Say his name, Rachel Maddow

I haven’t written published a whole lot about J.D. Vance, misogyny, and Christian Nationalism because I have so, so, so much to say about it. And it’s depressing and scary as hell. But I have a few hopefully short things to say about this recent Rachel Maddow segment on J.D. Vance’s favorite living philosopher Curtis Yarvin.

First of all, I do not enjoy Rachel Maddow. I will never forgive her boot-licking, victim-blaming coverage of Ruby Ridge or Waco. I find her generally… not my thing. To be fair, I don’t watch the news. If I care about a story, they never provide enough information and there’s no way to skim a video. Most of the stories they cover I do not care about.

There’s also this thing I noticed with John Oliver, who I like but still don’t watch. There’s a way to cover a story where everything you say is 100% true, but the viewer still walks away worse off than if they knew nothing. I watched one of his segments where I knew a lot about the topic, and that’s how I felt. It was so one-sided as to be ultimately misleading. A viewer who brought no relevant information to the experience of watching that segment would walk away feeling very confident that Oliver’s solution was the right one. But I knew there was a lot more to the story and that his solution was not the best path forward.

Anyway, I bring more information to the “J.D. Vance often cites Curtis Yarvin and they both want to delete the US government and replace it with a Ceasar/dictator/CEO” story than the average person. I’ve read a lot about it. And I’ve met Yarvin. A few times. I’ve listened to him at house parties ramble on at length. And Maddow’s segment was fair and accurate, as far as I could tell.

If anything, Maddow didn’t go far enough. She didn’t mention Yarvin’s slavery apologia.

Most importantly, she said that “a tech billionaire” devoted $10m to electing Vance to the Senate. This is the largest donation to a Senate race in US history. But otherwise she kept saying “tech billionaires.”

First of all, it’s Peter Thiel. That’s the tech billionaire who funds Vance and Yarvin. That’s the tech billionaire who wrote in 2009 that freedom and democracy are incompatible and that women’s suffrage was a mistake. Peter Thiel converted Vance to Catholicism. Peter Thiel created a college alternative program to divert promising kids from the US university system.

Saying “tech billionaires” lets Thiel off the hook. It obscures how singularly fucked-up and threatening this man is. Because there is no reality in which “tech billionaires” could possibly be as fucked-up and threatening as one man because there isn’t enough that tech billionaires can agree on. And what there is just isn’t fucked up enough to do the damage this one man is doing and wants to do.

I didn’t predict J.D. Vance. In fact, last year my money was on Josh Hawley taking the mantle of despotic, dictatorial Christian Nationalism. But I have been on the “Peter Thiel is a Nazi and it matters” train for many years now. What Vance shows is that I was right. He is and it does.