J. D. Vance, Gangs, and "Scientific Racism"
And you think Trump is bad...
There are currently six major gangs vying for power and influence under the Trump regime.
The term "gang" is not chosen lightly.
Pressed for an answer to the question "How would you identify yourself?", most people in the western world would define themselves in terms of their nationality, locality, or ethnicity.
And in places where the prevailing form of government is described as some form of "democracy", most voters believe that their elected leaders are representing the interests of one or more aspects of their "identity".
A person elected to Congress in the USA is expected to champion many things simultaneously - with the economic well-being of their constituents usually coming first.
But hot on the heels of economic well-being comes the championing, favoring, or protection of national identity, regional identity, culture, or ethnicity.
It is perhaps simplistic to say so (but still worth pointing-out), that economic questions should be matters for "the head", while things concerning identity, culture, or ethnicity are often matters for "the heart".
A clean, decent, and honest political leader seeking the best economic outcome for voters would explain how neo-liberal capitalism actually works.
How Big Business always seeks the lowest possible resource and labor costs, with the least amount of government regulation.
But politicians will of course never blame the economic problems of struggling workers (low wages, high bills) on "The Gangs" who pay to get them elected.
The simple truth is that our politicians almost never represent the economic needs of the underclasses.
They are working for gangs who expect legislation which further empowers or enriches them.
Hedge fund managers. Bankers. Big Tech. Big Pharma. The weapons and armaments industries. Resource and property barons who control agriculture, manufacturing, mining, real estate, forestry, the oil industry.
So let's set aside any lingering naive hope that our major political parties will strive to represent our economic interests.
Which leaves "matters of the heart".
Can we expect politicians to represent and champion our national and regional identity, culture, or ethnicity?
The answer is "yes", but only when identity, culture, and ethnicity can be manipulated, mobilized, or weaponized in a way which serves two purposes:
1) To bring in more votes, or to fragment opposition voting blocs
2) To further the interests of "The Gangs" - the people some refer to as "The Deep State"
The six major gangs vying for power and influence under the Trump regime can be laid-out as follows (in no particular order):
a. Big Business
b. Christo-Fascists and Conservative Ultra-Nationalists
c. The Technocracy and Libertarians
d. US Zionists and Israel
e. Foreign Capital and Oligarchs
f. White Supremacists, "Great Replacement" theorists, followers of "Race Science" or eugenics
Needless to say, there is a great deal of overlap between these gangs, and it would take the mother of all Venn diagrams to show the incestuous nature of these relationships.
With Donald J. Trump displaying overt signs of mental decline, and the media this week reporting on his deteriorating medical condition - "chronic venous insufficiency" - it becomes imperative that we understand the nature of the man waiting in the wings.
Who exactly is J. D. Vance, and to which gangs does he owe his allegiance?
The fact is, Vance is deeply intertwined with most of these gangs, so today's article will confine itself to the last gang mentioned above. We'll be exploring Vance's connections to more of these gangs in an upcoming podcast episode.
"The Scientific Racist Gang"
It's only after various pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are in place that we can begin to see some semblance of a picture.
When I first wrote about J. D. Vance a few years ago, it was out of simple anger.
Anger that a man who had managed to become wealthy would take the time to write an ideological hit piece disguised as a "memoir", the now infamous "Hillbilly Elegy".
Anger that a man clearly the descendant of mixed-ethnic Appalachian Americans would portray himself as a "white Scots-Irish Hillbilly".[1]
Anger that this man used his ignorance of his own ethnic roots to construct a dumb "Scots-Irish Culture Theory" [2] to explain Southern Appalachian social problems and poverty.
Anger that a film director of Ron Howard's standing would buy the entire story wholesale, amplifying Vance's fake backstory [3] to a wider and credulous American audience.
But most of my anger was reserved for the way Vance essentially blamed social dysfunction, substance abuse, and what HE perceives as a lack of ambition, on the people themselves.[2]
Not just on individual people and their individual choices, mind you. He blamed widespread social malaise on something INNATE to these people. Something in their culture.[2] Something in their GENES.
If this had been the extent of his nastiness and ignorance, it could have been dealt with in short order.
First, J. D. Vance is not "Scots-Irish". Not by descent, and not by culture.[1]
Vance is like a kid - a very human kid - who wins a medal in the long jump in high school, and then proceeds to insist that his grandparents were in fact kangaroos.
And the only reason no one else in his kangaroo family ever won a long jump medal, was because they all kept insisting on hopping across busy roads, and getting run over.
They're very proud kangaroos, you see, and won't be told where they can or can't hop...
*****
It is extremely odd when someone chucks a promising career in law out the window, and reinvents themselves almost overnight as a venture capitalist.
Did Vance suddenly discover a hitherto hidden genius for business? Was his grip on his own bootstraps almost Herculean?
No. For some reason, Vance was picked out of the crowd by a billionaire "benefactor".
Once our friend J. D. decided to run for the Senate, I began to suspect there was something more sinister afoot.
When riches aren't enough and someone begins to crave POWER, it is worth asking what they would like to achieve with a greater level of personal and political power.
