The radicalisation of JD Vance
The descent of the Hillbilly Elegy author is one of the more fascinating if troubling issues of the moment. His new Trumpist persona is not an act, instead a product of radicalisation on the right
The radicalisation of JD Vance’s politics is a cautionary tale of disturbing trends in the culture of America’s Right. A ‘red pilled’ macabre ‘online bro’ world, where a generation of radicalised younger men prowl the ruins of a shattered digital masculinity landscape.
In 2021 JD Vance suggested that those considering ending marriages, “maybe even violent” ones were selfish. “This is one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” he insisted. “Making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear”.
For most the notion that women trapped in violent marriages ought to face greater as opposed to fewer obstacles to escape them seems deeply weird and disgusting. But how did the talented author, marine, self-described ‘never Trump’ Yale graduate end up arguing women should stay locked in abusive marriages?
Perhaps something of an answer can be found in his best-selling memoir ‘Hillbilly Elegy’. In it he describes how his grandmother - or “mamaw” as he called her - saved him from becoming just another statistic amid the unfolding tragedy of America’s opioid nightmare. The outsized influence of “mamaw” on the young JD Vance is something he has repeatedly talked about, albeit eliding past the sheer scale of his childhood trauma. He grew up fatherless, in poverty as his mother’s drug addiction grew alongside a growing list of failed marriages. He spoke movingly of his grandmother being his guiding force.
Hillbilly Elegy paints a contrast between his unstable mother’s battling drugs, alcoholism and failed marriages, and Vance's grandparents who reconciled and became his guardians.
When the JD Vance of contemporary times denounces the “sexual revolution” for playing a pernicious role in making families fragment easier; is there a ghost from the past to be found here?
Perhaps to JD Vance’s mind, the fact that his grandparents stuck it out, made their marriage last - despite the family traumas and crises, has outsize importance? And it seems abundantly clear from his contemporary speeches that to Vance, this made the difference to his life prospects as he sees it.
His strict but loving grandmother - who stuck her marriage out till the end - was the one who pushed him to leave Middletown for undergraduate studies at Ohio State and post-graduate studies at Yale Law School.
It is a melancholic thing that the ‘Appalachian values’ of his Kentucky family and the socioeconomic problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio produced a politician with a deeply flawed concept of the social contract.
The social contract advanced today by Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance today is an angry, exclusionary one. His vision insists that people ought to live together in society in accordance with established moral and political rules from a deeply reactionary conservative concept governing behaviour.
A social contract born from a mind believing that the federal government should track women’s inter-state movements, in order to ensure forced pregnancy. A ruler-ruled relationship where the the national state provides a greater voice and more liberties to those couples deemed as producing enough children.
The JD Vance we lost along the way…
But the JD Vance of 2024 was not the only JD Vance which once existed. The man who rose to shining literary fame with his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” was actually all baby fat, with soft rounded edges. A notable example is his 2016 PBS interview where he describes the sense of cultural alienation that Trump prays on. Note this is still the ‘Never Trump’, pre radicalised, JD Vance, who leans firmly away from a Trump candidacy which he notes “doesn’t have all the answers” to “complex” problems
Add to this picture blogs he wrote as far back as 2012 and we find a compelling young man. One who writes brilliantly about the contempt he feels for the proto-populism of the tea-party ; the precursor to MAGA populism. He writes about how American conservatism should think with its head, not its heart:
“[criticising the proto-populism of the period] Perry and Bachmann’s conservatism is reflexively anti-government, but each supports the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposal that would annul the marriages of gay couples - ripping apart new families of which count young children as members”
In 2012 JD Vance insisted the best in conservatism was when it pushed aside emotion and prioritised policy. He correctly condemned the emerging populism that would later have him touring the liberal media studios and podcasts insisting he was ‘never Trump’.
But we have lost this JD Vance along the wayside. In 2012 he rightly recognised that families come in all different shapes and sizes; defending gay couples from conservative overreach risk. Sadly today he opposes gay people - like myself - rights to marry and even attacked gay Cabinet Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s marriage and family.
