Do you ever get the feeling that JD Vance was abducted by a bunch of theocratic tech bros, who screwed the top off of his human skull, replaced his brain with a human-sounding AI-bot, then plopped a really bad bowl cut on top of it? How else to explain his dead eyes, the way he laughs at jokes and sounds like a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic, or his inability to buy a doughnut without leaving everyone around him in the uncanny valley?
It would also explain the 180-degree reversal of the brain he apparently once had, one that married a non-Christian vegetarian lady with immigrant parents, and who compared Trump to Hitler. That old brain also helped his fingers type a spot-on essay in 2012 for one of his old Ohio State professors’ nonpartisan blog, Center For World Conflict and Peace, in which past JD Vance (by then a Yale Law student) reflects on the election loss of Mitt Romney, and also seems to be cautioning future JD Vance against exactly what he has become, like one of the tortured souls in “The Good Place” or Get Out.
CNN’s KFile reports that Vance later contacted his professor, Brad Nelson, in 2016, asking him to delete the post, and Nelson did. He was reportedly worried he’d have a hard time getting a job in Republican politics with all the fundamental decency you’re about to read on the world wide web. But the internet is forever! Or at least it is until future-future JD Vance destroys it. Anyway, the post is still on the Wayback Machine. You have to scroll down four stories, and check it out. How about this lede!
When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking: maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons. You can’t nominate people, like Sarah Palin, who scare away swing voters. You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate—Blacks, Latinos, the youth—and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate—Whites. And yet, four years later, I am again forced to reflect on a party that nominated the worst kind of people, like Richard Mourdock, and tried to win an election by appealing only to White people. The 2008 election, it seems, taught Republicans precious little.
Dear reader, did you also forget about racism in the 2012 election? Romney and his supporters did a lot of “Black people lazy” dog-whistling. As opposed to the “Black people eat dogs” lazy-whistling that conservatives do today.
Back then, the Tea Party Victory Fund pushed the rumor and put out an ad implying that Obama was giving people free “Obamaphones,” featuring a screaming Black lady who was missing some teeth, and Rush Limbaugh and the Daily Stormer quickly picked up on the story, even though Ronald Reagan actually started the Lifeline phone program in 1984 to help low-income households get phones. But we digress!
Here’s some more hot truths dropped by the JD Vance of 2012, which are so woke that some of it could’ve been written by me, today, if I had zero personality, a stick up my ass, and any inclination to help Christofascist motherfuckers do anything but pack their bags for Russia change their hearts and minds through my sparkling wit and appealing personality.
The party's problems start with an inability to connect with non-white voters. [...] Blacks and Latinos are growing segments of the population; whites are shrinking, and the racial composition of the 2004 electorate is a thing of the past. To win, the Republicans must turn the tide with non-white voters. […] The unfortunate reality is that attracting non-white voters is about far more than communication—political ads in Spanish are great but won’t move the dial absent fundamental platform changes. Republicans lose minority voters for simple and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are tired, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-whites.
Oh, no shit? And it gets better!
Supporting supply-side economics is like supporting Soviet containment—it’s anachronistic to the extreme.
At least he’s stayed consistent on not wanting Soviet containment?
Old Vance also has thoughts on immigration:
On immigration, Republicans are similarly tone deaf. … a significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self deporting” them). 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.
If the “laugh test” is anything like the Turing test, Vance 2.0 is failing that too. More bon mots:
But strong messaging and ideological purity are poor remedies to the perception that Republicans can't solve the country’s problems.
[T]he emphasis on prohibiting gay marriage is utterly misplaced. The biggest challenges to the American family are economic—stagnating wages that stress relationships to the breaking point and family leave policies that make American children less likely to spend time with their parents than children in any other country on the planet.
But then who will hang out with the post-menopausal women?
It’s just too weird how past-Vance’s essay hits and debunks like every single future-Vance talking point. You can almost hear past-Vance trying to get through to future Vance, his nose bleeding while he screams “GET OUT!”
GET OUT, JD, GET OUT! Call your friends at the TS motherfucking A!
It's like how C-3P0 had his memory wiped, except J-DVN isn't voiced by a funny English actor,
doesn't have a smart droid pal, and is made of human butt hair.
It's like how C-3P0 had his memory wiped, except J-DVN initiated the wipe on his own, isn't voiced by a comical English actor, doesn't have a smart, semi-omnipotent droid pal, and is made entirely of human butt hair.