JD Vance And His Race Buddies And Their Very Bad Faith

Plus all the other Bad Faith this month!

The faith has been unusually bad over the past month, with Elon Musk becoming a smol bean having his free speech rights crushed by French investigators, JD Vance’s internet buddies pretending to care about science while advancing racist tropes, a white nationalist trying to explain away his white nationalism before a Senate committee, and so much more.

Before we get into this month’s Bad Faith Times blogs, I want to remind the good and decent Wonkette folks that the right wing’s unreality — the make-believe world they have made inside the toxic cocoon of cable and talk radio and the X platform — almost always gets kicked in the goddamn teeth when it enters a courtroom.

For in the courtroom, Actual Reality takes precedence over the bad faith-fueled unreality Republicans have used for decades to advance an agenda that is in no way compatible with representative democracy. We saw this unfold in textbook fashion this month when a federal judge decisively ruled against the Education Department’s directive commanding all American public schools to end DEI practices or lose federal dollars. No more promoting diversity or you’ll lose your money, Linda McMahon said in a directive that expressed great concern for the civil rights of the oppressed, long-suffering white students in American schools.

District Court Judge Landya McCafferty outright rejected the Trump regime’s portrayal of pro-diversity efforts as discriminatory toward white kids and shot down the directive as blatantly illegal. Judge McCafferty is hardly the first judge to refuse to play the Right’s bad faith game. American courts have largely held up to Trump’s authoritarian onslaught because this game gets no oxygen inside the reality-based courtroom. Folks who enjoy democracy and want it to stick around for a while longer should find this heartening. It’s not easy to dismantle a democracy that’s been around for at least fifty years, according to the analytics.

If only that refusal to play the bad-faith game extended to the captured institution we know as SCOTUS, where a majority of justices willingly and quite happily live inside the Right’s unreality and make their rulings accordingly. It’s how Sam Alito can say with a straight face that there’s simply no way to know if the Texas GOP’s Jim Crow-style electoral maps were designed with racist intent. (Reminder that the late, great Thurgood Marshall sounded the alarm in the early ‘90s that conservative SCOTUS justices would deploy bad faith to unravel the civil rights gains of the 20th century.)

OK, enough of that. Let’s get into this month’s BFT blogs, some of which are freely available to everyone and some of which can be read by BFT backers.

JD Vance Is Awfully Close With These Race Science Guys

(Click above, that’s a link!)

The vice president has been a blackpilled freak for years now, associating with some of the most odious, nakedly racist and xenophobic accounts on Elon Musk’s website, and the political press seems not to care. It’s one of those things that makes you recall a time when politicians used to have at least a sliver of shame. Well, we’re fresh out of shame, and we need to bring it all the way back, as I’ve posted incessantly on Bluesky, the only legimtiate microblogging platform.

Some of Vance’s buddies dabble in science and now have access to (extremely valuable) federal data that they’re using to legitimize and mainstream so-called race science. These guys pretend (in bad faith) to care about health and science and the well-being of people of color when in fact they are weaponizing government data and research to validate their white supremacist worldview. In their spare time they interact with the vice president on the X platform formerly known as Twitter.

White Settlement Has Gone Woke

So here’s the thing about Woke 2.0: It’s not coming. It’s already here.

Politics nerds — and sweaty-ass Republican officials across the country — watched in early February as a Trump stronghold in Texas voted overwhelmingly for a standard-issue Democrat. Even a town called White Settlement went for the Democrat by shocking margins.

This massive red-to-blue swing was the latest proof that the 2024 electorate was impermanent, almost ghostly. I’m begging the 2026 election doomers to get a hold of themselves.

Nothing Real Can Emerge From The American Right’s Unreality

The popularity of various right-wing cultural events and products is entirely fake. From the ticket sales of Melania Trump’s dumbass bribe/documentary to the deeply pathetic Super Bowl halftime show put on by Turning Point USA, the numbers are juiced by powerful interests to make the public believe there is a lasting and ferocious appetite in the US for fascist culture.

That’s all wrong. I detail why in the blog.

Elon Musk Is Doing The Bad Faith Dance Again

Musk, BFT’s public enemy number one thanks to his central role in creating the Right’s unreality, is crying and coping over French government officials looking into his various (potential) crimes.

Those include the organized distribution, offering, or making available of images of minors of pornographic nature, violations of personal image rights through the creation of sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity (since Holocaust denial is illegal in France), and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group.

Unluckily for Musk, not every country is beholden to the toxic libertarian interpretation of free speech, which states that the more repulsive the expression, the more legal protection it deserves. This is the very heartbeat of right-wing bad faith in the US.

While you were busy rooting this month for the US Winter Olympic teams, I was rooting for the Paris Prosecutor’s Office and the rule of law!

I Can’t Be A Pessimist Because I Am Alive

I fully understand the instinct to engage in doomerism. Nothing, you believe after 10 years of Trumpism, can ever improve. Everything and everyone is doomed: Your social media timelines confirm this for you every hour of every day.

Civil Rights icon and writer James Baldwin sent a message to us from the past, and it goes a little something like this: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive,” Baldwin said when asked whether he was optimistic about the future for Black people in the United States. “To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I’m forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”

Civil Rights organizers and activists stared down the powers of white supremacy 60 years ago, and we are a freer and fairer nation for it. They did not doom, they did not see a harrowing news item and say, “Well shit, we’re cooked chat.” They persisted, and in many ways — in vitally important ways — they won.

I have always struggled in the inner war against pessimism. It comes so very naturally to me. Maybe it comes naturally to you too. But Baldwin is right, just as he was right when he said love would never be a popular movement. There is no point in engaging in pessimism as long as you are alive and able to make yourself and maybe a few others conscious of the injustices around you.

A Disinfectant For Bad-Faith White Supremacy

A white nationalist showed his entire ass (not literally, thankfully) during a Senate hearing a couple weeks ago when Democrats challenged him on his insane social media ravings.

Like every radicalized chud who gets exposed in a public setting, this guy — who was up for a high ranking State Department position — ran away from his white supremacist politics as quickly as he could muster. His bad faith politics held no weight outside the right wing’s unreality.

Sunlight is in fact a good disinfectant.

It’s Not A Trick Question

This one wasn’t easy to write because Wes Moore is my governor, I voted for him in 2022, and I’ll happily vote for him again in 2026 as he seeks a second term. Moore is by all accounts a good guy. I wouldn’t be all that shocked if he were the next president.

Moore’s recent live TV answer to the exceedingly straightforward question of whether famous racist Donald Trump is in fact racist fell well short of the mark, however. I wrote about how Moore’s non-answer reveals a woeful miscalculation of the 2026 American electorate and feeds into the Right’s eye-watering bad faith around labeling someone a racist.

A Chance To Establish The Run Against Authoritarianism

Now that the Trump regime’s occupation of Minnesota is kinda sorta over, families across the state are scrambling to recover from the government’s terror campaign. That includes economically.

Families who have been unable to work and earn money over the past month (because the regime follows the orders of fascist chuds on the X platform formerly known as Twitter) are now facing real and immediate economic hardship. Rents and credit card bills and utility bills will go unpaid. Untold thousands of hard-working families who have spent the past few weeks hiding from regime forces will be threatened with eviction because they simply don’t have the cash. It’s tragedy compounded by tragedy.

I wrote about some ways you can help families recovering from the siege of their communities, if you have a few bucks to pitch in.