These are dog whistles, though. Normal people watching the convention won't hear any of this blood and soil stuff. Or they will think it sounds normal, true and ok. This is because most Americans don't have very much knowledge about European history. The little history they know is about the big events in American history. That is why they don't understand that this country was founded in large part to avoid the pathologies of Europe: religious wars in particular. They don't know that religious wars tore Europe apart for centuries.
I have been a teacher at various community colleges for decades, teaching students from age 18 to seniors. People are very confused about the past: they get the Civil War and the civil rights movement mixed up; some people believe the earth is 6,000 years old; they have never heard of the Battle of Gettysburg, not even Southern students. Finding any country on a world map is impossible for them. So JD can be as Blood and Soil-y as he likes, and nobody will notice except the real fascists. And they do exist, right here in TN: recently Nazis paraded through Nashville carrying swastika flags. They also made an appearance in my small town to protest a drag show of all things. These guys can infiltrate and con our society largely because of the ignorance of the masses.
As Trump once said, "I love the uneducated." This is why conservatives are constantly trying to destroy public education in America.
One time a Southern boy told me that Pickett's Charge was called that because there was a white picket fence in the way. I wonder what his grandfather would have thought of that statement.
Once I projected a slide of the Venus of Willendoorf, which is a tiny sculpture about 35,000 years old. A student kept objecting that it couldn't possibly be that old, without explaining why he thought that. Later in the week he told me that it was because the earth was 5,607 years old. I told him to go to the Tennessee Bible College instead if that was the kind of education he wanted.
HE also told a long story about the time he picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be an angel, but that's not really relevant here. Or is it?
Another student told me that since I was born in the 1950s, and the civil rights movement happened in the 1960s, it was likely that my family had owned slaves when I was child.
Thank you for fighting the good fight in Tennessee, which sorely needs outstanding teachers of history at every level. When I was in high school in Tennessee in the early 1970s, I had two excellent history teachers. Mr. Alfred Fischer taught World History; Mr. Eugene Driver taught American History. I am thankful for them and for my dad, a student of history and political science. I am also thankful for my professors and instructors at the college and university level.
What's so farcical about it is that Vance himself has never permanently lived in Eastern Kentucky, nor will his wife and children.
It smacks of the "rightful" ruler of some tinpot kingdom somewhere living in comfortable luxurious exile in Paris or London still mouthing the words about returning home to conquer long after they have lost any plausibility.
The heirs to the throne of Appalachia, being raised in Washington by their Indian-American corporate lawyer mother from San Diego.
It's funny, because I also have a cemetery that I plan to be buried in, with exactly the same generations as Vance, also in a rural place that I've never lived, and that means a lot to me to visit. But it has fuck all to do with politics, and most of the people buried in that cemetery would disown me if I voted for someone like JD Vance. Appeals to dead people just can't do the work he wants. American tradition encompasses both Vance's reactionary vision and the progressive one of my Midwest ancestors, as well as the immigrant backgrounds of my (and John's) other ancestors and many more beside.
Vance’s speech reminds me of Calhoun’s letter to Richard Pakenham in it’s assertion that there is a permanent and rightful nationalist people and others who simply are not. While Calhoun was more explicit in stating that the two cannot exist without one being the subject of the other the underlying logic is the same.
As an actual "legacy American" - I am the tenth generation in America; among my ancestors is the first of the line to come here, a leader of the Germantown Quakers who in 1688 decided a slaveowner could not be a member of their community, setting the beginning of Quaker Abolitionism; my sixth great grandfather crossed the Delaware with General Washington and saved the Revolution; my great-great grandfather spent his 16th birthday atop Little Round Top, defending the Union - I have nothing but disgust for the descendants of the transported felonious English pig-fuckers like Widdle Jimmie Vance.