It wasn’t an accident that Trumpist JD Vance name-checked Pete Buttigieg in his now infamous ‘childless cat lady’ rant with Tucker Carlson
Buttigieg responded with a characteristic elegance and self-control I’d surely lack if had been sitting responding
“The really sad thing is, he [JD Vance] said that after Chasten [Buttigieg] and I had been through a fairly heart-breaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg, who now has twins, said Tuesday on CNN’s “The Source.” “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children,”
The radicalisation of JD Vance has taken a sensible, articulate defender of same-sex families of 2012, and produced a homophobic dog-whistler. One can almost picture JD Vance being one of those ‘online bros’ who tweet out on ‘X’ the ‘NoHomo’ hashtags, ironically highlighting their own deep-rooted insecurities and (white)fragility.
Personally, I’d much prefer to have the JD Vance of 2012 back again. That man once explained how he became a conservative - and his reasoning illustrated a sharp mind. One that stands in sharp contrast to the shallow-thinking ‘MAGA bro’ we witness displayed today.
“I became a conservative after reading Robert Bork’s ‘Slouching Toward Gomorrah’. I did not - and still don’t - accept all of its arguments, but what made Bork’s book so compelling was the way it describes the American left. Bork theorised that in the absence of religious faith, the modern left had become a substitute spiritual movement for many Americans. Complete with prophets, heroes, rigidity and often inexplicable passion. That struck a cord with me: the liberals that I knew and saw on TV were passionate to a fault. The conservatives always seemed more mature and reasonable. That’s a big reason why I became a conservative - I didn’t want to join the camp of the unreasonable”
He continues, observing
“with few exceptions this observation has been turned on its head. The American Right is no longer a bastion of maturity, but a factory of anger and contradiction. We fulminate against federal power, but our frontrunner would have the US government destroy marriage rights created by the states. We criticise federal spending and then lambast John Huntsman, the only candidate to endorse a serious plan to control it”
What would this JD Vance of 2012 - who decried conservatives seeking to use federal power hypocritically - make of the JD Vance of 2024 who thinks the government ought to track women moving across state lines in order to force them to have babies…
“Okay, look here’s the situation. Let’s say Roe vs Wade is overruled, Ohio bans abortion in 2022 - let’s say 2024 and then…you know…George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus, loads up disproportionately black women to have them go and have an abortion in California. And of course the left will celebrate this as some sort of victory for diversity(…)And if that happens, do you need a federal response to prevent it from happening? Because its really creepy. And you know, I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually” -JD Vance, Jan 2022
In 2012 he was focused on policy, a conservatism with a power to unite without the inanity of emotivism. Sadly, we lost that sensible bright spark in American conservatism and instead we have a pathetic avatar channelling ‘the id’ (unconscious, instinctive, primitive) mind of a dementing MAGA movement.
2012-2024 witnessed the man descend into one of Dante’s circles of hell, which remains to be finalised. From decrying populism to embracing it. From defending gay couples from conservative overreach to insulting and demeaning them. From being policy focused and rational to a wholesale embracing of alt-right ‘own the libs’ online meme culture.
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Radicalisation, not political cynicism: less Pittsburgh, more Handmaid’s Tale
In 1936, pursuing his first bid for re-election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was set to go to Pittsburgh to deliver a speech. Turning to his close presidential counsel and aide Sam Rosenman, he moaned how in October 1932, he had old a crowd in Pittsburgh that he would balance the budget and cut government spending by 25 percent in his first term.
In office FDR had realised to defeat the depression actually required increased spending, stimulus activity and expanding Federal intervention. Roosevelt prodded Rosenmann in 1936 for insight for how to handle questions about said broken promise.
"Deny you were ever in Pittsburgh," responded Rosenman.
Some writers argue Vance is ‘faking it’, cynically embracing MAGA-world for power’s own sake. In short, he’s simply denying he was ever in Pittsburgh.
One example of this line of thought is David Niven, associate professor of Politics at the University of Cincinnati. Niven insists that “what you see” regarding the changed JD Vance “is some really profound opportunism”.
But I disagree, that doesn’t make sufficient sense. Not least since the JD Vance of 2012 would easily have realised writing-off and condemning whole swathes of the American electorate via ‘childless cat-lady’ misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric is no way to win power.
‘Faking it’ - denying you were ever in Pittsburgh - only makes sense if it’ll enhance as opposed to diminish ones prospects for power.
Yet instead what we see is less a cynical politician on the make, rather a case of genuinely troubling radicalisation. JD Vance is less in the vein of DFR lying about Pittsburgh for political advantage, much more a ‘Commanders of the Faithful’ of the Handmaid’s Tale.
