J.D. Vance Can't Mask His Dead Soul.

Vance is a man of a thousand faces, each one wearing a mask.

Rick Wilson - January 13th

If you were to crack open the skull of JD Vance (if that’s his real name), you wouldn’t find a soul, a moral center, or even a modest collection of gears and wires. Instead, you’d find a rancid black ichor, a lost boy who became a lost man, a damp puddle of Silicon Valley Yarvinite neo-monarchism, and a handwritten mash note to Stephen Miller.

There is no there, there.

In the long, sordid history of American political grifters, we’ve witnessed a panoply of carpetbaggers, con men, snake-oil salesmen, degenerates, and garden-variety sociopaths. Trump is sui generis in his repulsive character, but his Vice President is something new, something modern, something almost unrecognizable in comparison to past aspirants for the highest office in the land.

Vance represents a new, more terrifying breed: the post-identity zealot.

He is a man who has changed his name four times, yet still hasn’t found a personality that fits. He is the ultimate code switcher, a shape-shifting wraith who can play the Appalachian martyr for the red-state rubes and the tech-bro nihilist for the donor

retreats in Menlo Park, all while maintaining the dead-eyed stare of a man who just shrugs as the foreclosure proceedings on his soul grind on.

His recent, stomach-churning pivot into pure, unadulterated cruelty was a defense of the indefensible: the ICE assassination of Renee Good in Minneapolis. What makes this moment particularly repellent is that this wasn’t just a lapse in judgment.

It was a formal move in the 2028 electoral sweepstakes, an audition not just for the MAGA base, but a supplication and a bent-knee to the most powerful man in Washington you’ve never seen under direct sunlight or a mirror: Stephen Miller.

Vance knows where the real power lies in the coming years. It’s not in the rallies or the red hats or the YMCA dancing of a geriatric, gravid con man; it’s in the dark machinery of the administrative state’s enforcement arms. By attacking a victim of state violence, a mother of three whose last words were a cheerful “I’m not mad at you,” to her killers, Vance lionized the agents of her demise, sending a signal to the emerging American SS that he’s their huckleberry



He wants the guys with the badges and the tactical gear, dragging American citizens out of their cars and sending some to the morgue, that he’s their guy. It’s his application for the Bubba Praetorians to be on his side, to remind them he believes in their absolute immunity, and that he will let them keep killing Americans for sport.

It’s a move that is simultaneously enormously dangerous and pathetically thirsty, the behavior of a beta-male bully who hopes that by holding the jacket of the guy doing the beating, he might eventually get to take the baddie to prom.

Vance understands better than Trump, and perhaps even more than Miller, that secret police organizations in authoritarian states hold a powerful veto over who gets elected, who gets to take office, and who gets to live or die; they’re the ones with guns, armored vehicles, and “absolute immunity.” Vance sees the future, and it’s dark, authoritarian, and violent to his opponents.

Vance was also sending a clear 2028 message the MAGA influencer media and the MAGA political base of dictator-curious extremists, that he embraces their grotesque incentive structures: cruelty, racial animus, social division, and cheerleading a weaponized government agency devoted to suppressing the speech and rights of the people who they hate: the immigrant, the literate, the compassionate, and those devoted to exercising their rights.

Not by accident, Vance has also been highlighting the lies and agitporn of the MAGA influencer class who have descended on Minnesota like maggots on roadkill. His message to them is that the circus of propaganda and division will continue, monetized with every violent attack by ICE.

What makes Vance truly loathsome, in a way that is frankly exhausting to chronicle, is his visceral hatred for the very ladder he climbed. This is a man who was rescued from the bleakest corners of the rust belt not by his bootstraps, but by the liberal meritocracy he now decries as a satanic elite.

The educational and political odyssey of JD Vance is less a “hillbilly elegy” and more a meticulously funded blueprint for the very elitism he now claims to dismantle. To understand the man, one must look at the three distinct pillars that hoisted him out of Middletown and into the vice presidency, each one a taxpayer or state-subsidized “springboard” that he has since attempted to kick away from the feet of others.

Vance’s first escape from the cycles of poverty he documented so lucratively was the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served as a combat correspondent. While his service is honorable, the political irony lies in the GI Bill.

This massive, federal, taxpayer-funded entitlement program was the engine that powered his transition. It provided the tuition and housing that allowed him to focus entirely on his studies. Today, as the aspiring standard-bearer for Project 2025’s vision for America, Vance wants to lead a party that daily derides “federal handouts” and “government overreach.” Vance stands as the ultimate beneficiary of the American social safety net, but would love to shred it for everyone else.