Well, on the other half of my family, I am also Scots Irish; the original McKelvey arriving here in 1801 "a hop and a skip ahead of Lord Cornwallis' rope" as a participant in "The '99," the only Irish rebellion against the English that included both Catholics and Protestants. His grandson, one of my other civil war ancestors, left his position on General Sherman's staff to command Squadron C of the First Alabama Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers - the Southern Unionist patriots. In fact, the history of the Scots-Irish in the South before the Civil War was the opposition of "the mountain people" to slavery (it was the enslavers who came up with "hillbilly" as a slur). Most of them fought for the Union, a truth that was buried after the national government abandoned Reconstruction and let the Confederacy return to power. Nowadays, the descendants of those patriots - denied access to their true history - are among the strongest supporters of the New Confederacy. Sad.
Thanks for the reference to the 1st Alabama - it led me on a fine wikiwander. I had heard/read that there were abolitionist/unionist pockets just south of the Mason-Dixon and in the mid-Atlantic and individuals in the Deep South. This was my first inkling that there was an entire (mostly) white Union regiment in the Deep South. I'm sure the Southern Unionist article in Wikipedia just scratches the surface, but it's material I was mostly unfamiliar with. And this https://web.archive.org/web/20150511233733/https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essays/abraham-lincoln-and-jacksonian-democracy?period=5 has me considering Jackson in a different light (without forgetting his considerable baggage)
Do you think he means it? His wife is a devout Hindu corporate litigator and his son is named Vivek. I’m not sure whether the dissonance makes this more or less horrifying.
If you want to see contemporary American derangement, look at the reactions to Vance's wife on social media. One Xitter bluecheck goober rationalizes her as coming from ancient Macedonian stock.
The other faction is Nick Fuentes and the groypers -- I need not say more. Another doozy was a freakout over California Gov. Gavin Newsom having more "pure blood" White children than Vance's "half blood" children.
My guess would be that like many upper-class British Imperialists, he would hold that 'the best' of other races might in fact be o.k., and in _their_ case extreme Right-think would make them acceptable Americans.
Note that as far as I can tell, Mr Vance thinks himself superior to most '_white_' people.
Is his wife in appearance, perhaps modulo colour, Aryan?
EDIT: I was going to add, but forgot, that except for colour, and perhaps partially due to public school food and life, Mr Sunak always looked remarkably like any rich,slightly inbred, Englishman, physiognomy maybe a little outside the norm but not as much as Farage or (especially) Rees-Mogg. There may be survival bias in this, anyone not 'looking' 'English' couldn't have risen as high in the Conservative Party as he…though I can't help but wonder if making him Chancellor were the U-English/Desi equivalent of an high-class W.A.S.P.'s wanting a Jew to handle his money for him.
And today's Hindu nationalists are as racist and fascist towards Muslims and non-Aryans as any grouper. I don't know if Mrs Vance is associated with the RSS structures in the USA, but as a successful business person in the GOP firmament, I'd be surprised if she wasn't tbph
In the same way that Neo-Nazis respect Israel as an ethnostate, I don't think there's much dissonance between "devout Hinduism" and blood-and-soil nationalism.
The R.S.S. and Modi's 'Hindutva' has, empowered, resulted in lynched minority group members, literally violent hatred of refugees arrived in flight for their lives, and mandatory school textbooks including the invention of television by Hindus millenia ago. These are all things toward which the Republucan Party _must_ bow its collective head in deepest respect, for great justice.
I don't want to be sure. My bias, against him based on his history and (unfairly) against the ruthless variety of poor-boy-made-good*, says so, but that makes me want to keep an open mind. I recall a Calvin Trillin piece from around 1962 about a 'white' Southerner who demonstrated depths of decency, perhaps out of sheer cussedness, when his fellow-townsmen turned against him '[…] just because I wanted to be fair to the n–g-rs.'.
Hillbilly Elegy was the preface to this speech. In the intro Vance wrote: "We [Scots-Irish] do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart."
When Trump describes himself to the MAGA-faithful as "your President" he is speaking the literal truth. As was Vance when he in his speech he said "I get to represent millions of people in the great state of Ohio with similar stories." They only represent the MAGA-faithful and those with similar stories. Not anyone with a different story.
