JD Vance Can't Be Self Aware
Even a moment of reflection would reveal Vance for who he is
Most politics, even the kind that advocate for a fairer and freer world, is projection.
Almost everything within the ugly confines of right-wing politics is projection.
Every single thing JD Vance says and does is projection. That, I guess, is nakedly obvious to anyone who has followed the political career of the current vice president, a vibes-less, juiceless extension of the oligarch class and a blood-soaked handmaiden for 21st century fascism.
It's become even more obvious that Vance is composed entirely of projection in recent weeks as the American conservative project works diligently to help Vance inch closer toward the center of its unreality-based universe with an eye toward a post-Trump future – a future Trump won't let them have without a fight.
At the Republican Party's midterm convention this month in Texas (a midterm convention is something you have when your political project is standing on its last teetering leg) Vance said a bunch of shit that could be defined as projection. Among those statements: "Democrats can't help but to tell on themselves and reveal how much they hate the American people."
This was, of course, nothing short of an admission from the vice president of an authoritarian regime that has turned the nation's immigration enforcement agencies into the president's personal paramilitary and used those forces to invade, terrorize, and occupy cities and states that do not support the regime – what NPR and ABC and CNN might call "opposition strongholds" in developing countries and authoritarian states.
Vance was telling on himself.
The guy who appears to not even like his own children hates American communities so much he starts pogroms against those he sees as undeserving. It was Vance – not Trump, not Stephen Miller, not Elon Musk, not any other white supremacist attached to the regime – who launched a terror campaign against Haitian families in Ohio in the months before the 2024 election. Vance took the anti-Haitian campaign from the depths of fascist message boards to the political mainstream. He plopped that hate campaign right there, before the TV cameras and the political press, and said have at it. Do your worst. And the racists and white supremacists who support Vance and his party did just that.
With nothing to do but troll the regime's perceived enemies on the X platform formerly known as Twitter, Vance has been charged with tearing down Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. That's kind of Vance's thing: Telling rooms full of white folks that They – you know They – are taking away everything from their families and friends, that the pie is only so big and their slices are being ripped away by people who have made the US a "dirtier" and "poorer" place.
JD Vance: "We were tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 10, 2026 at 9:31 PM
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Last week Vance hit on a particularly clumsy moment of projection when he said El-Sayed – a regular dude who likes football and recognizes the American left got sports in the national divorce – only wants to hand out "political favors and jobs to his favored ethnic groups. It’s about pitting racial groups against each other."
JD, buddy, please listen to yourself. For just a moment stop and reflect on the words spilling out of your mouth and hear the accusations against yourself and the curdled anti-democracy movement you've chosen to support. JD, if you're reading: The regime you work for has a hotline for white men who were turned down for job openings in favor of women of people of color. Your regime tries (and fails) to ram through national education policy based on the absurdist idea that white children in the United States are oppressed by modest diversity programs. The greasy, roided-up fella in charge of the military sees it as his job to award the most prestigious positions to white men while purging women and Black men from the military's top ranks.
Denny Carter
It is the American right, as ever, that longs for a national spoils system for Americans they see as deserving of power or prestige and wealth. Not a single elected Democrat in the country would support a system in which only their preferred citizens reap the benefits of government and business and economic success. That is purely a Republican thing. Somewhere deep inside – maybe where his soul used to be – Vance knows this.
It's necessary for a man like Vance to shun self awareness. It is essential that Vance never acknowledge the true aims of the movement he might one day lead, but instead project those aims onto his enemies. This means some part of Vance recognizes the ugliness he promotes from the lectern. He sees these aims as nasty and brutish and deeply unfair to good folks. He knows people would oppose such an agenda so he throws that agenda onto his opponents and points and says look over there at the bad man who wants what I want. Even a moment of self awareness would break this spell and end Vance's fascist cosplay and reveal him for who he is: A vacuous political grifter who will sell himself to the highest bidder, whether that's Peter Thiel or some other oligarch determined to end self governance because it is incompatible with accelerationism.
The regime does not even pretend to like Americans. Rather, they feign undying love and support for their idea of what the United States should be, not what it is. Perhaps this was never more obvious than when American conservatives were uniformly apoplectic about Joe Biden bringing home WNBA Britney Griner from a Russian prison in 2022. Because for them, Griner – a Black gay woman – is not really an American. Griner is merely a representation of how their fantasies of an ethnically pure United States have curdled into multicultural, multiracial democracy. The cries of the American right wing were clear: Send her back to the Russian labor camp from which she came.
Anthony Reimer
They opposed the Biden administration returning Griner to her loved ones not because it required the US to free a dangerous Russian guy – that was all bad faith, naturally – but because they truly, deeply hate Americans as they exist in reality, not in their algorithmically-charged fascist fantasies and AI slop videos of a racially pure nation.
Listen to the president talk about Americans and you'll hear a man who in no way identifies with Americans. He talks about American citizens as the Other, as some kind of alien race with which he's familiar but not particularly fond.
The same goes for when the president talks about the Republican Party; he often refers to elected Republicans as "they" and has worked hard over the past couple months to distance himself from the party as it faces an unprecedented reckoning in the 2026 midterms (White Settlement, after all, has gone woke). It's not difficult to interpret why the president has no identification with the political party he leads: He is merely the face hugger from 1979's Alien, jamming his tentacles into the party, sucking the money and power and resources out of the dying husk of the GOP, enriching himself, and weaponizing it against constitutional governance with an approving nod from John Roberts. That was his only interest in Republican politics. There was nothing else to it.
Soon he'll release his grip on the party's face and scurry away and leave it to gestate the horrors he has inserted within it. And out of the party's belly will emerge Vance, void of self awareness, soul-dead, happy to traffic hate into the political mainstream, fully formed as the normalized version of American fascism, here to stay as a presidential option in case eggs get too expensive under a Democratic administration.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