I've written elsewhere about how, during his time at Yale Law School, Vance and his future wife Usha Chilukuri jointly organized a discussion group focusing on "social decline in white America".[3]
I've also written elsewhere about how Vance's political ambitions have been deeply-backed financially by the ultra-Libertarian, ultra-Catholic tech baron Peter Thiel [4], who specializes in Big Data mining, and sells data to countries like Israel, who use Thiel's Palantir company to assist them in their ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.
I've pointed-out how Vance's wife contributed to the senate election campaign of Blake Masters in Arizona [5]. I explained how Masters is an open and avowed fan of the late white supremacist "philosopher" Sam Francis [6].
I wrote that Masters has also worked for and received millions of dollars in backing from the aforementioned Peter Thiel [7].
Once we had all of these "border pieces" of the jigsaw in place, we could begin to work toward the interior.
And the emerging picture looks a bit like an Hieronymous Bosch painting...
*****
Remember those guys at school who were always trying to join "Mensa", the weird club for people with a need to feel intellectually elite?
The socially maladroit guys who openly believed that having a high IQ score made them superior to those around them?
The ones so deep inside the cult of "intelligence", philosophical thought experiments, IQ scores, tech, science and science fiction that they begin to believe that they are above accountability to anyone outside their exclusive “circle of the gifted”?
People who seem to be skirting the outer edge of a way of thinking not entirely dissimilar to the social and moral "transcendence" of the child killers Leopold and Loeb in the 1920s USA?
The ones who adore statistics (any statistics) which can be manipulated to underpin their belief in their own oh-so-rare-and-special transcendant superiority?
The ones who eventually begin to find a reason for their financial success IN THEIR VERY GENETIC SUPERIORITY?
Vance is being propped-up by exactly those guys, who are now middle-aged, wealthy, and powerful. They have also donated millions to the current occupier of the Oval Office Donald Trump [8].
The affinity between people who adore groups like Mensa and the racialist "human biodiversity" camp within the alt. right have been commented upon and documented elsewhere [9].
But Peter Thiel appears to have been in direct communication with members of extremist white supremacy group members back in 2016 [10].
People like Elon Musk and his former partner Grimes have been open and simultaneously disingenuous in their support of "White Pride" [11].
The admirers of high IQ scores among extreme Libertarians and the alt. right are also the ones most likely to subscribe to the thinking behind books like "The Bell Curve" [12], which presented a deeply flawed analysis of data suggesting that intelligence is highly heritable, and that IQ itself varies greatly across "racial" groups at birth (basically suggesting that poverty among certain people of color is an unsolvable problem, due to fundamental differences in intelligence levels).
It gets worse. J. D. Vance actually felt brazen enough to offer a blurb to a book published last year called "Unhumans" [13], which is essentially a brownshirt fascist call to arms against "enemies" of the alt. right.
The book has also been praised by such "luminaries" as Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Jr., and Tucker Carlson [14].
A final piece of this jigsaw landed in my hand this year via a brief comment left by a follower of the Before We Were White podcast. A listener pointed-out that the alt. right, white supremacist nature of Vance and his backers was sitting there, hiding in plain sight, in the list of notes on the final page of Vance's grubby springboard to fame, his 2016 faux memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" [1].
Note No. 1 cites a 2012 article called "The Scots-Irish as Indigenous People", written by none other than Bangladeshi-American animal genomics specialist Razib Khan [15].
Don't bother looking for the article online, though, unless you're prepared to dig deep. The article has been removed from the website of Discover Magazine, where it was first published. The article has also been removed from Mr. Khan's own website [16].
I just happened to have an old PDF of it lying around the recesses of my trusty PC.
Why is it gone? Probably because it's a pile of poorly informed, pseudo-scholarly claptrap.
Which should probably come as no surprise, as Razib Khan is quite the busy little bee in the field of "New Eugenics". Not heard of "New Eugenics"?
Then you're probably not a regular reader of far right blogs like Taki's Magazine [17], VDARE, or the Unz Review [16].
You would need to follow such blogs to be up-to-date on the new racialist obsession with HBD [18] - "human bio-diversity", which is essentially racism in search of a scientific underpinning.
This jigsaw isn't finished, but we can see enough now to have an understanding of the man standing just to the side and behind a rapidly aging Donald Trump. A mixed-ethnic Melungeon in denial, who wants to play with the "white" Übermenschen.
*****
In various other articles posted by BWWW over the past year, I attempted to connect more dots between J. D. Vance and Trump, and the nexus of tech billionaires who back them financially.
Those articles also mentioned "Scientific Racism", which is a term used by various academics to describe a contemporary resurgence of 1920s-style eugenics - this time using data from the modern field of population genetics.
It is crucial that all of us make clear to our friends, neighbors, relatives, and complete strangers what is actually going-on, and what is actually at stake here.
There is no longer any room for doubt that if Vance gains power, he will attempt to move the USA even further away from democracy, and toward outright White Christo-Nationalist Fascism.
