Today I want to say something very clearly.
JD Vance Must NEVER Become President of the United States.
The reason I want to say this is because I know that if he is president, within a very few weeks, Most Americans, whether they are Republican voters, Democrat voters, independents, black, white, brown, MAGA hat wearers, left-wing activists, will agree on one thing. We will all wish and look nostalgically back on the days when Donald Trump was president. You read that right. I am not a Trump fan. But Trump’s sociopathic presidency, his quest for personal revenge on personal enemies, real or perceived, his pardoning many criminals across the board from the people who stormed the Capitol to his buddies in finance and Bitcoin and all the rest of it, will look like nothing compared to JD Vance.
Why? Because Trump’s agenda has always been about himself. And his unhinged policies when it comes to trade and all the rest of it have simply been things that he has carried in his brain since his youth. You can go back and look at Trump interviews with Howard Stern or anyone else or his association with Epstein and all the rest. And it’s always the same guy chasing women, grabbing them by the crotch. Grabbing them by the pussy, as he put it, but he has no nefarious agenda other than himself. He’s easy to read now. This has not been good for the country, and people who have followed my commentaries know my opinion on this. But JD Vance is a completely different sort of animal. JD Vance is a young American Napoleon.
JD Vance is a power-seeking person who will do anything to get that power.
And one of the things JD Vance has done has made a deal with numerous billionaires who have backed him. Along with Tucker, Carlson and others in the United States that Carlson consorts with and puts on his program, the rising right-wing, anti-semitic branch of the Republican right. People who would shock evangelical Christians who regard Israel as chosen by God. People who would shock Democratic voters who have backed American intervention on behalf of the state of Israel. What these new breed of oligarchs are about are also themselves, but they are into power. People like Peter Thiel. Elon Musk.
These titans of the tech bro conglomerates that have sold our children down the river by putting everything from violent porn online without restriction because they believe in free speech, with no limits, as long as they profit from it, by turning child against parent because child is staring into a smartphone hooked by deliberately crafted algorithms by these same people to keep sending us all down reactionary rabbit holes so right-wing people hear only from right-wing people, manosphere people only from manosphere people, left-wing feminists only from left-wing feminists, trans activists only from trans activists. We are at each other’s throats because the oligarchal rulers of our country—Yes, they are rulers. We talk about no kings—How about rulers of our country are not sitting in Washington. They are sitting in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk has more power in his little finger than the president of the United States right now, no matter who’s sitting in the White House.
And my problem with JD Vance is that unlike Donald Trump, who has been happy to suck up the adulation of the butt-kissing billionaires who showed up at his inauguration for his second term, etc. JD Vance has laid the groundwork to become the creature of the billionaire class. And now that the absolutely disgusting Epstein files are revealing the odious sex pest Donald Trump turned out to be, we need to focus on something else, and that is that there’s something much more dangerous, and that’s JD Vance.
Power is being re-centralized under the guise of populism.
JD Vance and his billionaire friends have conspired, and yes, I’m using that word advisedly, knowing that 99.999% of all conspiracy theories, anti-vax, and the rest of it is just pure nonsense and made-up garbage.
That said, just like paranoids can have real enemies, even anti-conspiracy theory people like me can understand that there are actual conspiracies, and one of them, by the way, that is not hidden is that in 2019, a small group of right-wing donors rented a resort outside the 100-person town of Rockbridge, Ohio, for a summit to secure the future of the MAGA movement. They aimed to turn a singular candidate, President Donald Trump, into an enduring political coalition with a pipeline of voters, donors, and candidates that would cement a radical transformation of the GOP. Convinced by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and JD Vance, then an investor who had written a best-selling memoir. The meeting included hedge fund heiress Rebecca Mercer, then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, etc.
And this was all put together by someone called Buskirk. Buskirk argues that MAGA. And its defiance against the establishment is not enough. And what we need instead, as he puts it, is a permanent change in American government from a democracy to one that has a new kind of aristocracy of rulers. The people JD Vance works for, in fact, which will never be the American people, but the billionaires. And that’s where we are. So when you look at what’s happening and you understand that Chris Buskirk leads this coalition of business leaders and tech bros, the problem with JD Vance will not be JD Vance. The problem will be that he is a sycophant follower of, put in place by a cabal of billionaires who have been very upfront about their desire to control American policy.
