Take the threat of a JD Vance's con seriously
Silicon Valley has updated the most destructive technology in the history of American politics
JD Vance wants me furious. And it’s working. This poser, who is one coin flip and a bad corn dog away from the presidency, is getting to me.
Watching his smile grow smugger with each word as he sprays neo-Nazi hate on his constituents and their neighbors makes me want to rise with my red hair and eat men like air. Dunking on him and his racist lies feels like the only purpose in life.
Yet I know that’s exactly what he wants.
Fixating on a success story of American renewal from the perspective of David Duke is the stated objective of the Trump/Vance campaign, mainly so we won’t talk about abortion rights and the growing death count from Trump ending Roe. And I know that spreading this stuff is helping him, no matter how I spin or yuck it up, but I can’t help myself.
I know this con is working on me and much of the media.
And we know Vance knows it’s an evil con because, unlike Trump, he’s made the biggest error many of us have ever made. He’s blogged.
Consider what he wrote in a 2012 post:
Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.
You don’t have to be any sort of cynic to suggest that Vance is a duplicitous gunt. We know this because he asked his professor to delete that post during the heat of the 2016 primary “so that Vance might have an easier time getting a job in Republican politics,” as Vance witnessed the success of Donald Trump’s racist con.
And we can say with near certainty that Vance is just using a “blood and soil” con to smuggle Peter Thiel’s techno-authoritarian ideology into the White House because it thinks it works. And I suppose it does.
Look where it’s gotten him.
But is this con working in the polls?
Is it effectively functioning as a cudgel to distract from MAGA’s fundamental goals, like ending all reproductive freedom and pilfering workers, to create some white racial solidarity butch enough to even impress incels of other races.
We can’t say yes or no.
But we can confidently say, with too much evidence, that it can. And we know that because it has worked for over half a century, from Nixon to to Reagan Trump to DeSantis.
And Trump is better positioned to become president than Mitt Romney ever was. And it’s important to remember that Mitt had immigration policies as bad as Trump (maybe just to beat Rick Perry) but was convinced to tone done his rhetoric by John McCain to become president for the third straight time. So Vance has good reason to believe this sort immigrant hatred is perfect to con the “hillbillies” he disdainfully imagines in his memoir about how he only understands the pain of mediocre white men because he was adopted by a billionaire, like the star of an 80s sitcom.
Even more important, Peter Thiel, said billionaire, believes it works. We are watching Silicon Valley invest billions in a startup in the form of JD Vance, a man who has won one election and did it by underperforming the GOP ticket by 9%.
They think he is the perfect hardware to roll out their updated app, which has already proven to work at scale.
Though Vance is unpopular in a way that would impress Sarah Palin, he is pimping the Web3 version of Dog Whistle Politics. It’s on the blockchain, running five GPTs and sucking in a Super Soaker of water every time he spews a new racist lie. But it is built on top of legacy software. Vance’s Nerd Reich OS has upgraded the most successful technology ever invented to help the wealthiest win elections, ban good things, and pilfer workers. This source code is why we don’t have universal health care, paid leave, or affordable college, unlike every other rich country in the world.
Ian Haney López, the legal scholar who wrote the definitive book on the Dog Whistle Politics, defined this technology for us earlier this year:
It's both old and new. It's old in the sense that it's one of the oldest, most dangerous forms of politics. It's pure demagoguery. It's an effort to stampede the population with stories of fear and threat and animated by hatred against other people in society. It's very old. We've seen this across the centuries. We've certainly seen this in Europe. This is the demagoguery that gives rise to fascism. At the same time, it's new. Because something happens in the late 20th century, which is that society as a whole in the United States, but also Western society more generally comes to understand that and sexism are morally bankrupt. They're offensive. They're wrong. And that means that people engaging in demagoguery need to find a technique whereby they can stimulate racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, prejudice against different religions, that they can stoke all of that, while pretending that's not what they're doing, and also, and this is important, the people that they're stampeding with these fears, that they're not reacting out of base hatreds, instead are defending high principle.
You can hear the whole interview here:
It’s worth your time just to hear Haney López call JD Vance a “real piece of shit,” after I played him one of Vance’s 2022 ads for Senate.
Dog whistling is the technology that allowed Donald Trump to become president in 2016 and then shovel trillions to the richest as he reshaped the courts. The drill is to invent a fantasy crisis of scary non-white people for the single purpose of dividing us just enough that he and Donald Trump can win Pennsylvania and the presidency.
This is such a classic dog whistle strategy—dividing with the white identity politics to deliver huge wins for billionaires and religious extremists—that it probably seems obvious to you.
Democrats think everyone gets the racism of this game, and this is a huge problem in two ways.
First, it feeds Vance’s embrace of Trump’s real innovation to the dog-whistling game, the triple move that Haney López calls “Racist Theater:”
Second, it makes Democrats think they don’t need to respond to it or, worse, can just mock it or spread it to say “See how terrible this is?”
Hillary tried it. Didn’t work.
Not getting the appeal this sort of fearmongering is a weakness of the liberal mind that comes form a good place. You see right through it but it’s important to see plausible deniability implicit in these appeals that avoid slurs and other obvious racism involved that lures in people who consider themselves “good” and not having a “racist” bone in their body.
How do you fight this kind of technology?
What’s the anti-virus to malware targeted at our society’s greatest vulnerability.
Haney López calls it the race-class narrative. And it starts with calling out the strategy. VP Harris did this when she called it “the same old playbook.” And Governor Walz was part of one of the most effective counters of Trumpism and attacking immigrants in Minnesota.
But soon and always, after we make the case in favor of a fair immigration that works for everyone and protects those who risk everything to start over in America, we have to get the conversation focused on freedom and we need to stay focused on freedom. Because, as I’ve said all year, when we’re talking about “the border” and any of the variations of this issue Republicans have weaponized for the evil purpose of strategic racism for generation, it’s Trump’s race to lose.
And no one gets that better than JD Vance.
Like Elon Musk, he has taken the parts of Trump that can work and can—in Silicon Valley terms—scale. Elon has taken Trump’s trick of doing something that would end someone else’s career every day and is trying to build an industry around it.
Vance’s whole political career has been about imitating Trump. Whether it’s in being a quisling for Putin or finding racist lies to divide people, Vance is determined to be the Web3 Trump, even more vicious yet less sloppy.
That’s all Peter Thiel wants.
Someone who will end democracy, and insist that’s what sweet ole Mamaw would want.
