After weeks of dodging and weaving, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, finally bit the bullet and endorsed the Big Lie. Donald Trump's running mate has been coy about echoing his boss's false claims that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, but Wednesday, Vance came right out and claimed Trump was the true winner in 2020. When asked by a reporter if Trump lost in 2020, Vance feigned exasperation and said, "No. I think there are serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use."
That's the part of his quote getting the most attention, but what he said next may be even more chilling:
Here’s the thing that I focus on. Because what the media will do, they’ll focus on the court cases, or they’ll focus on some crazy conspiracy theory. What I know, what verifiably I know happened, is that in 2020, large technology companies censored Americans from talking about things like the Hunter Biden laptop story. And that had a major, major consequence on the election.
He reiterated this point later that day, again pretending to be exhausted by reporters asking him about it: "I think that Big Tech rigged the election in 2020."
Vance appears to believe he's found a nifty little tapdance that allows him to both back Trump's ridiculous lies while also holding himself out as too smart to really believe all that nonsense. As usual, Vance is not nearly as clever as he seems to think he is. Instead of coming across as "MAGA, but smarter," he reads like a naked opportunist who views his own voters with contempt. He is so worried that journalists will think he's stupid that he will tacitly admit he's lying rather than let reporters think he might actually believe this stuff. This isn't the first time, either, as we saw when he told CNN he feels he's entitled to "create stories" smearing innocent people as cat-eaters.
But Vance's novel spin on the Big Lie isn't just a sad attempt to look smart in front of reporters. It's deeply tied to the larger political project that Vance, far more than Trump himself, is deeply enmeshed in: Building the pseudo-intellectual scaffolding to justify fascism. In this way, Vance's version of the Big Lie may be even more dangerous than the original rolled out by Trump in 2020.
While some of Trump's co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell generated buzzwords — "Dominion machines," "mules" and "Hugo Chavez" — to create the illusion of evidence, Trump himself was not all that interested in filling the Big Lie with manufactured details. That's the old-school style of conspiracy theory, where the theorists fling around names and dates, in hopes it sounds like they are investigating, instead of making it all up. Trump was too lazy to bother. Vague "fraud" was alleged and cities with large Black populations were accused of specifics-free funny business, but he didn't bother with drafting many fictional particulars. It was all just a thin cover for Trump and his supporters to say the only legitimate voters are white.
Vance is doing something different from either Trump or the Mike Lindell crowd, with their string-covered bulletin boards. He's arguing that tech companies are obliged to publish right-wing disinformation, and their failure to do so means democracy is forfeit. The Hunter Biden laptop gambit is a red herring. It's technically true that Twitter toggled stories about Biden's laptop for 24 hours while determining if the story was real, but no one with functioning cognitive capacities mistakes that for a serious case of censorship. Instead, what chaps the hide of Vance and all other Republicans whining about "censorship" is the inadequate job social media companies are doing of keeping disinformation off their platforms.
Put simply, Vance is yet again asserting not only that Republicans have a right to lie, but that they are entitled to have those lies amplified on massive platforms. One is reminded of his tantrum during the vice presidential debate, when Vance whined, "You weren't going to fact-check" at the debate moderators for correcting a lie he kept repeating about immigrants. Vance also threw a fit last week on ABC when the host called him out for lying about Biden's hurricane response, calling it "nit-picking" when she correctly noted it is untrue that FEMA was neglecting Republican-voting areas.
Trump's lies stem from a lifetime of being a cheat and a fraud, who will say whatever it takes to get ahead. Vance's lies — and the fact that he keeps insisting he's entitled to lie — are part of a larger ideological project of creating "intellectual" rationales for fascism. As he showed Dana Bash on CNN with his "creating stories" remarks, he employs an "ends justify the means" approach to lying. In this view, he and his are the only legitimate rulers, and therefore there is no limit on what they can do to seize the power that is rightfully theirs.
As has been well-documented, Vance and his billionaire benefactor, Peter Thiel, are deeply involved in a pseudo-intellectual movement of enemies of democracy. Some, like Curtis Yarvin, might identify as "neo-monarchist." Others, like Vance's Twitter buddy Costin Vlad Alamariu, proudly call themselves fascists. But whatever labels they apply, they share a belief that democracy has failed and must replaced by dictatorship. Yarvin, for instance, has insisted Americans must "get over their dictator phobia."
Vance is more coy than his buddies, but his antipathy to democracy is never far from the surface. During his Republican National Convention speech, Vance rejected the long-standing view "that America is an idea." Vance ignored the fact that GOP idol Ronald Reagan repeatedly insisted that "America is freedom" and that what defines America is not an ethnicity but that "we believe in our capacity for self-government." Vance rejected both the history of the American Revolution and Reagan's words to offer a blood-and-soil nationalism as a replacement. "It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future," he said. America, in his telling, isn't found in the Constitution or the concept of democracy, but in a "cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky" where his white ancestors are buried. In his view, a small number of immigrants may be allowed in. His wife, who married into a white family, appears to get a pass. Still, he rejected the concept of a nation formed by laws uniting people of different races and identities, in favor of an ethnonationalist view of America.
Vance didn't spell out the implications of this dramatic shift in the definition of "American," but it's not hard to see what they are. When tensions arise between democratic laws and preserving a white ethnostate, he unmistakably believes democracy must give way. For the MAGA movement, that time has come. The majority of voters back the view that America is a multiracial democracy, not a white ethnostate. And so the majority, in his view, should not have a say. Only "real" Americans should count.
In light of this, it's easier to make sense of why Vance barely bothers to hide his belief that there's no sin in lying for the fascist cause. Empiricism, rationality and truth are all values entwined with the democratic ideal. The concept of self-governance requires believing citizens are entitled to reality-based information to make informed decisions. But if what matters to you is not democracy, but preserving your concept of the correct American ethnic hierarchies, then the truth value of information doesn't matter. In Vance's view, a lie that upholds his preferred social order is always superior to a fact.
In a democracy, we should want social media companies to use their First Amendment right to refuse to publish fascist propaganda. If one believes in the concept of self-governance, it's self-evident that the people should have access to trustworthy sources of information. Trump is a liar because he's self-serving. Vance's vigorous defense of lying is even more disturbing. It's part of a larger ideological rejection of democracy. He's setting up MAGA as more than a personality cult around Trump. He's hoping to shepherd MAGA fully into a fascist movement, one that will outlive Trump.
