J.D. Vance Goes Nazi

GOP lies about "cat eating" immigrants might get someone killed.

Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images

If you’re reading this blog, there’s a very good chance that you’re already on board with the notion that American conservatism is a fundamentally bigoted enterprise — one in which any policy or platform can ultimately be pared down to some version of “that person is superficially different from me and therefore undeserving of basic humanity and the means to live a life of dignity.”

This is hardly a revelatory observation, but it bears repeating over and over again for as long as Republicans (and a good chunk of Democrats to boot) base their worldview on achieving success solely through the punitive diminishment of someone else. Their ideology is not only rotten to its core—it’s in perpetual danger of breaching containment and infecting countless other adjacent cores too.

Where conservatism has succeeded, however, is in the realm of optics, where its artifice of competency and legitimacy stands wholly divorced from any actual proof thereof. That a sizable portion of the country sees the GOP and its fellow right-wing travelers as having a valid authority in the national conversation is a sign of just how successful that optical illusion has been, as well as of how many people are incapable of rising above their own coarse bigotry.

It’s so successful, in fact, that it’s led to conservatives becoming complacent about maintaining their necessary veneer of respectability. The largest, most powerful figures in Republican politics have abandoned their attempts at cloaking ideological bigotry in the language of abstract policy and economic shibboleths. Instead, this week, we’ve seen people like J.D. Vance and Elon Musk embrace a form of unadulterated racism so basic and uninspired that it’s hard to tell if theirs is an act of pathetic desperation, genuine hubris, or some noxious combination thereof.

Here’s what I mean.