JD Vance’s political career unravels as his past writings from From Forum—mocked as pseudo-intellectual—clash with his shifting stances, from Duganism to pro-Russia rhetoric, leaving critics questioning whether he’s a manipulated "Manchurian candidate" or a hollow opportunist. Nick Fuentes’ 2023 Thiel exposé and the "fat face Vance" meme campaign shattered his credibility, forcing him into defensive pandering at events like TP USA, while Trump’s unfiltered chaos retains dark charm. His cowardly silence amid online harassment of his Indian wife and perceived weakness in defending himself—contrasted with Trump’s Rorschach-like appeal—exposes Vance as a hollow figure whose VP bid is a desperate bid for relevance, doomed unless Iran becomes a sudden geopolitical triumph. [Automatically generated summary]
Let me ask you one more question and then I'll go to the crowd because we have a couple of hands up already.
But what do you make of JD Vance?
Because he is in many ways right smack dab in the middle of what we've been talking about.
And he has changed his ideology, his ideologies almost as many times as he's changed his name.
Not as many times as he's changed his name, to be fair, but he has changed ideologies quite a bit.
Now, you could make a couple of different interpretations of JD Vance.
You could say that this young man who was writing blogs at From Forum, I remember back when I founded alternativewrite.com in 2010 on a complete shoestring, we were making fun of From Forum all the time.
And we actually had an article written about us on From Forum by Tim Mack, who's still a journalist, actually.
And he said they're Nazis, but they want to be fancy about it or something, which is pretty much true.
I don't know.
But anyway, they sent so many people to the site that the server crashed actually.
And I remember John Darsher wrote a little note in National Review on their little blog.
He's, oh, I'm so glad that Spencer created this new website.
And then it got taken down by like the editors.
They're like, but where was I going with this?
Oh, JD Vance at that time was writing at From Forum.
I'm older than JD Vance.
So I was almost like the older antagonist towards, it's hard to even imagine these things when he was starting out as a writer.
Anyway, obviously they wrote about a lot more than alternativewrite.com, but we were on their radar screen quite prominently.
But anyway, you could make an argument that he is just this little neocon kid and he puts on different masks.
He still believes in the same thing that he did in 2008 through 2012-ish.
He put his finger up to the wind.
He recognized which way it was blowing and he decided, hey, I'm going to be the white Obama, but I'm going to be a little neoconnie inside.
And so I'm going to talk about how we need to overcome racism and Trump is a real Hitler and blah, blah, blah.
But what I am on the inside is a neoconservative.
And then we now reach this point where there is some conflicting information coming out of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal seems to lean on the notion that Vance was against it, but reluctantly accepted it.
The New York Times is basically saying that Vance was slightly skeptical, but said if we go in, we better go in hard.
So you could make this claim that JD Vance is a Manchurian candidate of sorts.
He was invented by David Frum many years ago, passed off to Amy Chua at Harvard.
MSNBC bought their gambit and they played right into David Frum's hands and lo and behold, we're invading Iran.
You can make that claim.
You could also make the claim that JD Vance believes in nothing.
He's a hillbilly nihilist and he just says talking points, doesn't believe it, whether it's eating cats or nationalism or invading Iran, just whatever.
JD Vance: Cynical Nihilist?00:07:18
He'll just say it.
He's an utter cynical nihilist.
You can make that claim.
You could also make the claim, which you sometimes will hear from people on the left, which is that, oh, no, see, he's like into Duganism.
He's hardcore.
He pro-Russia.
He's a racist.
Don't look at his wife and kids.
He hates women and cat ladies.
He's a resentful incel.
You could make all of these arguments and they're maybe equally plausible.
But what do you think of JD Vance, where he was, where he is, and how he's positioned as Trump's successor?
I feel like he's toast, as things stand, unless somehow they're able to like pull some rabbit out of a, let's say they turn this around and make the Iran war into a tremendous success.
Maybe they'll get away with it.
But that's a long shot.
It's probably even a longer shot than the people are going to rise up.
I feel Vance suffered two really mortal blows to his credibility.
One was the expose that Nick Fuentes did at the height of Fuentes Mania last year, right?
Where I don't know where people are on Nick now.
I know he turned a lot of people off with his bra stuff around Venezuela, but about right, I think it was your influence that did it, which I think about six, I think about six months ago, he was had a kind of peak of popularity.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
And during that time, he absolutely exposed Vance in forensic detail, showed all the connections with Peter Thiel and so on.
So in a way, and a lot of people watch that, like into the millions, watch that one.
And because of that, I think people were primed to see Vance as a bit of a fake.
I also think that your friend RFH and various other meeting girl possesses on Twitter.
I think they also did a real job on him with the fat face Vance to the point where he actually had to reclaim it.
And if you want to talk about online and reality merging in a weird post, I remember Vance came to this country because he started slagging off British soldiers or something, which made Vance hated.
Vance is hated in this country even more than Trump because of those comments he made about British soldiers.
