MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: JD Vance’s brain ‘pickled’ by ‘monstrous’ conspiracies

Former President Donald Trump’s new running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), is emblematic of a deeper intellectual rot at the heart of the newer generation of Republican thinkers, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote in a scathing thread on X on Tuesday night.

Vance, a former venture capitalist who rose to fame with his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” about his childhood in western Ohio, started out as a never-Trump conservative who proclaimed that Trump could become “America’s Hitler.” But when it came to running for Senate in Ohio, he quickly changed his mind, became a MAGA supporter and now proclaimed he would help Trump overturn the election results.

This did not happen by chance, Hayes wrote – nor was it solely a show to win office.

“Something that is underestimated in discussions about Vance and his ilk is the degree to which, while his ideological shift is opportunistic, I also believe that he and large parts of the modern right have largely self-radicalized online, constantly absorbing and believing all sorts of truly monstrous, crazy and bizarre ideas,” Hayes wrote.

Also read: Fox News host: JD Vance “kind of reminds me of Barack Obama”

Much has been written about how the far right has built a following online, giving rise to the so-called “groyper movement” that seeks to bring white nationalism into mainstream political thought. The architect of that movement, Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, was catapulted into the national consciousness when Trump met with him at Mar-a-Lago. These are the kinds of ideologies that people like Vance are embracing when they solidify their beliefs online, Hayes argues.

“A big part of modern right-wing culture is this thrill of the challenging, of reading this or that author or report that is extroverted in whatever way (fascists, racial IQ fanatics, Holocaust deniers, people with very strange sexual fixations and pathologies that they make their own philosophy, etc.),” ​​he wrote.

“Many of them – and I think this is true of Vance and certainly of the creepy MAGA nuts from Silicon Valley – have simply picked their brains,” Hayes concluded.