Tag Archives: J.D. Vance

Looks like the senator really, really, really hopes to be Trump’s right-hand lickspittle — er vice-president.

Vance, , if you remember, is the raging misogynist who think being able to divorce an abusive spouse is a bad thing. And that people should get extra votes based on the number of children they have. I presume both are pitches to religious conservatives who think it’s a man’s right to beat his wife and that breeding huge Duggar-like families is a godly thing. His recent statements on Trump likewise seem to be toadying to the former president.

The recent $83 million defamation verdict against Trump? Joe Biden made it happen and the jurors were liberal so it isn’t a valid decision (as Philip Bump puts it, “suggesting that New York is one of several “extremely left-wing jurisdictions” where Trump is facing charges, implying that this was a stacking of the deck against Trump instead of a result of his alleged crimes while he lived in those jurisdictions.”)! And this isn’t something 2024 voters care about so stop mentioning Trump’s a rapist! And Congress should have refused to certify the 2020 results until the states submitted some pro-Trump electors because there were serious problems like social media covering up the evidence against Hunter Biden (Rep. Elise Stefanik, who’s competing with Vance for the Most Loyal Trump Toadie Award, is likewise anti-certification). Of course, even if that swayed the election results (it didn’t) that doesn’t justify not certifying the electors, any more than James Comey’s bullshit about Clinton in 2016 (which probably did tip the scales) invalidated Trump’s win.

Keep in mind, Vance has already called for Trump to fire anyone in government not loyal to him and ignore any Supreme Court decisions he considers invalid. And parroted right-wing lies about how J6 rioters are being locked up without trial. But as LGM says, his views (to the extent he believes any of it) shows again Republicans are all in on their lord and master, Trump. And for the attempted coup: Charlie Kirk, for instance, claims the rioters wouldn’t have been arrested if they’d made a gay sex tape. He seems to think this makes sense.

As Jennifer Rubin says, faced with tyranny, people can resist, accommodate or collaborate. “Republicans did not face imprisonment or death for standing up to Trump. It wasn’t that hard to put up a fight” but very few joined the Dems in resisting. Instead they accommodated, providing examples of “how a reasonable person can dismiss Trump’s astounding disregard for the law and even for basic decency and yet still vote for him and other GOP candidates in the name of some greater good” or they collaborated, whole-heartedly supporting Trump’s agenda and, if he wins, dictatorship. Vance has chosen option 3.

In a just world the Republican pro-fascist, anti-woman Party would have been crushed under a blue wave. But given gerrymandering, voter suppression efforts and the norman trend of midterm elections to work against the party in the White House, holding Republicans to such modest gains is remarkable.

I’m particularly please by Cortez Masto’s win. Not only does her win give us control of the Senate (counting Vice President Harris’s tie-breaker vote), but I wrote GOTV postcards via Activate Blue on her behalf. It’s good to feel I contributed. It’s great to know that things like that help make a difference, that it really was a better choice than sitting on my butt. Not that success is guaranteed — I GOTVed for Cheri Beasley in NC and she lost — but it’s worth trying.

The clear message is don’t treat women like crap but I doubt Republicans will accept it. As witness Gab CEO Andrew Torba declaring women are a threat to civilization (heard that one before, asshat). Jesse Waters suggests we get single women married to make them turn Republican (spoiler: won’t work). Then again, Republicans lost every demographic but older white voters. Which explains why Florida went so red, I guess.

I am getting plenty of schadenfreude watching them go from “red wave!” to sputtering indignantly. It’s the fault of celebrity candidates with no political savvy. Marjorie Taylor Greene is shocked and appalled that anyone would blame Trump (guess she really does hope to be his VP pick). Tucker Carlson, talking head on America’s most-watched news network, blames the media. Kayleigh McEnany worries if Trump announces before the Georgia runoff, it’ll hurt Walker. From your lying lips to God’s ears, my dear. Paul Campos has a fantasy of 2024 that’s more implausible but it would be fun.

More likely the mistake was their choice of battleground.  Culture war stuff didn’t trigger a red wave. White supremacism and fascism turned voters off. No wonder white supremacist Nick Fuentes

That Walker still has a shot tempers my delight. So does JD Vance winning in Ohio. But we have multiple gubernatorial wins, multiple election deniers — not all of them — going down to defeat. More gays and women in high office. Abortion rights measures won in multiple states. It looks like Sarah Palin’s political comeback ain’t happening. While Cheri Beasley lost as NC senator to a Republican, NC forced-birther Bo Hines went down in flames.

Newt Gingrich, a man who built his brief political career on smearing Democrats now pretends outrage that Biden has demonized Republicans. Of course the stuff Biden says about their misogyny, theocracy and opposition to democracy is absolutely true, which is not something anyone can say about any view Gingrich ever expressed.

While I’ve only seen Gingrich mouthing off on Fox News it’s depressing that he does occasionally do op-eds or interviews for reasonably sane media outlets. He’s been outside the halls of power for years, he never had any deep insights when he was in them, who cares what he thinks? The same with Trump. Yes, it was amusing to know he was freaking out but there’s no need to report every furious accusation he flings on Truth Social or track who he’s mad at for failing him. He’s an ex-president and he won’t say anything we haven’t heard before so why not just ignore him?

