so endlessly insulting that one of the leading avatars of American fascism is a tubby little forums dork with a millennial dad beard
Replies
ya i fuckin hate matt yglesias
aug 10, 2025, 5:10 pm • 11 0 • view
It is just a little funny that *he* is the “smart” one
aug 10, 2025, 8:24 pm • 0 0 • view
"yeah, I've known hardship" (waiting until payday so you can afford another ten bucks to reactivate your account)
aug 11, 2025, 1:18 am • 5 0 • view
Millennial dad beards are ok, he said for no particular reason, not totally knowing if what he has qualifies as one
aug 10, 2025, 5:13 pm • 17 0 • view
they're fine until you put one on a fascist
aug 10, 2025, 5:14 pm • 18 0 • view
It's never competent people who defend fascism the most. It's always those who most need an unfair playing field to exist for them to survive and thrive.
aug 11, 2025, 3:30 am • 4 0 • view
💯, all the way. It’s the WHY of their fascism support
aug 11, 2025, 10:40 am • 1 0 • view
M-G, you do have a way with words! Perfect description of JD.
aug 10, 2025, 8:04 pm • 0 0 • view
Trump's nouveau riche fascist kitsch is somehow way easier to swallow than an ugly fat slob with Gerard Way eyeliner putting an air of intellectualism on his herrenvolk politics
aug 10, 2025, 5:09 pm • 282 21 • view
He’s a latter day Goring. Wanna take bets on how long it takes him to bust out some pumps after Trump bites it?
aug 10, 2025, 5:51 pm • 1 0 • view
jebony dark'ness dementia raven vance
aug 10, 2025, 5:16 pm • 16 4 • view
I was about to say I wonder who jebony voted for all these years later, but honestly, no I don’t
aug 10, 2025, 6:12 pm • 2 0 • view
Trump really does feel like the embodiment of the American soul in a very fundamental way; I hate him but I think he does actually represent something very atavistic and primordial about this country.
aug 10, 2025, 5:12 pm • 240 15 • view
Trump isn't an embodiment of the American soul but he is clearly an embodiment of the American id.
aug 10, 2025, 5:16 pm • 13 0 • view
He’s the Id
aug 11, 2025, 1:24 am • 0 0 • view
He’s the first white president and the most truly American one
aug 10, 2025, 5:31 pm • 3 0 • view
He’s extremely recognizable in a nineteenth century kinda way.
aug 10, 2025, 5:57 pm • 1 0 • view
Racism. The secret ingredient is racism
aug 11, 2025, 1:21 am • 0 0 • view
The villain character works only because we can see our own darkness in them.
aug 10, 2025, 5:53 pm • 1 0 • view
he's a walking cheesecake factory
aug 10, 2025, 5:29 pm • 6 0 • view
He is the most American president (derogatory) in history. There should be an annex to Linz’s “Perils of Presidentialism” about how heads of state are symbols of the nation but not often exemplars of it, and exemplar strong presidents are typically bad.
aug 10, 2025, 5:35 pm • 3 0 • view
He does — but that’s the danger. Fascism feeds on the unexamined shadow, turning what could be integrated into what must be denied or destroyed. Seeing it is the first step to breaking its hold. www.hivegeist.us/2024/09/13/s... #HiveGeist #StrongerTogether
aug 11, 2025, 11:01 am • 0 0 • view
He's our racist shithead id given form.
aug 10, 2025, 5:22 pm • 3 0 • view
If you saw the death of America in a prophetic vision any time after 1789, it would have Trump’s face
aug 11, 2025, 12:11 am • 1 0 • view
yeah, Vance is something genuinely freakish and largely unasked for outside of elite conservative circles but you can't say the same of Trump
aug 10, 2025, 5:13 pm • 151 1 • view
Really? Vance is just a generic suburban conservative man. He’s like half of my former Trumper neighbors.
aug 10, 2025, 5:15 pm • 2 0 • view
They all want to be Trumps, but lack the nerve and shamelessness.
aug 10, 2025, 5:16 pm • 2 0 • view
I don't think your former neighbors were reading BAP
aug 10, 2025, 5:16 pm • 5 0 • view
You’d be surprised, there are some real whackos in the suburban Midwest.
aug 10, 2025, 5:21 pm • 2 0 • view
I think Vance presents as a generic con on the surface but once you figure out what esoteric Nazism he's spent the past couple years reading you realize he's something simultaneously more dangerous and more pathetic
aug 10, 2025, 5:22 pm • 7 0 • view
So have they. Most conservative Republicans somewhat empathize with the Nazi cause. What did you think GRT was about?
aug 10, 2025, 5:23 pm • 1 0 • view
We assume the median voter is more normal than they actually are.
