“Are you a racist?” asked J.D. Vance in a memorable cold open to an ad for his 2022 Senate campaign.
Vance went on to bash the media for smearing those concerned about the skyrocketing number of illegal immigrants pouring across the southern border under the Biden administration.
His point was familiar to conservatives: America’s left-wing establishment lobs defamatory insults at its countrymen to prevent them from expressing unfashionable opinions.
Fast forward to Wednesday night, when Vance delivered his speech accepting the Republican vice-presidential nomination — and MSNBC did everything in its power to underscore Vance’s argument.
While previewing the “Hillbilly Elegy” author’s remarks, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow dug herself a rabbit hole so deep, she must have made it to the center of the Earth.
“‘Lord of the Rings’ is a sort of favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures, both in Europe and the United States,” she explained in the same, at once matter-of-fact and slightly unhinged manner Alex Jones might use to talk about frogs’ sexuality.
“Like his mentor, like Peter Thiel, who had given him all his jobs in the world, Mr. Vance also when he founded his own venture capital firm with help from Peter Thiel, named it after a Lord of the Rings thing,” she continued.
“He called it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s Aryan, but you move the n to the front.”
Maddow family: This is the stuff interventions were invented for.
Not to be outdone, her colleague Alex Wagner piled on after Vance’s speech.
“I know that there was not the same red meat, sort of blood-and-soil nationalism that you might hear in, I don’t know, other parallel-universe Republican convention,” mused a disappointed Wagner.
“But I do think there were some sort of Easter eggs of white nationalism in the speech.”
Like what?
This, apparently.
“He went on a long sort of paragraph at least about this plot in eastern Kentucky, where his seven or six generations of his family are buried, and his hope is that his wife and he are eventually laid to rest there and their kids follow them,” complained Wagner.
“It reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit and indeed the history that should be determinative in the story of the Vance family is the history of the eastern Kentucky Vances and not the Vances from San Diego, which is where his wife is from and where her Indian parents are from,” she argued.
“I just think the construction of this notion reveals a lot about someone who fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity,” she concluded.
Well, first, it’s unlikely his wife’s maiden name is also “Vance.”
Second, huh?
If Wagner genuinely believes Vance’s desire to be buried next to his family is proof of his sympathy toward white nationalism, is there anything anyone could do or say that she wouldn’t point to as evidence of such sympathies?
These attacks on Vance are not just spurious — they’re deranged.
What’s more: They’re almost certain to redound to his benefit.
For the better part of a decade, Vance’s partner at the top of the Republican ticket has seen his position strengthened by the fourth estate’s ceaseless criticism.
Donald Trump is a deeply flawed man, and there is no shortage of arguments to be marshaled against sending him to the White House.
But the media’s insistence on treating every word and deed he’s responsible for as a new horror has trained the public to ignore many of his warts.
Instead of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” think “The Press That Cried Hitler.”
There is plenty in Vance’s record to make hay of as well.
He has bizarrely identified depriving Ukraine of aid as a priority in the Senate, and his journey from himself likening Trump to Hitler to signaling he would have helped him steal the 2020 election is quite clearly a product of his political ambitions.
Yet instead of asking legitimate questions about these issues, members of America’s corrupt media class are dragging Vance’s name through the mud in what has to be the most braindead way imaginable.
Don’t be surprised when Trump’s new apprentice thanks them for it.