And so when he came here, and obviously the left hates him anyway, but I think he turned off a lot of patriots too.
When he came here, they had these massive trucks like with billboards of the fat Vance face going down the street.
So the real life meme had now made it into a physical, like a six-foot physical object going down the street.
And I think he was so nailed by it that he had no choice in the end, but to then to try to reclaim the meme himself.
So he then started posting Vance fat face memes, right?
Okay, it's all fun and games, but I think that did real damage to his credibility.
And also in with it, there's this horrible, there was this sense when Vance became the VP that, oh my God, he's one of us.
He's within one degree of separation from following me on Twitter.
He's a mutual.
Some of my mutuals are his mutuals and things like that.
And how exciting all this is.
We're one DM group chat away from the vice president.
Yeah.
And also weirdly.
Yeah, it's true, but it's also pathetic.
It's also crazy because not only is it not that exciting, it's not that exciting because what they're doing is taking a few aesthetics and ideas and watering them down, but also on the by the same token, it's like, why are you looking for my approval?
Isn't that weird that you're all looking for my approval all the time?
And it's strange.
And I think it's actually weak.
The moment I can think of is when people were making fun of his wife, his one is what, because his wife is Indian, and this was at the height of anti-Indian, anti-Indian racism online or whatever.
And he basically failed to come out and he failed to come out to protect her or to honor her in some way.
And took him like a week or maybe even two weeks because he didn't want to be seen to counter signal the dissident online.
You can't have a vice president who's behaving like this.
It's pathetic.
It is like he had to just come out straight away and be like, that's my wife.
Fuck off.
You know what I mean?
So all of that was coming into this.
And now, whether he likes it or not, he's part of the campaign that's doing the one thing that he and Trump said they'd never do, which is bomber art.
So here we are.
Isn't it interesting that JD Vance is almost like a reversal, like a black mirror reversal of Trump?
Because Trump doesn't pander in the way that word is used.
Now, all politicians pander just to some degree and so on.
Whenever Trump panders, it's almost like he's insulting the group.
It's like, we love our uneducated people.
They're big Trump fans, people who dropped out of high school.
You know, the Vengies, they love me.
He was asked at one point, do you believe in God?
And he said, the evangelical Christians do and they vote Trump.
It's just totally cynical, contemptuous in many ways attitude towards his followers.
He doesn't pander.
And what he does is he allows himself to be a screen onto which you project your hopes and dreams.
And for example, maybe this isn't even the best example, but he could say something like, if I were president, the Ukraine war never would have happened.
And okay, so the Ukrainian supporters, they're like, oh, he must be one of us.
Yeah, that's great.
The Russian supporters, it's, oh, yeah, he's one of us.
He's pro-Russia.
The people who are anti-war, oh, we love this guy.
The people who are pro-war love this guy.
It's a, and I think he does it.
I'm not even sure he does it consciously.
I think it's just like an instinctive way that he acts this sort of Rorschach test as politics.
So he doesn't pander.
He allows you to pander to him.
He allows you to project your hopes and fears and dreams on him.
Whereas JD Vance, in this like cloying way, like literally doesn't want to offend Captive Dreamer or something.
And it's Captive Dreamer's a shill.
It's two shills having sex or something.
It's what it doesn't work.
It's just, it's insane.
And you can see that in that, yeah, it's weak.
Like at TP USA, when he's, I'm not here to divide the Republican Party or whatever.
And it's okay, I get that on some level, but Ben Shapiro took out a switchblade and started cutting people up.
Now, I don't agree with Ben Shapiro on 99% of things, but like he has ballsy, actually.
Like he's a man and JD Vance just ain't.
And if whenever you feel contempt for something, that's when you know it's over.
In a marriage, whenever you can argue and whatever, but like you start having contempt for the other person, it's over.
There's no reconciling it.
You can't bring it back.
Just move on.
Contempt for Vance00:01:21
And I feel like that is the emotion that people feel about JD Vance.
Whereas the emotion that I feel about Donald Trump is sometimes hate, if I'm honest, sometimes a weird love that I just can't help laughing at his stand-up comedy routines that he performs every day, a sort of just amused delight and his insanity.
Those are my emotions.
It's not really contempt.
I don't think I've ever had contempt for Donald Trump.
I have just outright contempt for Vance and I don't think I'm alone.
And it just doesn't work.
And I don't think the people who think that he's one of them or that he's cool or he's smart really grasp that like the visceral level.
I don't know anyone who does think he's cool, to be honest.
Yeah.
I think he's always behind it.
People can tell if somebody's lacking in character and authenticity and things like that.
And I haven't, I'd be honest, I haven't felt those like, I haven't laughed with Trump for quite a long time at this point, because I genuinely think he's gone a bit mad in his old age.
Yeah.
He's become like kind of Napoleon or something.
He's just gone a bit crazy now.
But he certainly had that.
He kept me going for what, nine years or something.
Even at this, even as late as last year, I was still had moments where he was bringing me back with his jokes and things.