Then there’s the part in Vance's speech where he thought it was hilarious and sooo American to tell people his “mawmaw” had, at all times, 19 loaded guns stashed around the house. After describing her in detail as a dysfunctional, irresponsible drunk in his book, he now thinks it’s funny that she was probably suffering from paranoid dementia. To resounding applause. The sickness of it all.
There were two mother figures: his dysfunctional druggy Mama, and his Mamaw (which means Grandmother in Appalachia--I know, it's confusing). Mamaw was not a drug addict, although a gun nut, and she was the one who really raised him.
Thanks for the correction. The mamaw story does seem to reveal something about his raw opportunism, or whatever it is with this guy. The Vance of 2016 who tagged Trump as a menace and who apparently occasionally had half-sensible thoughts sometimes would, I'd guess, have considered having 19 loaded guns in the house a sign of clinical paranoia, not patriotic fealty to the 2nd amendment that he could trot out as cheap applause lines.
I think, for the moment, we're 'white' if we shut-up and play-along. No yellow star or camps for all of us, just camps for the most disagreeable, but not objecting to increasing anti-Semitism active and verbal, and increasing pressure to go to Israel. That's my guess.
(All four of my grandparents were born subjects of Alexander III or Nicholas II, in what are, at least for the moment, three or four separate states, each of which contained at least five of what Mr Vance would call 'nations'.)
EDIT: Camps for the excessively un-Trumpy may not hapoen at all, it depends on numbers and the extent to which a penal system in the hands of people unashamèdly in love with punishment will be scary enough as it is. I can see them, actually, veing instituted federally in states whose legal systems have _not_ been completely subverted…'leave it to the states uf we xan', if you will.
Assuming we’re getting fucked in November, what’s the next step?
I’ll qualify that getting fucked in November a little bit. If it’s not game over in November, it will be within two years or so.
The Democrats have proven they’re worthless. When the going got tough, they gave in to cowardice and hysteria. They destroyed their candidate who, while appearing his age in public — at a bullshit TV debate — was also being a better POTUS than Carter, Clinton and Obama.
So again: now that we have a de facto one party state (except on the local level), what’s the plan going ahead?
Moxon/Goat: "Here's what I want you to understand today: These Americans who want to kill Americans have, through their intent and actions, already destroyed the thing you want to protect. What you want to protect is already gone. The reason we can't live in a society with them is not because we have any intention to harm or kill them, but because they are eager to kill so many of us that they are willing to destroy society to do it. Either they get their way, and society is no longer accessible to most of us, or they don't, and everyone including them gets to access society. Therefore, I think they shouldn't get their way or be treated as if they should. These are people who intend to destroy whatever they need to in order to rule over our lives to secure their own personal enrichment and comfort, and are so confident in their success that they announce their intent. They do not care about you, and they certainly do not care about your good-faith efforts beyond the extent to which they make it easier for them to seize control. They will never give you credit for working to find their rationales reasonable. They will never return the benefit of the doubt you extend. Our mission is not finding ways to work with them. Our mission is finding ways to sabotage their efforts and keep their targets as safe from them as we can.
Here's what I want you to understand today: The ends do not justify the means, but they do define them. Lying is usually wrong. ... But lying is not always wrong. Do you think people on the Underground Railroad who hid formerly enslaved people sometimes lied to the nascent police officers hunting them? I think they did. Do you think they lied to those in their communities who they knew would report suspected slaves on the run? I think they did. Do you think that was wrong of them? I don't. Do you think they needed to justify the lie? I don't. What people are actually trying to do is what matters. Apply moral clarity to your thinking, and behave accordingly. The ends don't justify the means, but they do define them."
The question is given that what’s coming is worse what’s been happening the last couple of decades and that we’re de facto anti-democratic state lacking an opposition party of any great us, after all the imaging or gaming or whatever, then what?
