Welcome to Trump 2.0: The indignities are daily, the uncertainty of whether the federal government will even exist in the next hour is constant, the cruelty is astounding, and the most fucked up part of it all might be just how much we have to hear from Vice President JD Vance.
On Thursday, Vance, whose doughy face and general demeanor are so nerdy and unappealing that his own allies are known for Facetuning and editing him in photos, stopped by the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The 40-year-old—who’s managed to never shed the vibe of being the most annoying, infantile fascist in your freshman-year political science 101 class—took it upon himself to lecture the crowd about masculinity.
“Our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge… you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place,” he said. “My message to young men is, don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive. The cultural message… it wants to turn everybody, male or female, into androgynous idiots.”
Let’s take a look at the subtext of this, shall we? First: Speaking of “masculine urges,” I’m old enough to remember when, last summer, we all had to learn a little too much about Vance’s rumored “urges”—namely, his alleged proclivity for fucking couches. The then-vice presidential candidate faced a good deal of cyberbullying over that supposed meme, which he very conspicuously never denied. So one could easily interpret his CPAC speech as a reclamation of his “masculine urge” to hump the ol’ loveseat.
JD Vance: “Our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge … my message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person bc you’re a man, bc you like to tell a joke, bc you like to have a beer with your friends.”
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 20, 2025 at 10:58 AM
As Trump continues to hit the media circuit alongside shadow President Elon Musk, fawning over the world’s richest and most divorced 53-year-old man, I personally think Vance sounds a little resentful.” In his own words, Vance just wants to “have a beer with” his friends. Except, when it comes to Trump and Musk, at least, that seems entirely one-sided. Sad! But not that sad: Few people in the world are as deserving of humiliation after humiliation as Vance is. As for his quip about young men no longer being allowed “to tell a joke,” has he considered that his jokes—or any conservative’s jokes, really—might be better received if they were funny? Try that next time!
Vance’s comments on masculinity are, obviously, stupid. They also build on this administration’s endless, chilling pandering to anti-feminist backlash. His reference to our culture telling men to “suppress every masculine urge” is clearly his interpretation of movements like MeToo, which protest endemic gender-based violence, harassment, and discrimination. Trump, a legally recognized sexual assailant, is in the White House; an accused rapist and alleged domestic abuser runs the Defense Department; another alleged sexual assailant runs the Health and Human Services Department. Musk, himself an accused sexual predator, has been awarded unilateral power to hack the federal government to bits—this has included disrupting funding for rape crisis centers across the country. But men, we’re told, are the real victims right now.
In the same speech, Vance also bitched about how we can’t possibly have expected Trump to fulfill his own campaign trail promise to fix inflation on day one: “It’s gonna take some time to fix what Joe Biden broke over four years,” Vance said. “It’s easy, unfortunately, to burn the house down. It takes a lot of time to build it back up.”
And he also made sure to throw some red meat at his base of vile racists: “We cannot rebuild western civilization, we cannot rebuild the United States or Europe, by letting millions and millions of unvetted migrants come into our country. It has to stop … You have to allow European peoples, and of course the American people too, to raise issues about it.” These days, the term “Western civilization” itself is little more than a white supremacist dog whistle.
The last thing we need is lectures on masculinity and “rebuilding Western civilization” from a guy who isn’t allowed within 100 feet of an Ashley Furniture store.
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