And the radicalised Commander JD Vance of angry Handmaid’s Tale has hardly polled well. His Ohio senate run in 2022 saw him winning by 6 points, whereas Governor Dewine won that state by 25 points the same year.
And while it is true that Vice Presidents rarely if ever bring much to a ticket, a VP certainly can (and has) weighed down one. Sarah Palin proved to be a catastrophic choice for Republican hopeful John McCain, and likewise JD Vance has proven to be a disaster for Trump. Vance is officially the most unpopular Vice Presidential picks in modern American history.
Instead, the facts lend themselves more to a dark process of radicalisation.
A cracked concept of the social contract as a result of a traumatic childhood linking up with a new-found Catholic integralism mixing in with alt-right Tucker Carlson ‘white replacement’ conspiracy-paranoias and trans-obsessions.
That is how we end up with the angry, deeply weird and certainly creepy JD Vance of 2024. The JD Vance which is everything the JD Vance of 2012 was condemning in elegant prose.
The darkness behind the ‘childless cat-lady’ remark
"The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children…How does it make any sense we've turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?…We are being run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too".
How many people sincerely believe that women taking care of cats and not kids is really a root cause of everything that is wrong with America today? Weirder still, how many subscribe to the contention that this phenomena is squarely due to the Democrat Party?
Suffice to say, none of this is normal. The ranting about the “sexual revolution”, bemoaning that women are no longer locked into abusive marriages is altogether the product of a deeply weird and troubled mind.
The anger-laced venom is palpable as he drools about women choosing not to have children (or being unable to) are somehow eroding the American Republic is sincerely creepy.
One wonders if men such as Commander Vance of Gilead any longer retain an ability to conceive of how offensive, weird, false and genuinely strange they sound to normal people?
After all, I think it is rapidly becoming obvious that JD Vance has been radicalised by a converging of many factors which have reduced the contemporary GOP into an online ‘red-pilled’, toxic masculine social media hate-fest.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but lets give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” drawled a now-bearded Vance. “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic”
“Let’s face the consequences and the reality, if you don’t have as much an investment in the future of this country,” Vance said in relation to childless people, “maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice”.
When confronted by the record of his own words about childless cat-lady Kamala (a step-mother incidentally) or about his creepy obsessions with other peoples relative childlessness, Commander Vance of Gilead attempted to demur, “The point is that her [Kamala Harris] party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child”
The problem for Commander Vance of Gilead is that his excuse is betrayed once again by his own rhetoric. The JD Vance selected by the sex-offending, secret stealing convicted felon Trump as a running mate might be a strict pro-natalist; but that doesn’t mean he wants to promote child-friendly policies.
Not if those pro-child, pro-family policies might risk empowering women, risking their independence. Jamie Dettmer of Politico noted recently that JD Vance
“has taken aim at childcare subsidies as “class war against normal people,” despite — or maybe because — such subsidies provide women with young kids more opportunities to work or go to school and be independent.”
The men of the MAGA movement seem to only have two gears, grievance or low energy. But we are confronted with a Vice Presidential candidate with an articulated desire to erode rights on the basis of reproductive capacity and seemingly hellbent on asset-stripping women of their fundamental rights.
Perhaps we need a better explanation for the radicalisation than mere grievance?
One possibility driving the radicalisation of younger conservative males in contemporary America such as like JD Vance is perhaps a linked to spending far too much time hooked into darker, weirder corners of MAGA social media?
Take the reactionary online world of Catholic integralism. As a movement it asserts the need for a Catholic underpinning to all social and political action, and the minimalization of any competing ideological actors. Secular humanism and liberalism in this world are particularly reviled. Integralism itself arose ortiginally in opposition to liberalism, which some Catholics saw as a “relentless and destructive ideology”.
It has been repeatedly reported that Commander Vance of Gilead has links to the world of Catholic integralism. Something he has refused to ever address publicly.
We know that Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, around the same time he was shifting from the ‘never Trump’ author of Hillbilly Elegy to full-blown Trumpist misogynist homophobe. He today shares the integralist hatred of liberalism, reproductive healthcare rights, homosexual rights and equalities and scepticism of immigration and climate policies.