Every single indicator is already on full display:
1) Undermining of a free press via attacks on fact-based journalism, defunding of public media
2) Undermining of an independent judiciary through stacking of courts with partisan loyalists
3) Undermining and destruction of a functioning, non-partisan justice department
4) Undermining and defunding of a functioning, non-partisan civil service
5) Undermining the neutrality of the armed forces by deploying them against civilians
6) Undermining social cohesion with constant attacks on marginalised and minority groups
7) Undermining and stifling normal public political debate by characterising dissenting voices as "dangerous radicals", "anti-Semites", "Marxists", "evil", etc.
In 1930s Germany under the Nazis, it was homosexuals, the disabled, Communists, Roma, and Jews who were publicly demonised as "poison" in the bloodstream of the German Nation.
In 2025, the GOP under Trump is singling-out many of the same groups, with a particular focus on brown immigrants.
It goes almost without saying that a man like Vance, with his creepy obsession with "white decline", will be at the forefront of efforts to "whitify" the USA - if or when he gains access to the highest political office.
It is a source of some alarm to this writer that no one seems to be mentioning that one of Trump's largest financial backers, Elon Musk, is the grandson of one of the founders of the "Technocracy" movement.
"Technocracy" is the idea that only people with a track record of technical expertise or SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE should have a say in government.
Poets, writers, musicians, history scholars, carpenters, social workers need not apply.
And just by coincidence (yeah, right), the same men who wish to form a future "Technocracy" are all of European ancestry, and obsessed with "proving" an innate biological intellectual superiority to other "races".
Pause for a moment and recall how many times Trump has mentioned IQ during his two terms in office. This is also no coincidence. Someone, perhaps Vance, perhaps someone in Vance's circle, is whispering in Trump's ear, like Gríma Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings.
Funny how so many Tech Bros from Silicon Valley are obsessed with Tolkien's work.
"Palantir", indeed.
LEST I SOUND ALARMIST, please read the extract below, taken from another article.
We've all heard of "Friendfinder", I presume?
The owner of that company Andrew Conru (and many other wealthy tech barons) have actively funded groups who supply the "science" behind the belief system of the "new eugenicists".
These are the creeps lurking behind the curtains, whispering prompts to Trump and Vance.
Excerpt from linked article:
"...HDF [Human Diversity Foundation] is part of a movement to rehabilitate so-called race science as a topic of open debate. Labelled scientific racism by mainstream academics, it seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime. Its supporters claim inequality between groups is largely explained by genetics rather than external factors like discrimination.
Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences.
“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”.
In one conversation, HDF’s organiser was recorded discussing “remigration” – a euphemism for the mass removal of ethnic minorities – saying: “You’ve just got to pay people to go home.” The term has become a buzzword on the hard right, with Donald Trump using it in September to describe his own policies in a post on X that has been viewed 56m times."
This is the sick ideology driving the massive increase in ICE funding, and the building of inland concentration camps.
Trump will not finish his term.
And under Vance, things are going to get far worse before they get any better.
*****
Notes:
[1] https://beforewewerewhite.com/2024/07/24/sometimes-i-forget-myself/
[2] https://www.harperacademic.com/book/9780062300553/hillbilly-elegy/
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6772802/
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/leokamin/2024/07/19/here-are-jd-vances-biggest-billionaire-donors/
https://www.ft.com/content/408fb864-5831-4b1d-beef-fd1966b3beed
[5] https://www.washingtonian.com/2024/07/18/6-things-to-know-about-usha-vance-the-potential-next-second-lady/
[6] https://www.mediamatters.org/white-nationalism/blake-masters-endorsed-white-supremacist-writer-who-said-country-should-oppose
[7] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/22/peter-thiel-arizona-senate-campaign-00047536
[8] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/who-are-mega-rich-donors-backing-trump-2024-04-26/
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-07-26/elon-musk-and-peter-thiel-backed-trump-and-vance-to-what-ends
[9] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/jamie-loftus-the-comedian-who-infiltrated-mensa
[10] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/03/18/white-nationalist-who-met-peter-thiel-admired-terroristic-literature
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/books/review/the-contrarian-peter-thiel-max-chafkin.html
[11] https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964160/elon-musk-antisemitic-x-post-ibm-ads
https://consequence.net/2023/12/grimes-white-culture/
[12] https://intelltheory.com/intelli/the-bell-curve/
https://archive.org/details/whatitmeanstobel00char
[13] https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781648210860/unhumans/
[14] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/08/08/jd-vance-support-book-unhumans/74687296007/
[15] https://forward.com/opinion/346533/human-biodiversity-the-pseudoscientific-racism-of-the-alt-right/
https://www.pinkerite.com/2022/01/the-appalling-race-pseudoscience-career.html
https://undark.org/2017/02/28/race-science-razib-khan-racism/
[16] https://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-scots-irish-as-indigenous-people/
[17] https://www.takimag.com/
[18] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/9780815732884_ch1.pdf
Unfortunately I think you may be correct. This scientific racism does sound like a concerning ideology. Hence we are witnessing attacks on science and the labeling of our academic institutions as promoting an “improper ideology”. Thanks for your work.