LRRR :bc: on Nostr: OOC: a someone who has spent the last 18 months running a nuanced study of white ...

OOC: a someone who has spent the last 18 months running a nuanced study of white professional suburban alienation, I feel like J.D. Vance is a gift from the universe. He's terrible, but he's also terrible at being terrible. The most mockable motherfucker, climbing into the mocking booth at the state fair, daring people to mock him, and falling all wrong into the mocking tank. The dumb jokes about him stick because we have, many of us, known someone just like him: a smug, opportunistic grifter who is fixated on sex and control in a way that bums everyone out. I *love* making fun of him.

Vance got where he is off the back of a book that told a good story and conveniently narrated rural alienation in a way that smelled true enough to the David Brookses and Peter Thiels of the world. Hillbilly Elegy seemed important to make sense of a world that Nate Silver and Co. could not tidily explain. So what if he wasn't particularly good at running for office? Ohio's demographics were lurching rightward and he had enough stardust to enchant Ohioans into voting for him. He could talk the talk. Or, write the write, anyway. And that, for his senate race, was enough. It wouldn't really matter to Ohio that he was, in a word, a shillbilly whose big dumb book was an autohagiographic turd because Very Serious People could buy into him. The shoeless, jug-blowing, cousin-fucking morons of... upper-middle class Ohio suburbs would vote for whoever promised tax cuts and forced births. He proved this by underperforming other, more capable Republican campaigners.

Projecting a degree of competence, charm, and normalcy is a huge part of running a national campaign. Vance's problem is that a campaign is not a book or a series of op-eds, which would play to his strengths. Instead, all of the gormless whackadoo nutlog fuckery that his Silicon Valley VC bros cheered on is actually totally fleabitten bananapants insane. And not, like, "ha ha" insane. Not Lrrr insane. More like "hold your car keys in your fist while you back slowly out of the room that smells way too much like bleach and pennies" insane. And he did it on film, in print, and in audio! Wherever you go, he is jamming his foot further into his mouth on issue after issue after issue. Why? Well, at first, to impress the lowest, most vile lifeforms on the planet (podcasters), but then because it felt good, because he surrounded himself either with people who wanted to hear it or with people who didn't care as long as they had a reliable vote for renewing the TCJA in 2026. He's not normal. He can't play it on TV. He certainly cannot parlay his strangeness into a disarming caricature of success like his running mate can. He is, to use the phrase, weird.

Ultimately, J.D. Vance is a contemptible shit who, God willing, will help snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in an all-time great campaign implosion. Here is a suburban kid who lived the American dream, hated Yalies as much as I would, and convinced people that this made him special. If he had had a modicum of decency, we would not know his name, and it is a pity that we do not live in that world. I hope the memes haunt him forever and the shame of seeing his most dedicated supporters lugging around vials of jizz in his honor one day drives him mad.