You emigrate and make America great again by leaving it, or denying your talents and virtues from lubricating the systems of your oppression.
Second, I do not condone violence. But I do not condemn it either. You have to pick your battles, but as history reminds us, sometimes the battle picks you.
I’m sure Trump/Vance ticket will be as awful as we imagine but folks seem to be excavating an awful lot from a fairly prosaic speech. While this portrait of Vance may prove to be accurate it is not to be found there.
A little puzzled by the massive pile on. I’m not thrilled with the guy either but he’s not Goebbels.
JD Vance might on his best day be Peter Thiel's palantir. Peter Thiel is, because as John wrote on this Substack right here Thiel does have a totalized vision of the world and he's just two degrees from the most powerful office in America to realizing it.
Yeah… not sure what being Thiel’s “palantir” means. He’s either Thiel’s magical crystal ball or the embodiment of the software company. If you guessed I’m not a big Tolkien nerd you’d be right . Either way I just don’t think it’s reflected in the text of the speech.
You're correct on both accounts. Palantir is the name of Thiel's surveillance as a service company, deliberately chosen because he's a fan of Tolkien. Also, Vance is in politics to be Thiel's seeing stone, to build out his power base in Washington.
Just a reflection. If Trump wins, and if wither at the same time or later in the term gets a Republican trifecta, they will begin enacting this stuff. and if it goes away from illiberal democracy and on to full dictatorship, it may be a long dark night indeed. There is no one, literally no one to pull our nuts out of the fire if that happens, like we, the British and the Soviets were able to do for Germany.
As someone with the same kind of cemetery who is the same age as Vance, the seven generations range from people born in the 1850s to my kids, who are currently small children.
The aesthetic power of fashoid ideology is syncretism: fact and fiction, history and myth can be mixed together to make as much or as little sense as necessary.
I think populism is, like elitism/elitist/elite, another casualty of the rightwing's annihilation of meaning.
What I hate is that if I were to be asked what is populism, you'd just point at Vance's speech and go "THIS!" And I'd ask "What do you mean by 'THIS!'?" You'd go "Populism" and the conversation would just loop on without ever being able to arrive at a definition.
Describing Vance or maga as populism is the triumph of totalitarianism, tricking a person to think nothing is something. Voters and the media are playing along in their own subjection.
I think populism is meant to equivocate to something taboo -- like fascism, totalitarianism, herrenvolkism, ethnocentrism -- but deceive the listener into believing it's something more benign or popular than it is.
The rightwing does this violence on language so much they have it down to an art. On George Lakoff's FrameLab newsletter, I came up with a term for it: space roaching. (Context: the name is inspired by the villain in the first Men in Black movie and what it does to Vincent D'Onofrio's coot farmer character). You take a word with a generally understood definition, devour the meaning of it, and substitute a completely different meaning and use the same word in conversation and pretend like everyone was talking about the same thing all along. Some space roached words are: freedom, liberty, family, elite and now populist. These are rightwing words used to frame narratives with the rightwing controlling the conversation.
These are dog whistles, though. Normal people watching the convention won't hear any of this blood and soil stuff. Or they will think it sounds normal, true and ok. This is because most Americans don't have very much knowledge about European history. The little history they know is about the big events in American history. That is why they don't understand that this country was founded in large part to avoid the pathologies of Europe: religious wars in particular. They don't know that religious wars tore Europe apart for centuries.
I have been a teacher at various community colleges for decades, teaching students from age 18 to seniors. People are very confused about the past: they get the Civil War and the civil rights movement mixed up; some people believe the earth is 6,000 years old; they have never heard of the Battle of Gettysburg, not even Southern students. Finding any country on a world map is impossible for them. So JD can be as Blood and Soil-y as he likes, and nobody will notice except the real fascists. And they do exist, right here in TN: recently Nazis paraded through Nashville carrying swastika flags. They also made an appearance in my small town to protest a drag show of all things. These guys can infiltrate and con our society largely because of the ignorance of the masses.