aug 10, 2025, 5:24 pm • 1 0 • view
I'm not assuming they're normal, I'm just assuming they don't have the time or energy to work up and read through a whole years-long Nazi reading list like JD has rather publicly been doing?
aug 10, 2025, 5:26 pm • 1 0 • view
I don't think they think too deeply about any of this shit and just go on impulse and gutter bigotry. Vance thinks.
aug 10, 2025, 5:24 pm • 7 0 • view
I also really don't think your average conservative reads much anymore, whereas Vance very clearly does (and it seems to make him more and more of a Nazi, based on what he reads)
aug 10, 2025, 5:25 pm • 5 0 • view
Vance-Thiel-BAP politics doesn't have a mass base large enough to win on its own or dominate a winning coalition, vulgar Trumpism does
aug 10, 2025, 5:16 pm • 157 5 • view
post-Trump will be "interesting" bc clearly Vance doesn't have the juice but pretty much no one of the elder millennial generation or younger hasn't been internet brain-poisoned. I don't think the movement withers away but there's going to be some "terrible beauty is born" realignment
aug 10, 2025, 5:37 pm • 52 1 • view
That's why I think Rubio will be Trump's successor, because he still kinda appears normal enough to regular people who want to vote for Nikki Haley instead of Trump, but still gives the base its red meat, while mollifying elite concerns.
aug 11, 2025, 12:45 am • 46 0 • view
Yeah, that's cursed enough that it could be true, I'll buy it.
aug 11, 2025, 12:47 am • 43 0 • view
People say he’s dead behind the eyes or whatever, but I think he is legitimately a true believer. Florida now isn’t Florida 2010. He believes his side should have power, that’s all he believes and he’ll do whatever to make that happen.
aug 11, 2025, 1:00 am • 10 0 • view
I don't even know if he's a true believer. I don't think it matters. He wants power and he probably is in the best position of any of this team of reprobates to take it.
aug 11, 2025, 1:03 am • 18 0 • view
He doesn’t have an ideology, he’s just full of unspecified hate at whatever the left is at the moment. People forget how long he’s been around.
aug 11, 2025, 1:05 am • 11 0 • view
I think the only thing Marco Rubio believes in is “will this particular position at this particular moment increase Marco Rubio’s chances of becoming president?” Remember he was all in on “sensible bipartisan immigration reform” at the point when it seemed beneficial to him
aug 11, 2025, 1:25 am • 4 0 • view
In this light his unanimous (?) approval by the Senate looks almost like a cross-party conspiracy, like Democrats decided that Rubio would be an acceptable successor to Trump and that's why they voted the way they did. Granted I would've voted for him, because I was afraid of nuclear war.
aug 11, 2025, 2:30 am • 0 0 • view
I don't think it was that. It was that a lot of people thought he would be a reasonable voice within the administration, not the modern Von Ribbentrop. That's his real danger: not a conspiracy, but a comforting appearance.
aug 11, 2025, 2:35 am • 1 0 • view
I think it's likely that he is the only reasonable voice in the administration and for that very reason he's left to do the absolute worst shit so that he will shut up.
aug 11, 2025, 2:37 am • 1 0 • view
The future of MAGA belongs to whoever is able to keep both business/media elites on-side by promising to rein in the "excesses" of the regime while letting the base marinate in the knowledge that somewhere an immigrant is being brutalized. That's Rubio.
aug 11, 2025, 12:51 am • 48 0 • view
the complete charisma vacuum is against him. trump puts enough vaseline on the lens to let people enjoy the idea of state violence whilst permitting them to ignore the reality
aug 11, 2025, 1:52 am • 1 0 • view
Yeah, but in the absence of someone with Trump's charisma, the person who has the best handle on power and can consolidate elite opinion will probably win. Rubio lacks Trump's charismatic leadership, but so does everyone else. Barring a dark horse I think Rubio is the most likely successor.
aug 11, 2025, 1:55 am • 3 0 • view
A sort of cursed MAGA Thermidor.
aug 11, 2025, 12:52 am • 15 0 • view
2029 is a long way away, but I haven’t yet felt media elites agonizing much over Trump’s “excesses” and search for a palatable successor, at least not since Peak DeSantis in 2023 They seem to have no qualms and little difficulty covering for Trump or, say for example, Musk’s Hitlergrüße
aug 11, 2025, 1:14 am • 3 0 • view
That's the thing, we will probably be dealing with backlash to Trump by the midpoint of his term, so elites who accepted Trump as a way to beat down workers, minorities, etc. will probably be looking for a successor who keeps them feeling safe while delivering what they like about Trump.
aug 11, 2025, 1:16 am • 3 0 • view
whole thread where i expand on this bsky.app/profile/utop...
