J.D. Vance Is Dangerous, Garry Kasparov Has His Number

It will be particularly interesting to watch the principle of ETTD when it finally applies to a certain senator from Ohio. The most recent flare up of note in the culture war is J.D. Vance, otherwise known as Putin’s Other Puppet, attacking chess champion Garry Kasparov. Kasparov has lived under communism and he knows who and what Vladimir Putin is. Vance has enjoyed every boost and assistance that democracy can give a citizen and yet he sees fit to spit in democracy’s face and side with the Russian dictator.

This is just starting to get rolling and my prediction is that Kasparov is going to continue to tell Vance where to stick it, in no uncertain terms. Coupled with that prediction is the observation that Vance is one of about a dozen governors, would-be governors, congressmembers and senators who are all eagerly debasing themselves on a regular basis as they vie for the coveted position in MAGA world of Donald Trump’s vice president. Look for Vance to further identify with Putin in order to win Trump over.

JD Vance as the shadow senator from Silicon Valley controlled by tech trillionaires is yet another reason Biden needs to cut off all taxpayer welfare to Silicon Valley and stop bailing out tech oligarch bank accounts when they cause a bank run like at SVB

— Kefka Forever 🪄😈 (@0xKefka) April 28, 2024

This is from The Bulwark in February. J.D. Vance is dangerous.

ATTENDING THE INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CONFERENCE in Munich over the weekend, J.D. Vance continued his criticism of Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia (“there’s no clear end point,” Vance said). Fully embracing his role as a MAGAer-than-thou Republican, the junior senator from Ohio has repeatedly made headlines in recent months for his militant opposition to military aid for Ukraine—and, in particular, for a blatantly misleading memo he sent to every Senate Republican last week asserting that the Ukraine aid bill contained a provision that could lead to a new Trump impeachment in 2025 for trying to negotiate peace. Vance also earned plaudits from Sputnik, the Russian propaganda network, for telling Tucker Carlson that Ukraine needed to be defunded for its own good, since Democrats “want to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian drop of blood.”

Given his stance and his prominence on U.S. policy toward Ukraine, it’s worth taking a moment to look back on a Vance tweet from February 9 riffing on Carlson’s much-hyped interview with Vladimir Putin:

If you read this tweet and come away bewildered because you’ve never heard of “Duglas Makki” and because Vance appears to be criticizing the Putin regime and Carlson, you’re not the crazy one. The tweet is a troll job. And if you dig into what it means, you’ll better understand why this MAGA senator is parroting vile Kremlin talking points about Ukraine.

THERE IS NO “DUGLAS MAKKI.” The reference is to Douglass Mackey, whose alter ego “Ricky Vaughn” was a notorious alt-right social media figure during the 2016 presidential campaign. In January 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s inauguration, Mackey was prosecuted for election interference. The charges stemmed from posts on Twitter—where he had 58,000 followers and was rated a major election “influencer” by MIT Media Labs—urging Hillary Clinton supporters to vote by text message. (There is, of course, no such option.) What’s more, the tweets were specifically geared to black and Latino voters. In March of last year, Mackey was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn.

Why does Vance know or care about Mackey? Because he’s a cause célèbre on the right. The narrative pushed by Carlson, erstwhile presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and many others is that Mackey’s prosecution was not only a dangerous assault on free speech but an outrageous demonstration of double standards. He was punished, his defenders say, for mocking Clinton supporters by inviting them to vote by text message and implying that they’re stupid enough to fall for such a scheme—while a left-wing Chinese-American comedian, Christina Wong, got away with the exact same joke mocking Trump supporters.

You can read the rest of the article, and you should, but the basic takeaway is that J.D. Vance has immersed himself in the far right-wing lunatic fringe. That’s his niche these days, not being a traditional Midwest senator from a traditional Midwest state. He is a MAGA/Putin senator. The purpose of his tweet is to promote a false equivalency, that Joe Biden is or was harassing this journalist. Make no mistake, Vance is part of the War On Truth which is happening in this election year. He’s hell bent on poisoning the minds of the electorate with false information because this is the New GOP, or the MAGAfied GOP, who believe that they can only stay in power by subversive means because they have no platform and no policies. So, anything goes. The article continues,

Exactly a year ago, Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist and mother of two in Barnaul, Siberia, was convicted of spreading “fake news”—that is, posting the truth about the Russian bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theater in the spring of 2022, in which hundreds of people sheltering inside, including children, were killed. Ponomarenko’s sentence was six and a half years in a penal colony. Years, not months. Contrast to Mackey’s seven-month sentence for “memes” that evidence showed, and the jury believed, were intended to keep at least some black and Latino voters out of the voting booth.

And just four days after Vance’s tweet, Russian academic and magazine editor Boris Kagarlitsky was given a five-year sentence for a video in which he discussed Ukrainian strikes at the Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea and suggested that the bridge was a legitimate military target. Convicted of “justifying terrorism,” Kagarlitsky had been initially sentenced to a 609,000-ruble fine (about $6,700) with no prison time, but the prosecution appealed the sentence as unduly lenient, which the Russian legal system allows. The court obliged. Such harsh sentences for social media posts and other expressions of dissent are no longer the exception but the rule in Putin’s Russia.

This is how it could be here in the United States as well. Fox News and right-wing media indulges in angertainment, has for decades now. But 2024 is a different kettle of fish. An accused felon, Donald Trump, is running for the White House again and he’s running from the law. He’s in the first of four criminal trials and J.D. Vance, along with other MAGAs, are all on the bandwagon that this is political persecution and not the outworking of the rule of law.

This is a Yale educated lawyer and United States senator siding with Vladimir Putin. And Trump is siding with Putin. So is Marjorie Taylor Greene and other lunatic fringers. The MAGA right is anti-American and it “defends the Kremlin’s political repressions by trotting out faux “political prisoners” in America, be it Mackey or the January 6th rioters. The America-hating shoe is solidly on the other foot.” Yes, J.D. Vance and other extremists are wearing it.

This is terrifying. This is what’s left of the GOP, knowing that the party is sinking, and grabbing onto Vladimir Putin as a life preserver. Garry Kasparov sees the truth and he credits the “apathy of the free world.” He’s right. Between apathy and right-wing media, we may end up just voting democracy away and voting in fascism.