As Trump once said, "I love the uneducated." This is why conservatives are constantly trying to destroy public education in America.
And conservative voters want to genuinely be unburdened of education.
And what they "know" about the "big events" of American history is mostly wrong.
One time a Southern boy told me that Pickett's Charge was called that because there was a white picket fence in the way. I wonder what his grandfather would have thought of that statement.
Thank you very much for that laugh.
Once I projected a slide of the Venus of Willendoorf, which is a tiny sculpture about 35,000 years old. A student kept objecting that it couldn't possibly be that old, without explaining why he thought that. Later in the week he told me that it was because the earth was 5,607 years old. I told him to go to the Tennessee Bible College instead if that was the kind of education he wanted.
HE also told a long story about the time he picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be an angel, but that's not really relevant here. Or is it?
Another student told me that since I was born in the 1950s, and the civil rights movement happened in the 1960s, it was likely that my family had owned slaves when I was child.
I had to make sure I didn't laugh about the Picket Fence Charge because you're not supposed to laugh AT students. You can laugh WITH them.
Southerners always complain we treat them like they're morons, then they go prove us right.
Most of the people who graduate from public schools are pretty uneducated.
Thank you for fighting the good fight in Tennessee, which sorely needs outstanding teachers of history at every level. When I was in high school in Tennessee in the early 1970s, I had two excellent history teachers. Mr. Alfred Fischer taught World History; Mr. Eugene Driver taught American History. I am thankful for them and for my dad, a student of history and political science. I am also thankful for my professors and instructors at the college and university level.
What's so farcical about it is that Vance himself has never permanently lived in Eastern Kentucky, nor will his wife and children.
It smacks of the "rightful" ruler of some tinpot kingdom somewhere living in comfortable luxurious exile in Paris or London still mouthing the words about returning home to conquer long after they have lost any plausibility.
The heirs to the throne of Appalachia, being raised in Washington by their Indian-American corporate lawyer mother from San Diego.
JD Vance's Appalachia is apparently the Greater Dayton, OH metro area.
It's funny, because I also have a cemetery that I plan to be buried in, with exactly the same generations as Vance, also in a rural place that I've never lived, and that means a lot to me to visit. But it has fuck all to do with politics, and most of the people buried in that cemetery would disown me if I voted for someone like JD Vance. Appeals to dead people just can't do the work he wants. American tradition encompasses both Vance's reactionary vision and the progressive one of my Midwest ancestors, as well as the immigrant backgrounds of my (and John's) other ancestors and many more beside.
Vance’s speech reminds me of Calhoun’s letter to Richard Pakenham in it’s assertion that there is a permanent and rightful nationalist people and others who simply are not. While Calhoun was more explicit in stating that the two cannot exist without one being the subject of the other the underlying logic is the same.
As an actual "legacy American" - I am the tenth generation in America; among my ancestors is the first of the line to come here, a leader of the Germantown Quakers who in 1688 decided a slaveowner could not be a member of their community, setting the beginning of Quaker Abolitionism; my sixth great grandfather crossed the Delaware with General Washington and saved the Revolution; my great-great grandfather spent his 16th birthday atop Little Round Top, defending the Union - I have nothing but disgust for the descendants of the transported felonious English pig-fuckers like Widdle Jimmie Vance.
He's probably Scots Irish really.
Well, on the other half of my family, I am also Scots Irish; the original McKelvey arriving here in 1801 "a hop and a skip ahead of Lord Cornwallis' rope" as a participant in "The '99," the only Irish rebellion against the English that included both Catholics and Protestants. His grandson, one of my other civil war ancestors, left his position on General Sherman's staff to command Squadron C of the First Alabama Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers - the Southern Unionist patriots. In fact, the history of the Scots-Irish in the South before the Civil War was the opposition of "the mountain people" to slavery (it was the enslavers who came up with "hillbilly" as a slur). Most of them fought for the Union, a truth that was buried after the national government abandoned Reconstruction and let the Confederacy return to power. Nowadays, the descendants of those patriots - denied access to their true history - are among the strongest supporters of the New Confederacy. Sad.
