DAILY TRIFECTA: MAGA's Memetic Man
The "D" in JD stands for "Disingenuous"
TITLE: JD Vance got a former professor to delete a blog post Vance wrote in 2012 attacking GOP over anti-immigrant rhetoric
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/politics/jd-vance-delete-2012-blog-post-attacking-gop-anti-immigrant-rhetoric/
EXCERPT: A week after President Barack Obama won reelection in November 2012, JD Vance, then a law student at Yale, wrote a scathing rebuke of the Republican Party’s stance on migrants and minorities, criticizing it for being “openly hostile to non-whites” and for alienating “Blacks, Latinos, [and] the youth.”
Four years later, as Vance considered a career in GOP politics, he asked a former college professor to delete the article. That professor, Brad Nelson, taught Vance at Ohio State University while Vance was an undergraduate student. After Vance graduated, Nelson asked him to contribute to a blog he ran for the non-partisan Center for World Conflict and Peace.
Nelson told CNN that during the 2016 Republican primary he agreed to delete the article at Vance’s request, so that Vance might have an easier time getting a job in Republican politics. However, the article, titled “A Blueprint for the GOP,” remains viewable on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
“A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or ‘self-deporting’ them),” Vance wrote. “Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.”
Twelve years later, as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Vance espouses many of the same anti-immigrant postures that he criticized back in 2012 as a 28-year-old law school student. In recent days, Vance has amplified baseless claims against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
TITLE: How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/springfield-ohio-pet-eating-claims-haitian-migrants-04598d48
EXCERPTS: City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.
“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.
After Vance’s tweets on the morning of Sept. 10, Springfield Mayor Rue called a press conference that afternoon to try to contain the damage.
He also was faced that evening with the pain that Vance’s tweet was causing locally. Along with promoting the pet-eating rumor, Vance’s post had said a Springfield “child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”
That night, Nathan Clark—the father of Aiden, the boy who had been killed in the bus crash—spoke during the public-comment portion of the Springfield City Commission meeting. Visibly shaking, he referenced GOP politicians, including Vance, and said they had used his son’s death “for political gain.”
“I wish that my son Aiden Clark was killed by a 60-year-old white man,” he said. “I bet you never thought anyone would ever say something so blunt.”
Hours later, Trump uttered the line that launched countless memes. He was called on it in the moment, when ABC debate moderator David Muir said his outlet had checked with Springfield’s city manager and found there were no credible reports of pets being harmed by immigrants. Trump responded that the city manager would be expected to say that, but he’d seen people saying the opposite on TV.
The morning after the debate, parents in Springfield kept their children home en masse. Several schools, City Hall and the state motor vehicle offices in Springfield were forced to evacuate after receiving bomb threats. The city canceled its two-day CultureFest celebrating diversity, arts and culture “in light of recent threats and safety concerns.”
Blood Tribe (a growing neo-Nazi group claiming to have chapters across the U.S. and Canada) took a victory lap for its presence in the town, boasting on Sept. 11, “We are on the ground in Springfield weekly—we even showed up to their City Council Meeting.”
Vance, meanwhile, has continued to defend his claims.
A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.
Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.
Vance has also added to his claims about Haitians, saying on social media that communicable diseases have been on the rise in Springfield because of the Haitian migration.
Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015.
TITLE: JD Vance’s Scapegoating Theory Is Playing Out in Real Time
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/18/jd-vance-springfield-scapegoating-00179401
EXCERPT: Vance’s past writings about scapegoating…cast doubt on his claim that that he’s merely trying to draw attention to a worsening humanitarian crisis in Springfield. Rather, Vance appears to be putting his past theorizing about scapegoating into practice, with potentially dangerous consequences for the people of Springfield.
Vance’s familiarity with the conservative discourse around scapegoating comes primarily via his relationship with the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whom Vance met in 2011 at Yale Law School and who subsequently became a sort of intellectual mentor and professional patron to Vance.
In the course of their friendship, Thiel introduced Vance to the work of French literary theorist René Girard, whom Thiel studied under at Stanford University in the late 1980s and whom Thiel has since cited as a major influence on his political and religious thinking. (Girard has become an increasingly popular figure within the conservative intellectual milieu that Vance inhabits.) Indeed, Girard’s influence on Vance was so profound that Vance has credited Girard’s work with prompting him to “reconsider [his] faith” by converting to Catholicism in 2019.
