Former President Donald Trump's new running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), is emblematic of a deeper intellectual rot at the heart of the newer generation of Republican thinkers, wrote MSNBC's Chris Hayes in a scathing thread on X Tuesday evening.
Vance, a former venture capitalist who became famous for his "Hillbilly Elegy" memoir of growing up in western Ohio, started out as a never-Trump conservative who proclaimed Trump could become "America's Hitler" — but rapidly changed his tune when it came time to run for Senate in Ohio, going full-blown MAGA and now proclaiming he would help Trump overturn the results of elections.
That didn't happen by accident, wrote Hayes — and it's not entirely an act to win office, either.
"Something under appreciated in discussions of Vance and his ilk is the degree to which, yes, his ideological transformation is opportunistic, but also I think he and huge swaths of the modern right really have self-radicalized largely online and are constantly imbibing all kinds of genuinely monstrous, insane and bizarre ideas and have come to believe them," wrote Hayes.
Read also: Fox News host: J.D. Vance 'kind of reminds me of Barack Obama'
Much ink has been spilled about how the far-right has established a following online, giving rise to the so-called "Groyper movement" seeking to inject white nationalism into mainstream political thought; the architect of this, Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, was catapulted into national awareness when Trump took a meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago. These are the kinds of ideologies that people like Vance are adjacent to as they harden their beliefs online, Hayes argued.
"A big part of modern right-wing culture is this frisson of the elicit, the reading of this or that writer or account who are outre in whatever ways (fascists, race-IQ obsessives, holocaust denial adjacent, people with very weird sexual fixations and pathologies they turn into their own philosophy, etc)" he wrote.
"A lot of them, and I think is true of Vance and definitely true of the creepy Silicon Valley MAGA weirdos, have simply pickled their brains," Hayes concluded.