Thanks for the reference to the 1st Alabama - it led me on a fine wikiwander. I had heard/read that there were abolitionist/unionist pockets just south of the Mason-Dixon and in the mid-Atlantic and individuals in the Deep South. This was my first inkling that there was an entire (mostly) white Union regiment in the Deep South. I'm sure the Southern Unionist article in Wikipedia just scratches the surface, but it's material I was mostly unfamiliar with. And this https://web.archive.org/web/20150511233733/https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essays/abraham-lincoln-and-jacksonian-democracy?period=5 has me considering Jackson in a different light (without forgetting his considerable baggage)
Look up 1st Alabama Cavalry and find the re-enactor's website. They're mostly descendants and have a huge archive of original history and documents.
Do you think he means it? His wife is a devout Hindu corporate litigator and his son is named Vivek. I’m not sure whether the dissonance makes this more or less horrifying.
If you want to see contemporary American derangement, look at the reactions to Vance's wife on social media. One Xitter bluecheck goober rationalizes her as coming from ancient Macedonian stock.
The other faction is Nick Fuentes and the groypers -- I need not say more. Another doozy was a freakout over California Gov. Gavin Newsom having more "pure blood" White children than Vance's "half blood" children.
My guess would be that like many upper-class British Imperialists, he would hold that 'the best' of other races might in fact be o.k., and in _their_ case extreme Right-think would make them acceptable Americans.
Note that as far as I can tell, Mr Vance thinks himself superior to most '_white_' people.
Is his wife in appearance, perhaps modulo colour, Aryan?
EDIT: I was going to add, but forgot, that except for colour, and perhaps partially due to public school food and life, Mr Sunak always looked remarkably like any rich,slightly inbred, Englishman, physiognomy maybe a little outside the norm but not as much as Farage or (especially) Rees-Mogg. There may be survival bias in this, anyone not 'looking' 'English' couldn't have risen as high in the Conservative Party as he…though I can't help but wonder if making him Chancellor were the U-English/Desi equivalent of an high-class W.A.S.P.'s wanting a Jew to handle his money for him.
Perhaps marrying Vance makes her an honorary Aryan.
Indians are considered the original Aryans.
And today's Hindu nationalists are as racist and fascist towards Muslims and non-Aryans as any grouper. I don't know if Mrs Vance is associated with the RSS structures in the USA, but as a successful business person in the GOP firmament, I'd be surprised if she wasn't tbph
It depends…some racialist groups use the 'example of degeneration by race-mixing' out to hate even the lightest ones.
In the same way that Neo-Nazis respect Israel as an ethnostate, I don't think there's much dissonance between "devout Hinduism" and blood-and-soil nationalism.
The R.S.S. and Modi's 'Hindutva' has, empowered, resulted in lynched minority group members, literally violent hatred of refugees arrived in flight for their lives, and mandatory school textbooks including the invention of television by Hindus millenia ago. These are all things toward which the Republucan Party _must_ bow its collective head in deepest respect, for great justice.
Exactly what I was thinking of, yeah
In service of his ambition and his oligarchical vision, he'd throw either or both under the bus in an instant.
I don't want to be sure. My bias, against him based on his history and (unfairly) against the ruthless variety of poor-boy-made-good*, says so, but that makes me want to keep an open mind. I recall a Calvin Trillin piece from around 1962 about a 'white' Southerner who demonstrated depths of decency, perhaps out of sheer cussedness, when his fellow-townsmen turned against him '[…] just because I wanted to be fair to the n–g-rs.'.
Hillbilly Elegy was the preface to this speech. In the intro Vance wrote: "We [Scots-Irish] do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart."
