On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.
Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”
Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.
I don’t want to understand Vance.
I want to forget about him. I want to forget ever learning about him. And failing that, I want his only legacy to be that of being a couchfucker.
we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims
Hey, you God damned ignorant racist, why are those “third world migrants” trying to get into Western countries? Could it be because our countries have been portrayed as places of hope for the downtrodden, where anyone willing to work hard can make a life for themselves? Or maybe it’s because their lives are fucked due to Western countries fucking the Middle East and Central America for all of the 20th century?
Nah, it must be a plot by the “globalists” to “replace” “whiteness”!
The right wing viciously hates America despite their rhetoric to the contrary.
You cannot hate your fellow countrymen and seek actively disenfranchise them by dismantling the rule of law and the right to vote while at the same time purporting to champion “American Values”.
MAGA are not patriotic Americans anymore than Mussolini supporters were “patriotic Italians”. Just a grab bag of classless opportunistic assholes with a vision that extends no further than the tip of their dick.
You cannot hate your fellow countrymen and seek actively disenfranchise them by dismantling the rule of law and the right to vote while at the same time purporting to champion “American Values”.
all evidence to the contrary… because they do. and they get away with it.
Just because they have been doesn’t mean that will serve as the status quo indefinitely.
There is no wrath greater than the anger of a patient man. The performative rage of MAGA bleating hollows in comparison.
Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced…
“Humans are being displaced from existence by climate change caused by capitalism… but at least we hated foreign people for a few decades before this happened. Wasn’t that fun??? Isn’t hate great!!!”
“America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
It’s funny. The people most likely to be ‘American exceptionalists’ take the one thing that is arguably at least somewhat unusual about America (that we are very much not a nation in the traditional sense) and utterly fucking deny it.
Ah, the replacement mythos, blended with White Fascism and Christian Nationalist chaser. All badness all the way down.
