On the eve of the vice presidential debate, Rachel Maddow used her MSNBC show to speak to the fundamental, right-wing political philosophy animating Republican candidate Sen. JD Vance.
"I have debated whether or not to talk about this on the show, because I feel like it, it gives me the ughs,” Maddow explained. “But I also feel like this is an important thing to know about the Republican vice presidential nominee and what he has to offer and why he was brought onto the ticket.”
Maddow played clips of Vance attacking the government, as well as institutions of higher education which he has described as places filled with “deceit and lies, not to the truth.” She showed some of his many calls to “seize the institutions of the left.”
In the first half of her extended monologue, she illustrated how Vance’s rhetoric—and the right’s general attacks on higher education—mirrors the work done by pro-fascists, like Nazi-sympathizer Elizabeth Dilling, also known as the “female Führer,” in the 1930s and ’40s.
“[Vance] comes wholly from this very, very obscure, eccentric, right-wing subculture of tech billionaires and his relationship with this eccentric Silicon Valley pro-dictatorship philosophy has been pretty widely discussed in print,” Maddows said, turning her focus onto Vance’s dedication to the radical far-right-wing thought-cauldron of his benefactor Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires.
She highlighted Vance’s citations of Curtis Yarvin—a right-wing blogger fascist whom Thiel and the tech bro movement love. Vance has pointed to Yarvin as someone who has written about the radical solutions needed to topple our government and replace it.
Maddow played a clip where Yarvin explains a simple plan for action that he calls “RAGE—Retire All Government Employees.” Yarvin believes that the country should be run like a Silicon Valley business.
“You need a CEO, and a national CEO is what's called a dictator,” Yarvin told an audience in 2012. “There's no difference between the CEO and the dictator. Americans want to change the government. They have to get over the dictator-phobia.”
“They’re gonna have to get over their ‘dictator-phobia,’” Maddow repeated. “What do you do with this level of radicalism trying to take over in Washington right now, and trying to convince the far right that they've got to stop being afraid of wielding this kind of power this way? What do you do with this at the debate tomorrow, in the campaign in general?”
She added, “I don't know, but we got to do something with it.”
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