When Trump describes himself to the MAGA-faithful as "your President" he is speaking the literal truth. As was Vance when he in his speech he said "I get to represent millions of people in the great state of Ohio with similar stories." They only represent the MAGA-faithful and those with similar stories. Not anyone with a different story.
Then there’s the part in Vance's speech where he thought it was hilarious and sooo American to tell people his “mawmaw” had, at all times, 19 loaded guns stashed around the house. After describing her in detail as a dysfunctional, irresponsible drunk in his book, he now thinks it’s funny that she was probably suffering from paranoid dementia. To resounding applause. The sickness of it all.
Oh yeah, the Times is now reporting that the kid sniper was apparently just looking to shoot either Trump or Biden, Trump was just the opportunity target close to his home town. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/secret-service-trump-shooting.html
There were two mother figures: his dysfunctional druggy Mama, and his Mamaw (which means Grandmother in Appalachia--I know, it's confusing). Mamaw was not a drug addict, although a gun nut, and she was the one who really raised him.
Thanks for the correction. The mamaw story does seem to reveal something about his raw opportunism, or whatever it is with this guy. The Vance of 2016 who tagged Trump as a menace and who apparently occasionally had half-sensible thoughts sometimes would, I'd guess, have considered having 19 loaded guns in the house a sign of clinical paranoia, not patriotic fealty to the 2nd amendment that he could trot out as cheap applause lines.
Blut und Boden — the true American creed. As a Nee Yorker whose four grandparents were born in the Pale of Settlement, where does this leave me?
I think, for the moment, we're 'white' if we shut-up and play-along. No yellow star or camps for all of us, just camps for the most disagreeable, but not objecting to increasing anti-Semitism active and verbal, and increasing pressure to go to Israel. That's my guess.
(All four of my grandparents were born subjects of Alexander III or Nicholas II, in what are, at least for the moment, three or four separate states, each of which contained at least five of what Mr Vance would call 'nations'.)
EDIT: Camps for the excessively un-Trumpy may not hapoen at all, it depends on numbers and the extent to which a penal system in the hands of people unashamèdly in love with punishment will be scary enough as it is. I can see them, actually, veing instituted federally in states whose legal systems have _not_ been completely subverted…'leave it to the states uf we xan', if you will.
https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1813789123276370127
John Ganz analysis remains undefeated
Assuming we’re getting fucked in November, what’s the next step?
I’ll qualify that getting fucked in November a little bit. If it’s not game over in November, it will be within two years or so.
The Democrats have proven they’re worthless. When the going got tough, they gave in to cowardice and hysteria. They destroyed their candidate who, while appearing his age in public — at a bullshit TV debate — was also being a better POTUS than Carter, Clinton and Obama.
So again: now that we have a de facto one party state (except on the local level), what’s the plan going ahead?
The next step is to imagine the unimaginable, because reality is going to be unimaginably worse than that.
AR Moxon, aka Julius Goat, gives a flashlight to the dark reality before us in "Lying to Fascists": https://armoxon.substack.com/p/lying-to-fascists
Moxon/Goat: "Here's what I want you to understand today: These Americans who want to kill Americans have, through their intent and actions, already destroyed the thing you want to protect. What you want to protect is already gone. The reason we can't live in a society with them is not because we have any intention to harm or kill them, but because they are eager to kill so many of us that they are willing to destroy society to do it. Either they get their way, and society is no longer accessible to most of us, or they don't, and everyone including them gets to access society. Therefore, I think they shouldn't get their way or be treated as if they should. These are people who intend to destroy whatever they need to in order to rule over our lives to secure their own personal enrichment and comfort, and are so confident in their success that they announce their intent. They do not care about you, and they certainly do not care about your good-faith efforts beyond the extent to which they make it easier for them to seize control. They will never give you credit for working to find their rationales reasonable. They will never return the benefit of the doubt you extend. Our mission is not finding ways to work with them. Our mission is finding ways to sabotage their efforts and keep their targets as safe from them as we can.