In the last analysis Superman was right: fighting for truth and justice is a never ending battle. I’m looking around for ways to keep contributing to the fight, whether it’s donations, writing Please Vote postcards (I’ve signed up to write postcards for potential Warnock voters) or whatever. Victory is not assured, but Tuesday showed us that neither is defeat. And contrary to some pre-election takes, victory without compromising our principles.

Curtis “Mencius Goldbug” Yarvin’s calls to destroy American democracy  have become an inspiration for dictatorship loving right-wingers such as J.D. Vance. (yes, the guy who thinks it’s wrong women can divorce abusive husbands). This detailed interview in Vox has me wondering what’s really going on in his head.

Yarvin makes the stunningly novel argument that democracy has failed, therefore what’s needed is a dictatorship. But a good dictatorship, an absolute monarch who looks out for all the people, not just a given political faction (I’m reminded of Vincent Price declaring in Scream and Scream Again that his creation will be “Yes, a master race, but not an evil master race!”). Such dictators is few and far between. The probability of finding one is even more remote when you consider Yarvin wants a right-wing dictatorship to break free of the left’s supposed control of culture, education and government. The Republican right wing has no interest in setting up a government that works for everyone. Their dreams of a new constitutional convention are specifically so they can impose their minority will on the rest of the country, not to form a united government where everyone has buy in. So his ideas are bullshit and snake-oil from the get-go.

One possibility is that Yarvin is lying to himself about what will happen after his fantasy revolution. The history of naive revolutionaries who thought they were bringing on a golden age is legion. The Russian Revolution. The French Revolution. Castro in Cuba. Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. All of them fought against bad regimes that deserved overthrowing, all of them fell into dictatorship. The United States didn’t, but we still founded a new nation where millions of Americans lived and died in slavery.

Another possibility is that he’s lying to us. Like the right-to-lifers who insisted women would not be prosecuted if abortion became illegal again or that Dobbs won’t be the basis for overturning the right to contraception, Yarvin’ll tell us anything he wants to to keep us from resisting (he admits he was upset the Dobbs decision mobilized the left because if we’re not meek and cowed, a smooth takeover will be impossible).

A third alternative is that his definition of a dictatorship that’s good for everyone is the lie. A lot of the misogynists covered in Jesus and John Wayne and Undead Sexist Cliches claim that male supremacy is good for women, honestly! They’ll be so much happier when they stay home, popping out babies and obeying the man who does the thinking for them. Or the ever-reliable argument we just can’t disrupt society for a few malcontents. The square pegs just gotta fit in those round holes.

As for the left’s supposed control, to the extent that it’s true it’s because we are (as one Bush II official put it), the “reality based community.” Our positions (speaking generally) are right: equality under the law is desirable, women and POC, have equal ability to white men, gay rights and gay marriage don’t destroy or hurt society, religious equality is the best approach, evolution (and more generally science) works, Christian morality is not essential to society, etc. Many of the things the right pretends it’s oppressed by, such as safe spaces, conservatives are actually fine with them — provided it’s a safe space for, say, sexual harassers, not for victims.

On top of which his proposals for Year One — replace all federal workers not loyal to Emperor Trump or whoever, nationalize all police and National Guard operations under the Executive Branch — are seriously dumbass. It doesn’t matter whether the president has absolute power, that’s simply too massive an organization to run smoothly or even keep track of what it does. Does Yarvin think for a minute that replacing all those workers with anyone competent will be that simple or not result in massive disruptions? Certainly not in a gloriously efficient, smooth-running machine.

So my guess is he’s lying to us. But liar or not, his views are just as horrible. It’s depressing we live in a country where “we should be a dictatorship” is now within the Overton Window.

Which explains why so many conservative are terrified of equality. The more equality there is, the less security that the rich, the white, the male, etc. will stay securely atop the social hierarchy. If democracy has to die to preserve their power, so be it. If that means America has to become “a country where a city of more than 160,000 residents recently had no safe drinking water for weeks? A country where life expectancy has dropped for the second year in a row and poor people sell their blood plasma in order to make ends meet? A country where the maternal mortality rate of black women in the capital is nearly twice as high as for women in Syria?” — well, so be it again. The rich and powerful probably figure they’ll come out fine.

So for example, Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance — who believes women should stay with violent husbands, andthe next Republican president should purge the government of any employees who aren’t party loyalists — portrays himself as an edgy rebel pushing back against liberal tyranny (as shown in a recent Mother Jones article) rather than a cliched authoritarian who wants to cut off everyone who disagrees with him (and presumably his backer, Peter Thiel) from access to power.

Over in Georgia, any voter can challenge anyone’s voter registration, so unsurprisingly theocratic fascist Michael Flynn’s America Project is engaging in mass challenges. I’m sure with no intention of tilting the race in Republican’s favor, he said sarcastically. The Wall Street Journal thinks the only problem with Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake being a Stop the Steal acolyte is that it might hurt her chances.

The US Chamber of Commerce is shocked -— shocked — that the CFPB might oppose discrimination in banking. In Pennsylvania, Dr. Oz is likewise shocked that John Fetterman would hire wrongfully convicted ex-cons, because that’s bad for … reasons? Kellyanne Conway pretends she’s shocked that Fetterman is pro-marijuana legalization when (according to her) drug overdose deaths are rising (none of them pot-related).

Rigging elections is okay. Lies are okay. All that matters is that they win.