So what did Vance learn from Girard about scapegoating?
A practicing Catholic who immigrated to the United States from France in 1947, Girard was most famous among intellectuals for his theory of “mimetic desire” — the idea that humans desire things because they see other people desiring those same things. Think of a kid on a playground wanting to play with a specific toy because they see their friend playing with it first.
For Girard, this structure of desire formed the basis of all human society, religion and art: Over time, competing desires for limited resources gave rise to personal rivalries and social conflict, which ultimately gave rise to unmitigated violence. Eventually, Girard argued, societies developed ways to resolve these conflicts using what he termed “the scapegoat mechanism”: Societies would select an individual or group who had somehow harmed the larger community to be ritually punished, often by killing them. The punishment of the scapegoat for his limited offenses thus became a way of resolving the deeper tensions and rivalries within the social order. (In some instances, an animal like a goat could serve as the sacrificial victim — thus the term “scapegoat.”)
But this whole ritual dynamic, Girard argued, was upended by the advent of Christianity. For Girard, Jesus Christ played the role of a prototypical scapegoat, but with one crucial difference: Unlike a traditional scapegoat, which had actually harmed the community in some concrete yet limited way, Jesus was completely innocent of any crimes against the social order that punished him, and yet he willingly submitted to death at the hands of the Roman authorities. In Girard’s telling, the gospel stories thus revealed the scapegoat mechanism for what is really was: a mask for violence in which the real moral blame lay with the scapegoaters.
Vance has reflected articulately — and even eloquently — about Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. Discussing Girard in a 2020 article about his conversion to Catholicism, Vance wrote, “In the Christian telling, the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him. The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful — able to prevent his own murder — and perfectly innocent — undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd.” Summarizing the religious import of Girard’s theory, Vance wrote: “In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.”
In the same essay, Vance even reflected on the significance of Girard’s theory for the modern world: “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them at all.” That realization prompted a change of heart in Vance: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”
Five years after writing these lines, Vance appears to have reversed course. Why? Scholars of Girard may offer one possible answer. Though Girard never said so outright, some of his interpreters have argued that Girard’s idea of the Christian ethic — which in theory offers an alternative to ritualistic violence as a basis for social cohesion — cannot in practice serve as the basis for a large, complex and modern society. As one scholar of Girard has written, “The gospel story is not a myth uniting the entire social order.” In other words, although an elite spiritual minority may take up Christianity as its guiding ethic, the majority of mass society will continue to require some amount of ritual violence to preserve itself. According to this formulation, scapegoating is not only inevitable but useful, insofar as it builds social cohesion among large, otherwise diverse groups of people.
And if mass society needs some amount of ritualistic violence to maintain itself, Vance appears ready to let it play out — having defended his comments even after several schools and municipal buildings in Springfield were evacuated due to bomb threats. Meanwhile, the city’s Haitian residents — many of whom are there legally through a federal resettlement program — have faced a precipitous rise in threats and harassment.
At least on a subconscious level, Vance seems to be aware of his role in raising the stakes of the conflict.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said in an interview with CNN on Sunday. He later clarified that he meant that he was “creating the America media focusing on it,” but the suggestion was the same: Vance is consciously stoking the conflict to promote cohesion among his native-born political base, even if doing so results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.
Meanwhile, the Girardian undertones of Vance’s comments have become impossible to overlook. Vance has repeatedly referenced the unfounded claim that Haitian immigrants are abducting and killing residents’ pets and wild animals — a kind of perversely cartoonish re-enactment of the scapegoat myth — as a symbol of the harmful effects of immigration on American life. In response, he has encouraged his followers to flood the internet with memes of Trump protecting cats and ducks — “meme,” of course, being a derivative of the same word as “mimetic,” denoting something that grows through replication.
In sum, Vance and his allies have stoked a meme-driven rivalry over limited social resources that now teeters on the brink of violence against a minority group, all in the service of repairing the communal foundations of national greatness. It’s a scene ripped directly from the pages of Girard — but reality may prove far messier than theory.