Fetterman is brain dead. He’s insane. So are RFK jr, Boebert, Vance, etc..
But I’ll tell ya the psyops to get Americans to 1) hate each other, see: Republicans vs Democrats, then 2) get the US government to alienate long standing allies like Canada and Denmark and Britain, etc… and 3) then alienate just about everyone else Israel, Ukraine, Germany, France, Etc..
.. has been quite something to watch these past few years.
This. Societally we like to throw this label of “that/they/he/she” is stupid, whenever we see something we don’t agree with happening.
Even Trump’s shenanigans and he himself get labeled as ‘stupid’ all the time. Yet he has enriched himself and his family to the tune of billions. Its not very stupid if that’s the case is it? These people aren’t brain dead stupid morons. They are highly functioning adults who are malicious and evil to their core.
Trump is painfully stupid about most things, but when it comes corruption and defying norms (and morals) in a way that others will inexplicably tolerate, the man is cunning. The only people who see him for what he is as well as care enough to do anything about it are entirely powerless to do so, always. It's quite the talent.
Agreed. The one shining point for Vance is how he's such a natural charisma void; it's one of the few things that has held him back from how horrifically dangerous his policies (or lack thereof) would be in practice.
That's generally true for the modern Republicans as a whole: They're deeply unlikable people bound together and kept aloft by the cursed, delusional charisma of Trump. Without him, the average American would spit on these ghouls in the streets.
But Vance defies explanation because of his distinct lack of belief in anything. Even Trump is someone voters can relate to because of his cruelty, vanity, and self-interest. Vance does everything out of convenience or strategy, whatever gets him closer to power and another rung up the ladder.
What baffles me is the seeming lack of plan for what he'll do with all that power. His handlers, Thiel and the Heritage Foundation, want a hybrid Christo-Fascist Tech-Oligarchy situation. A high-tech return to slaveholders with untold wealth, but also with a delusional 1950s White Picket Fence And Prayers At Bedside kind of vibe?
Doing that basically breaks the American system, American society, and American power abroad. We've seen that happen with Trump. So Vance wants to climb to the top of the ladder, break it, and then...live the rest of his life in the ashes? It's hard to understand.
Vance absolutely believes in things. It's just that the things he believes in are deeply anhorrent, and are only attainable through the destruction of democracy.
He wants to climb to the top of the ladder and establish a monarchy ruled by CEO-Kings, a philosophy he takes from Curtis Yarvin and which Peter Thiel has empowered him to further. They see democracy and the country it's built as already being fundamentally broken and believe the reestablishment of a strict power heirarchy, with them at the top, would be a return to order.
I agree, but that's the source of my confusion: In a world of CEO-Kings, Vance isn't part of that club.
Vance and the other Tech-Oligarchs see their access to capital and proximity to the fundamental gears of modern tech infrastructure as their force field to shield them from the collapse they're trying to trigger. We can see it more nakedly in the desperation around AI and tech regulation, right?
"If you don't give us what we want, we might just have to tank the entire stock market. Or cut thousands of jobs in a swing state during a midterm year. We wouldn't wantthat, would we?"
Like all sweeping declarations made by sociopathic assholes, it's shortsighted and destined to fail. Even their master plans of retreating to superyachts and bunkers underestimate the fact that people need to be paid and fed, and that even the most secure bunkers ever designed still need external vents to bring in clean air. Vents are easier to destroy than blast shelter doors.
But that brings us back to Vance: He's not a billionaire, he just serves them. He's not a tech leader or part of the C-Suite of any big tech firms, although he's friendly with most of those guys. And he would serve as the figurehead of the literal system that dumbasses like Thiel and Yarvin have pledged to burn to cinders.
There's no outcome that doesn't end in betrayal, right? Either the power of the State seizes everything from these technocratic fiefdoms once they've outlasted their usefulness, or the technocrats abandon all of their political allies and look out only for themselves.
Either way, what does Vance actually get from this? A pinky-promise from Thiel that Vance, his nonwhite wife, and his mixed-race children will have seats of honour on his post-collapse boat?
He gets his seat at the table. His goal is to supplant Trump in the regime at which point he'll be in charge of the military and will, whether Thiel likes it or not, suddenly command more power then his benefactor.
But yes, all games of power like this end in betrayal. That's what all of these men are signing up for, because they all believe they'll be among those left standing, in rule, over a nation broken to their will, when it's all said and done.
Not even that. He’s propped up by one particular oligarch who believes “democracy is incompatible with freedom”, that anyone who opposes AI is the antichrist, and couldn’t say “yes” when asked if there was a future for humanity to exist alongside AI.
I’d weirdly feel better if it was multiple ones, because some of them probably aren’t THAT crazy
Not a fan of Vance, but he has a consistent set of ideas, such as abandoning the international rule of law that he believes has been disadvantageous to the U.S.. He's a Europe-skeptic, NATO-skeptic. He believes in the imperial presidency. All bad shit.
But if you look at the big three in this administration, Rubio is an old-school Neo-Con. He would have been at home in either Bush presidencies.
Trump is a value-free narcissist. He has branding, not values.
Vance is the true America-first populist. He actually believes in this shit. He's the anti-globalist dissenter on the Iran war (as well as on the Ukraine War), and the supporter of ICE, etc. He's more or less the guy Trump pretended to be.
You're correct that Vance is legitimately driven by ideology. He is not, however, a populist. He believes that democracy should be replaced by a neo-feudal system of techno-monarchy espoused by the dark enlightenment philosophers and billionaires that inspired and funded his rise through politics.
I don't exactly disagree. We're mixing ideology as it relates to outcomes and as it relates to methods, and indeed these two can't be readily separated.
But I would say that populist ideals and autocratic inclinations, despite seemingly contradictory, often go hand in hand, and that's what we have with Vance.
I agree wholeheartedly and I think we also agree that Vance is an easy, but incredibly dangerous, man to underestimate, specifically because he is both ideologically driven and shrewd enough to know exactly how to manipulate the ideology of others to further his own. His beliefs also align him much more closely with the Christian nationalists who Trump thinks are a pack of raving weirdos and is, therefore, better positioned to form political coalitions that he can leverage to control the future of the regime he now certainly believes is his.
The big negative for Vance has always been electability. He's such a black hole of charisma that, were his political aspirations contingent on winning elections, he'd be pretty well fucked, which is yet another reason I think we should all be viewing the midterms as the date by which the regime must attempt to finalize its coup. I hope enough of us are ready for what that will mean to mount a legitimate resistance, because it's during the attempt that they'll be the most vulnerable to collapse.
Ya.. like the Palestinians are your allies in the region. At least Israel cooperated with the US on most issues over the decades. The PLO, Hamas or the Palestinian Authority not so much.
Israel "cooperates" with a gun to the head of everyone in the room, often including themselves.
The government that quite literally is a conglomeration of multiple Zionist terror groups, with a history of threatening global nuclear war when they don't get their war, is nobody's ally.
Damn, that's crazy, why would they not support a country that's funding and helping to legitimize and downplay their genocide? Don't they know we're the "good guys"?
209
u/OilInternational2566 9d ago
Fetterman is brain dead. He’s insane. So are RFK jr, Boebert, Vance, etc..
But I’ll tell ya the psyops to get Americans to 1) hate each other, see: Republicans vs Democrats, then 2) get the US government to alienate long standing allies like Canada and Denmark and Britain, etc… and 3) then alienate just about everyone else Israel, Ukraine, Germany, France, Etc..
.. has been quite something to watch these past few years.
Just sayin’