Before the Ivy League, there was Ohio State University, a land-grant institution built on the radical idea that the state should provide high-quality, subsidized education to the masses. Vance graduated in just two years, a feat made possible by the resources of a public university. Yet, in his current political incarnation, the universities are the home of woke DEI socialism, and he’s all-in on the aggressive attacks on academic freedom, to say nothing of their funding and tax status.

Then came Yale Law School, the apex of the American meritocracy and one of the Ivy League’s ultimate citadels. It was here that Vance was truly born into the global elite. Yale didn’t just give him a law degree; it gave him a network, including Amy Chua (who convinced him to write his memoir) and Peter Thiel (who funded his subsequent ventures and political rise and remains his Palpatine).

The transformation was so total that some accounts of his time at Yale describe a man deeply searching for identity, but they should be seen as the narrative of a man whose entire persona is a series of strategic acquisitions from the institutions he now brands as “woke” and “corrupt.”

He took the scholarships, he drank the wine, learned the code and mores of Silicon Valley, married the high-flying corporate litigator, and then he turned around and told the people back home that the systems that helped him are their mortal enemies. It’s the ultimate “I got mine, Jack” disguised as a populist manifesto. He views his own past not as a source of empathy, but as a marketing gimmick to be exploited and then discarded.

To keep track of the many iterations of the man who would be King, consider the following data points: he was once James Donald Bowman, then James David Hamel, then J.D. Vance (with periods), then JD Vance (No periods). He is a man who has changed his name four times, but hasn't yet found a single identity that doesn't smell like a rental, like a flag of convenience.

The recent, bizarre revelation, delivered with the casual drop of a nightly weather report, that he once “convinced himself he was gay” until Peter Thiel essentially talked him out of it is one more of the Many Masks of J.D. Vance. In any other era of conservatism, this would have been a career-ending “Da fuq?” moment for the religious right. Instead? Silence.

The movement didn’t care because they recognized a fellow traveler in the land of transactional identity.

Everything in Vance’s life is a deal. His politics, his sexuality, his religion (his high-octane conversion to Catholicism is about as authentic as a Canal Street Rolex), and his name are all just variables in an equation where the solution is always push a code revision to the Vance GitHub. His own internal life is a mutating software platform, the program under eternal revision and updating, not because he’s learning and improving, but because he’s optimizing himself for power.

Perhaps the darkest chapter in the Vance Saga is the role of his wife, Usha. She is a child of immigrants, a brilliant lawyer by most accounts, and to the blood-and-soil white nationalist wing of the movement JD now leads, a “jeet.” If you’re not familiar with the term, God bless you, but it’s the alt-right’s slur for Indians, the subcontinent’s n-word.

As the racial purity cohort of the MAGA movement grows in volume and ferocity, Vance doesn’t just ignore them, much less muster the moral courage to tell them to fuck off; he flirts with them, teases them, endorses them, and gives them everything but a rousing chorus of “Dees Boys is Misegenated!”

Vance has fully embraced the “no enemies to my right” philosophy of MAGA. Vance knows the alt-reich that increasingly dominates the MAGA GOP that views his own children as a “demographic threat,” and he’s fine with it. It is a level of moral cowardice that defies standard political analysis.

There’s a reason the weird chemistry between Vance and America’s Most Grieving Widow, Erika Kirk, drew so much public attention: for Vance to succeed with the MAGA base as it is today, particularly with the younger cohort for whom Nazism and eugenics have underappreciated virtues, he’ll need to ditch the brown girl and find himself an Aryan princess.

To sell out your country for a slot as Donald Trump’s VP is one thing; to stand by while your own family is placed on the rhetorical chopping block by your “allies” is a special kind of moral destitution.

JD Vance is the personification of the howling void of social media culture; a man who rewrites his values and history with a blissful ignorance that the Internet never forgets. His story is the Hillbilly Elegy that ended in a funeral for his own integrity.

He is a man who has spent his entire life running away from where he came from, only to realize that the only way to get ahead is to pretend he never left, while simultaneously burning the bridge behind him.

He isn’t a leader; he’s a symptom. He’s what happens when you combine a Yale education with a roaring void where his character should be and a desperate, clawing need to be the next somebody. The pharmaceutical addiction he chronicled in his family is nothing compared to his addiction to the sweet opiate of power.

He’s not the voice of the working class; he’s the ventriloquist’s dummy for the darkest impulses of the American tech oligarchy and racial arsonist, a shameless, endlessly metamorphic husk of a man.

And the worst part? He knows we know.

And he doesn’t care.

Vance is a man of a thousand faces, and every single one of them is wearing a mask