Here's what I want you to understand today: The ends do not justify the means, but they do define them. Lying is usually wrong. ... But lying is not always wrong. Do you think people on the Underground Railroad who hid formerly enslaved people sometimes lied to the nascent police officers hunting them? I think they did. Do you think they lied to those in their communities who they knew would report suspected slaves on the run? I think they did. Do you think that was wrong of them? I don't. Do you think they needed to justify the lie? I don't. What people are actually trying to do is what matters. Apply moral clarity to your thinking, and behave accordingly. The ends don't justify the means, but they do define them."
The question is given that what’s coming is worse what’s been happening the last couple of decades and that we’re de facto anti-democratic state lacking an opposition party of any great us, after all the imaging or gaming or whatever, then what?
You emigrate and make America great again by leaving it, or denying your talents and virtues from lubricating the systems of your oppression.
Second, I do not condone violence. But I do not condemn it either. You have to pick your battles, but as history reminds us, sometimes the battle picks you.
I’m sure Trump/Vance ticket will be as awful as we imagine but folks seem to be excavating an awful lot from a fairly prosaic speech. While this portrait of Vance may prove to be accurate it is not to be found there.
A little puzzled by the massive pile on. I’m not thrilled with the guy either but he’s not Goebbels.
JD Vance might on his best day be Peter Thiel's palantir. Peter Thiel is, because as John wrote on this Substack right here Thiel does have a totalized vision of the world and he's just two degrees from the most powerful office in America to realizing it.
Yeah… not sure what being Thiel’s “palantir” means. He’s either Thiel’s magical crystal ball or the embodiment of the software company. If you guessed I’m not a big Tolkien nerd you’d be right . Either way I just don’t think it’s reflected in the text of the speech.
You're correct on both accounts. Palantir is the name of Thiel's surveillance as a service company, deliberately chosen because he's a fan of Tolkien. Also, Vance is in politics to be Thiel's seeing stone, to build out his power base in Washington.
Just a reflection. If Trump wins, and if wither at the same time or later in the term gets a Republican trifecta, they will begin enacting this stuff. and if it goes away from illiberal democracy and on to full dictatorship, it may be a long dark night indeed. There is no one, literally no one to pull our nuts out of the fire if that happens, like we, the British and the Soviets were able to do for Germany.
Seven generations? Doesn't that include the Civil War?
As someone with the same kind of cemetery who is the same age as Vance, the seven generations range from people born in the 1850s to my kids, who are currently small children.
How convenient of Vance to just miss the Civil War.
The aesthetic power of fashoid ideology is syncretism: fact and fiction, history and myth can be mixed together to make as much or as little sense as necessary.
I think populism is, like elitism/elitist/elite, another casualty of the rightwing's annihilation of meaning.
What I hate is that if I were to be asked what is populism, you'd just point at Vance's speech and go "THIS!" And I'd ask "What do you mean by 'THIS!'?" You'd go "Populism" and the conversation would just loop on without ever being able to arrive at a definition.
Describing Vance or maga as populism is the triumph of totalitarianism, tricking a person to think nothing is something. Voters and the media are playing along in their own subjection.
I think populism is meant to equivocate to something taboo -- like fascism, totalitarianism, herrenvolkism, ethnocentrism -- but deceive the listener into believing it's something more benign or popular than it is.
The rightwing does this violence on language so much they have it down to an art. On George Lakoff's FrameLab newsletter, I came up with a term for it: space roaching. (Context: the name is inspired by the villain in the first Men in Black movie and what it does to Vincent D'Onofrio's coot farmer character). You take a word with a generally understood definition, devour the meaning of it, and substitute a completely different meaning and use the same word in conversation and pretend like everyone was talking about the same thing all along. Some space roached words are: freedom, liberty, family, elite and now populist. These are rightwing words used to frame narratives with the rightwing controlling the conversation.
What I will is 'Nazi-y', or maybe 'Volksy-isch'.
Fashoid.
'{New York "Times" Best-selling Author}itarian'