In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that aired on Sunday, JD Vance accused Democrats of perpetrating “schoolyard bully” attacks against him by calling him “weird,” which mostly just demonstrated that he has no understanding of irony or any idea what we actually mean when we call him “weird.”
“It drives home how they’re trying to distract from their own policy failures,” he told Bash. “I mean, look, this is fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff. They can accuse me of whatever they want to accuse me of — as Harry S. Truman said, ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’”
I don’t think you get to complain about “schoolyard bully stuff” when you are the running mate of the man who more or less determined that was how things were going to be when he first ran for president eight years ago. He broke norms, he called people stupid “schoolyard bully” nicknames, he said horrible things to people, and now that’s just the way things are. They don’t get to complain when what they dish out is served right back to them. They don’t get to play like they are innocent victims.
A large part of the reason why Vance has been called “weird” is because he does shit like calling people “childless cat ladies,” or insisting that those who think schools should be allowed to acknowledge the existence of gay people are child molesters.
These things are also good examples of what one would call “bullying.” Bullies target people based on things they cannot change or things that make them different. Calling a person older than the age of 13 who does this same thing “weird” is not quite the same thing.
Vance can claim that calling him “weird” is some kind of substitute for talking about policy, but for Republicans, most of their policies are based on bullying. That’s what’s weird about them! They are far more obsessed with preventing kids from finding out that gay people exist or that racism ever happened than they are about making sure those kids have enough to eat. Why? Because they don’t want people (especially their children) to point out that they are assholes when they say or do things that are homophobic or racist.
They regularly claim that the only way to “help” poor people stop being poor is to make them suffer (i.e. bully them) until things get bad enough that they “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” while refusing to acknowledge that we literally need people to do the work that poor people do, and that this means that, barring outside intervention or companies being forced to pay people enough to live, a large percentage of our population has to be terribly poor in order for our society to function. So it doesn’t really matter if one person pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, because someone else would necessarily have to replace them.
It’s like how bullies claim they are “helping” fat people become healthy by bullying them (a sentiment shared exclusively by the girl who made middle school a living hell for everyone, and also adult conservatives).
If we’re gonna get deep about it, Republicans — including JD Vance — have pretty much the same target list as your standard bully from any given teen movie: the poor, minorities, women who won’t obey them, LGBTQ+ people (kids especially), men who fail to be sufficiently macho, women who fail to be sufficiently feminine, women they think are sluts, immigrants, fat people, smart people, artists, etc. One of their primary complaints is, in fact, that they can’t be mean to these various groups of people anymore without anyone calling them an asshole. A reason Donald Trump was so popular is because he tapped into the anger they had over this and they thought he was going to make bullying great again.
I mean, we are talking about a group of people who are eternally miffed over the fact that they “can’t” use racial slurs. Like, 70 percent of right-wing issues can be summed up as “these people exist and I don’t like it!”
Arguably, one of the reasons bullies “bully” is to enforce social homogeneity, which is something the Right is increasingly open about wanting to do — it’s why they’re pushing so hard for dumb shit like putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, talking about Christian Nationalism and still all het up about people being gay or trans like it’s any of their business. It’s why they won’t shut up about “47 GENDERSSSS!!!!1?@?”
If JD Vance wants to put a stop to “schoolyard bully” behavior, he is going to have to start at home. He and his running mate will both have to change their behavior, they will have to change the way they treat people and the way they talk about people. They will have to give up on policies that hurt people, schoolchildren especially.
Until then, we’ll just have to keep calling him weird and making jokes about this thing we read on the internet that says he has an affinity for living room furniture. Whoops!
OPEN THREAD!
Joy Reid, "Y'all shouldn't have messed with the cat ladies."
"Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" Rachel describing NC Gov. candidate Mark Robinson.