We need to talk about JD

I know we try to think about him as little as possible, but I think we need to talk about the Vice President of the United States. While JD Vance seems to think the job of the vice president is to troll people on social media, host podcasts and travel, he does play a significant role in our government, especially at a time when we have a president who's showing symptoms of cognitive decline.

If anything, we can at least agree he's more able to influence the president than the average Republican, because he's in the White House. He's in the room. Vance is also likely going to run for president in the future.

So let's talk about him. We all know JD Vance is extreme and uses inflammatory rhetoric, but something that's made few headlines is the source of his extreme views and how they're guiding his actions.

The New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie often rails against the mainstream press for failing to adequately cover Vance's abhorrent associates. "Genuinely crazy-making how much the national press is indifferent to the verifiable fact that JD Vance is buddy buddy with internet nazis," Bouie posted on social media earlier this month.

Gil Durán, an independent journalist based in California, has been covering reactionary Silicon Valley figures for years. Some of these figures, like the blogger and software developer Curtis Yarvin and the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, are among Vance's most important influences.

"JD Vance's influences—Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel—are men who believe the United States of America is an outdated concept and should be replaced with an authoritarian form of government," Durán tells me. "The fact that Vance has openly cited Yarvin as an inspiration and that Thiel is the person most responsible for creating Vance as a politician should be viewed as a national emergency."

Durán says Vance has also "plugged into the religious extremist element of the Republican Party," and all of this explains why he behaves the way he does. He refers to Vance as "Trump's most vicious servant."

"The mainstream press has completely failed the American people. If Kamala Harris had been friends with Curtis Yarvin, she would have been forced to resign," Durán says. "The major papers would have made the investigation a Pulitzer-worthy competition. Yet no one bothers to ask Vance about Yarvin, who is widely credited as the philosopher behind JD Vance."

In 2021, Vance publicly called for doing something along the lines of what DOGE ended up doing under Elon Musk. This was based on Yarvin's concept of something called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). Yarvin proposed removing anyone from government who was left-leaning and supported democracy and replacing them with people who would loyally serve an authoritarian in the White House.

Yarvin has many loathsome ideas, and he once wrote that poor people who are "not productive" should be converted into biodiesel that could fuel buses. He said later in the piece that he was just kidding.

"The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass," Yarvin wrote. "However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide."

Peter Thiel is also opposed to democracy, and he loves to talk about the Antichrist for some reason. Thiel employed JD Vance at his Silicon Valley venture capital firm years ago, and he donated $15 million to help Vance win his Senate race in Ohio in 2022.