J.D. Vance Can't Mask his Dead Soul

If you were to crack open the skull of J.D/ Vance (if that’s his real name), you wouldn’t find a soul, a moral center, or even a modest collection of gears and wires. Instead, you’d find a rancid black ichor, a lost boy who became a lost man, a damp puddle of Silicon Valley Yarvinite neo-monarchism, and a handwritten mash note to Stephen Miller.

There is no there, there.

In the long, sordid history of American political grifters, we’ve witnessed a panoply of carpetbaggers, con men, snake-oil salesmen, degenerates, and garden-variety sociopaths. Trump is sui generis in his repulsive character, but his Vice President is something new, something modern, something almost unrecognizable in comparison to past aspirants for the highest office in the land.

Vance represents a new, more terrifying breed: the post-identity zealot.

He is a man who has changed his name four times, yet still hasn’t found a personality that fits. He is the ultimate code-switcher, a shape-shifting wraith who can play the Appalachian martyr for the red-state rubes and the tech-bro nihilist for the donor retreats in Menlo Park, all while maintaining the dead-eyed stare of a man who just shrugs as the foreclosure proceedings on his soul grind on.

His recent, stomach-churning pivot into pure, unadulterated cruelty was a defense of the indefensible: the ICE assassination of Renee Good in Minneapolis. What makes this moment particularly repellent is that this wasn’t just a lapse in judgment.

It was a formal move in the 2028 electoral sweepstakes, an audition not just for the MAGA base, but a supplication and a bent-knee to the most powerful man in Washington you’ve never seen under direct sunlight or a mirror: Stephen Miller.

Vance knows where the real power lies in the coming years. It’s not in the rallies or the red hats or the YMCA dancing of a geriatric, gravid con man; it’s in the dark machinery of the administrative state’s enforcement arms. By attacking a victim of state violence, a mother of three whose last words were a cheerful. “I’m not mad at you,” to her killers, Vance lionized the agents of her demise, sending a signal to the emerging American SS that he’s their huckleberry...