By Frisk Nightingale ►
Around 6:05 p.m. EST on July 13, 2024, Donald Trump took the stage at a rally in Pennsylvania to address his loyal followers. At 6:11 p.m. EST, shots rang out, and the former president ducked for cover. Within seconds, the shooter was neutralized—that is, shot dead—by Secret Service personnel, and a blood-streaked Trump was whisked off the stage. This grisly and chaotic scene immediately raised the question of why?
J.D. Vance had the answer. Vance is, of course, a Republican senator who, before his political career, rose from a quaint upbringing in an Appalachian family and made his way through to Yale Law School. This provided the raw material for the narrative that he wove in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which catapulted him to fame and political office. At the time of the shooting, Vance was the presumptive Vice Presidential running mate for Trump in the 2024 election. At 6:20 p.m. EST, less than ten minutes after the shots were fired, Vance tweeted (or rather Xed) the following:
Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
Drawing on the full horsepower of his Yale Law intellect, Vance arrived at some preternaturally decisive conclusions well before investigators could. Firstly, the shooter was a leftist. Secondly, Democrats have erroneously associated fascism with Trump. The implied corollary is that leftist Democrats, with their willingness to engage in violence and propound mistruths, are the real fascists. Thirdly, and most damningly, Democrats caused the shooting.
On July 14, 2024, the FBI reported that the shooter, one Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican. Crooks had, however, also donated a small amount to progressive causes after Biden’s 2020 election win. Crooks’ politics, then, would appear to be ambivalent and inconclusive; if anything, the registered-Republican status would suggest he skewed rightward. Whatever the case, it seems difficult to say that anyone with that rare level of derangement that prompts them to attempt an assassination on a political figure could be representative of wide swaths of political opinions, either Republican or Democrat or whatever.
But Vance has made that leap and has decided that such deranged behavior is representative of, coincidentally, his diametric political opponents. His central premise deals in the kind of broad and polemical associations Vance has accused the Biden administration of promulgating. Moreover, Vance was able to tender this thesis in the face of a complete lack of evidence about the perpetrator of the attack against Trump.
Thus, we must conclude that Vance’s intelligence is a chimera. True, he may possess the brain power and wherewithal to get into and graduate from Yale Law School, and he may have the charm and connections to publish a best-selling book. But outside of those domains, he is a moron. Vance is one among the staggeringly large number of brainy, well-educated people in America who choose to employ their cerebral powers not to come to equitable, evidence-based solutions, but rather to rationalize their own entrenched worldviews. And in Vance’s case, his personal worldview is corroded by conspiracy theories, religion, and polemical politics (all of these elements likely cross-pollinating into some vague eschatological possibility of religio-political deliverance in the near future). Evidently, Vance is still thinking in hillbilly terms, like a discouraging proportion of Americans—most notably, the Republicans. His intellect ultimately functions as little more than a turbocharger for his inveterate hillbilly sensibilities.
Ergo, J.D. Vance has established himself as a hillbilly of the highest and most demented order. And now, as of around 3 p.m. EST today, Vance has been named Trump’s vice presidential nominee. Given the fact that Trump’s ability to stand up from a bullet wound will likely cement his bid for the presidency, this Uber-hillbilly Vice President Vance will be just a heartbeat away from leading the free world.