Online it’s worryingly easy to come across Catholic integralist Reddit, which functions as a lightening rod for the radicalisation of young men in digital landscape. A place where online Catholic integralist blogs hook up with Tucker Carlson variety white Christian nationalist paranoias, all with an added sprinkling of transgender transitioning obsessions. Once you chuck in a man with childhood trauma…
Perhaps this heady and revolting brew has produces the sort of troubled, deeply weird and creepy man who engages in such blatant misogyny and anti-gay bigotry?
Listening to JD Vance diatribes about ‘childless cat ladies’ has me imagining a man who has failed to get beyond the fact some women were probably unkind to him once a long time ago. Now he’s reduced to thinking ‘we need to go back, women stay at home for the good of the family’.
The paucity and moral bankruptcy of the ‘online bro’ world has ruined a man who once-upon-a-time was deeply impressive; having overcome tremendous childhood trauma.
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Digital ‘redpilling’: the resurgence of toxic masculinity
In the The Matrix, the films lead character Neo was given the option of taking a red pill, enabling him to comprehend what was actually occurring outside the illusionary world of the Matrix, or a blue pill, which would allow him to return to experiencing the illusion. By choosing the red pill, Neo became aware for the first time of the oppressive, parasitic nature of the Matrix.
My purpose for mentioning this is because there exists online influencers such as the Tate brothers, who persist on holding out their own version of a ‘red pill’ to easily influenced young men. In many ways the Tate brothers are cut from the same cloth as the Trump persona.
The digital space has become a 21st century equivalent of the lawless high-seas, where cynical operators eager for money and fame pursue easy targets. Only now, the targets are all of the young men growing up online, in a Matrix-like world where the lines have blurred between the real and digital realms. It is easy to forget that people of my generation (35 years old) are likely the final age-group to recall a time growing up without mobile (cell) phones, internet in every room.
This is an important observation explaining the flawed and clearly troubled evolving persona of Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential running-mate.
As this toxic masculine ‘redpilling’ online is being driven forward apace, it coincides with the evolving and shifting gender and sexual power structures of recent decades in America.
The ‘red-pilled’, troubled, ‘online bro’ males who prowl the shattered ruined landscape of digital masculinity are certainly the audience the radicalised JD Vance speaks to; and like a mirror reflects.
Ultimately this suggests to me that a slice of America is struggling to come to terms with the fact that female leadership has unarguably emerged as opposed to remaining the odd exceptions to the rule.
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016 perhaps helped produce - or draw out - a creature as disgustingly vile as Donald Trump. Is this what we should come to expect this November? Has Kamala Harris, similarly, drawn-out the radicalised JD Vance from the deeply troubled Republican id?
Pausing to examine the counter-cultural fightback against the assorted gains obtained by women in America, it certainly seems possible. Dobbs pulled down Roe vs Wade thanks to a repeatedly divorced convicted sex offender. Now women’s access to reproductive healthcare is under siege across the American heartlands. Media rhetoric traducing women who have chosen to be childless as somehow less invested in their country’s future persists as if this where totally normal rhetoric. Childless women (and gay men) should have less of a voice in the republic? Welcome to the GOP’s ‘Project 2025’.
This all points to the chronic need to control women by men who fear the gains achieved by women, ethnic and sexual minorities; post sexual revolution. For the likes of JD Vance, their reaction is clearly an atavistic scream of ‘we need to control these women, they’ve upended everything!’
When JD Vance calls for the Federal Government to prevent women travelling between states to obtain reproductive healthcare, this isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s part of a wider aggressive pushback against women’s rights and equalities in the culture.
After all, Vance has also called for abortion bans so strict that even victims of rape or incest would be forced to carry to term.
“It's not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term. It's whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child's birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance said in 2021. “The question really, to me, is about the baby.”
Online toxic masculinity has been poisoning the minds of a whole generation (18-25 year olds) with nonsense egotism. JD Vance ‘cat ladies’ slurs, his insistence on federal authorities tracking women’s movements fits neatly into the sex-offender Donald Trump’s online-fuelled falsity.
The whole rise of Trump as a cultural phenomenon (and remember, cultural always leads politics these days), was driven by the digital online false-masculinity of the ‘redpilled’.