aug 11, 2025, 1:13 am • 7 0 • view
Oh yeah, I think I remember reading this and kinda agreeing with it, but not fully. But as time has gone by and I've mulled it over I've come to agree with you.
aug 11, 2025, 1:14 am • 2 0 • view
There's a universe where Marquito gets his payoff for 12 years of clownish syncophancy i.e. a nomination, reverts to the "sane conservative" shtick that fooled a lot of us until 2017, and the GOP kind of returns to a party in a democracy.
aug 11, 2025, 1:49 am • 0 0 • view
But #ETTD and Marquito fits the profile of just one more of Trump's suckers, so I doubt he'll see the payoff. I just hope he fights Vance to the death for it.
aug 11, 2025, 1:50 am • 0 0 • view
This might be overly optimistic, but I think republican political power is likely to fall apart after trump, because every ambitious shithead is currently only restrained by the knowledge that hitching themselves to trump is the optimal strategy.
aug 11, 2025, 2:57 am • 1 0 • view
These people all hat each other and consider themselves gods gift to humanity, and I’m having a hard time imagining anything other than a war of mutual annihilation in the absence of trump.
aug 11, 2025, 2:59 am • 3 0 • view
Vance is colorless, but the real danger is his link to Thiel. When Trump fully collapses, they may already have the fascist infrastructure in place for automated purges. www.hivegeist.us/2025/05/15/e... #HiveGeist #TAIRID #EndTimesFascism #StrongerTogether
aug 11, 2025, 11:05 am • 2 0 • view
Vance will go into 2028 feeling entitled to the nomination and the Presidency. When he doesn't even come close to the nomination where does he go?
aug 10, 2025, 5:53 pm • 3 0 • view
the usual shit. cable. speaking gigs. shitty books that sell 2000 copies.
aug 10, 2025, 10:47 pm • 3 0 • view
I think he's honestly the perfect american president. he's vain, venal, ignorant, racist, untrustworthy, petty, a man of, quite possibly, no positive traits. who better to represent this shithole?
aug 10, 2025, 8:40 pm • 0 0 • view
He is the physical incarnation of the worst things about this country into a single human being, sort of like how Conrad Black is with Canada.
aug 10, 2025, 5:25 pm • 50 1 • view
Vance is just a loathsome creep who masturbates to a portrait of Reinhard Heydrich every night.
aug 10, 2025, 5:26 pm • 35 0 • view
Trump is a habitual liar but he's also weirdly genuine about his actual principles (that everything can and should enrich Trump at everyone else's expense, and that everything in life is zero-sum). Vance holds absolutely no principles, and Thiel's morality is utterly alien and incomprehensible.
aug 10, 2025, 5:38 pm • 10 0 • view
This why I've always bridled when people call him un-American. I think he is one of the most American human beings ever (derogatory).
aug 10, 2025, 5:26 pm • 7 0 • view
"When I'm rich, no one will be able to tell me what to do" is aspirational for an awful lot of people, and no one exemplifies that quite like Trump. The vulgarity, the criminality, the sexual predation, the fact that he has gotten away with it for decades...these are his virtues.
aug 10, 2025, 5:37 pm • 6 0 • view
On the less pessimistic side, his favorability ratings are pretty terrible and I doubt his ability to win a national election
aug 10, 2025, 5:28 pm • 4 0 • view
On the more pessimistic side, if Trump croaks, Vance is ideological and mentally/emotionally coherent enough to use the presidential levers of power to turn the US into a dictatorship.
aug 10, 2025, 5:32 pm • 4 0 • view
I don’t believe it’s true that Vance would be more able than Trump at effectuating an illiberal putsch It’s possible (lotta uncertainty, of course), but Vance is a market-rate far-right apparatchik & podcaster with ~no elite or popular personal loyalty behind him other than Trump’s afterglow
aug 10, 2025, 5:39 pm • 2 0 • view
He has elite support in Peter Thiel and his ilk, arguably more so than Trump. He's the posterboy of thielism. At the very least he's more likely to hard attempt it rather than soft attempt it.
aug 10, 2025, 5:41 pm • 0 0 • view
Sure, Vance can string sentences together, but Vance uses his intellectual energies on stupid far-right intelligentsia bullshit that even most of the MAGA base can’t follow; and he exudes contemptuous prick energy. His subordinates would talk shit about him all day
aug 10, 2025, 5:42 pm • 4 0 • view
I don't think you'd have to be a charasmatic dictator to be a dictator. Vance would be the kind to try to genuinely rule through brute force.
aug 10, 2025, 5:45 pm • 2 0 • view
The 20th century fascists were the product of WW1 and the Great Depression, modern fascists are just lonely antisocial terminally online losers who can't make friends
aug 11, 2025, 1:12 am • 3 0 • view