One thing I hate about this genre of article from big publications is that they publish an article like "Can This Man Be The Next Adolf Hitler?" and then put a lot of effort into Tue accompany art to make him look really distinguished and determined.
JD Vance is a fairly recent Catholic convert
People like me who have left the Catholic church know that the converts to Catholicism are often those who get off on authoritarianism.
It’s possible that in a cockamamie way SCOTUS handed us the ONLY way to defeat Trump and MAGA, and that’s at the ballot box with a decisive and crushing win. It’s very unlikely to happen in a court room.
“certain liberal democratic principles” drives up a wall as a phrase in this article. Makes it sound like acceptable disagreement instead of some people wanting to end our republic.