Alexandra Juhasz as far back as 2017 hit the nail firmly on the head when she wrote for DAME about Trump’s nuclear posturing with Kim Jong Un,
“I’ve coined a phrase for this potent mix of internet-fueled falsity, masculine grandiosity, and the resulting bellicosity: “Virality is virility.” Trump’s nuclear threats enact a macho posturing central to his political persona and operations—virility—rooted in sanctioned, if often despicable, forms of male aggression.”
Toxic masculinity as a feature of the digital landscape is real, and it has been radicalising for many younger men on the right of American politics. The idea that what you post online, what you say to Tucker Carlson or tweet-out is really just one big popularity contest.
For Trump his masculinity sold to his adoring MAGA cultists via his social media output. His phallic virility is communicated through “despicable forms of male aggression”. A patriarchal world where misogynists like Andrew Tate, Donald Trump and Commander JD Vance of Gilead, seek to convince younger male minds that bigger is better, dominance coming from totems of male power.
‘Owning the libs’, or “I grab women by the pussy” intermingles in very much the same digital space as JD Vance insistence that raped girls be forced to carry the pregnancy to term or women beaten in the home must remain tied to their husbands.
This is the unearned authority and dominance of the toxic masculine. Where the phallic totems of control and power rests on a fragile edifice of male supremacy. It’s a world where the rise of assertive women more interested in careers than being broodmares threatens the patriarchal superstructure.
One can readily trace the invisible hand of the digital ‘red pilled’ toxic masculine behind a myriad of Trump-world’s policy antics. When he boasted about unleashing “the mother of all bombs” on Syria 87 days into his Presidency in 2016, he was channelling the same subconscious ‘id’ that we find in today’s ‘Project 2025’.
When we see the promise to turn US civil servants into political appointees throughout the federal administrative superstructure (thereby enabling Trump to fire and replace anyone on a whim), we need to take it seriously.
Just who is Trump-Vance planning to install for example in Health and Human Services (HHS)? There are people in MAGA world, close to both GOP top-ticket men who darkly reference the policies of Romania of the 1970s and 1980s. Under Ceaucescu’s regime contraception was banned, as was abortion. There was a ‘celibacy tax’ imposed on families who failed to adhere to the state-demanded quota of children born. There were even state-employed doctors who went from workplace to workplace forcing women of childbearing age to undergo invasive gynaecological testing.
Just who would Trump-Vance be installing in the HHS? And how many of these political appointees responsible solely to and blindly loyal to Trump harbour Ceausescu-esque policy desires?
As one confronts the results of weird Catholic integralist blogging subcultures on Reddit, angry digital toxic male influencers and politicians pledging to sythe away at women’s liberties and equalities one has to pause and reflect.
Reflect on the out of control toxic masculine digital culture where rising female leadership as a norm has produced this truly monstrous counterrevolutionary reaction among males like Commander Vance of Gilead. Men who have so clearly become radicalised themselves over recent years of exposure to this truly deplorable Breitbart-variety alt-right socio-political subculture.
Saying women who have fewer children should have fewer rights, than childless women should have diminished voting rights, that marriage is an inescapable purgatory for women is not merely offensive. It is actually truly messing with women’s rights across so many different dimensions.
Messing around with women’s access to reproductive healthcare means affecting where they can study (which state), where they can go to medical school, where they dare put down roots and seek employment. Women in the United States post Roe vs Wade face having to constantly weigh up which parts of America will offer them which rights.
It also places the doctors and physicians of America in a truly dark place, where providing life-saving healthcare to women is now dependent on what the legal risks are resulting from the laws imposed by the men from Gilead.
Concluding thoughts…
I fear I have gone on long enough, so let’s conclude.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that JD Vance is simply doing a Pittsburgh, he is not. Had he simply been a cynical political opportunist what he represents wouldn’t be nether as extreme or deeply weird as it is.
What we can witness is the resulting elements combining to radialise JD Vance:
traumatic childhood (where the grandmother who stuck out her marriage saved him)
radicalising fringe religion
Tucker Carlson variety whitelash conspiracy paranoias
Exposure to ‘red pilled’ online ‘bro’ toxic masculine digital sub-culture
The only element I am as yet unsure about regarding the depressing descent of JD Vance is to what extent whitelash racialism plays its part. But for those interested, I wrote a piece exploring the white backlash racism among non-college educated white women in America’s suburbia earlier this week.
Commander JD Vance of Gilead is a stark warning to all liberals about just how high the stakes now are for women, sexual and ethnic minorities across the United States of America.
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