What you see now is that this movement is no longer about voters. It’s about investors. And these investors are billionaires with, in one case, a trillion-dollar pay package. The Rockbridge Network isn’t a grassroots coalition. It’s a donor consortium. Venture capitalists, tech founders, and hedge fund heirs coordinating campaigns, data options, even propaganda films. They use the idea of the base as a marketing segment, not a community. They could care less about us. Now, in contrast to that, by the way, think of the Spanish pop star Rosalía and her new album Lux that represents so much of the Gen Z cohort of people who follow her.
Now, JD Vance claims to be a Roman Catholic. He says he converted, as did Tucker Carlson; a strange type of conversion to this kind of new coalition of billionaires, anti-Semites, greed merchants, and above all, power-seeking people who think that they are somehow ordained, divinely ordained to rule. And that’s who Tucker Carlson represents. That’s who JD Vance represents. And they are in league with each other to put JD Vance in the presidency, a presidency that I want to repeat again will make all of us, including right-wing MAGA people, wish for the good old days when it was just Donald Trump in the White House. Rockbridge built a massive voter-profiling database using membership in churches, hunting clubs, and outdoor groups, recording shared human experiences into exploitable analytics. Friendship, faith, and leisure become funnels for political manipulation, and that is the world that JD Vance is part of.
Now, the reason I bring up Rosalía and her new album, Lux, which, by the way, is a gorgeous album recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra (which, by the way, I worked with many, many years ago, 40 years ago. They recorded the soundtrack to a film series I made with my evangelical philosopher father that I produced and directed called How Should We Then Live? followed by the one that began the pro-life movement in the evangelical circles called Whatever Happened to the Human Race? And we recorded with the LSO, the London Symphony Orchestra, and that was our soundtrack. It was good enough to be released as an album, by the way, but that’s another story). Anyway, Rosalía’s new album, Lux, which is gorgeous, is her meditation on the saints. And in that album, this Gen Z singer says, “Who could live between the two? First, love of the world, and then love God. Who could live between the two? First, love the world, and then love God. Who could come from this earth and enter heaven and return to earth?”
And the entire album, which unlikely as it seems that Gen Z would love globally, is an enormous hit, is a meditation on the saints of Christianity and the saints of other religions. What sets them apart? Now, why do I bring this up in the middle of something about JD Vance? Because. How amazing that Rosalía, who, by the way, was never even baptized into the Catholic Church, but believes in God because her grandmother used to take her to church, but only when Rosalía asked to go with her. Now, as this young, dynamic, brilliant musician making probably the best pop album of the last 20 years called Lux, all the tracks on that album are meditations about true spirituality, seeking God, as opposed to say what? JD Vance is doing in, quote, Converting to Catholicism and then going against the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
By becoming a supporter of ICE and all its raids, and the harshest critics of having people who immigrate to this country and treating them with dignity, that the Church preaches, contrast him with the spirituality in this album. And that’s what gives me hope. To turn a corner here, because obviously a world in which Rosalía’s album, which is a meditation on the teaching and spirituality of saints of all things in the middle of the context of this world, we now live in of division and hatred, which she is hoping to heal through meditating on people who bring us together instead of driving us apart. The whole of the JD Vance campaign with his billionaire friends is about elites that meet in secret to decide the people’s future. The opposite of what Rosalía is talking about in her album.
The working class is treated as a marketing aesthetic to be bypassed when the billionaires pursue their ends. Now, here’s the ultimate hypocrisy. JD Vance and Tucker Carlson say they’ve converted to the Catholic Church. And what they’ve really converted to is putting billionaires in power over us. And some of these billionaires, like Peter Thiel and others, Are talking about genetic engineering projects to remake the human race with in vitro fertilization and checking out the fertilized embryos and eliminating those that don’t fit an IQ profile of superiority. They want people like themselves. They believe they’re superior and eliminate anybody under that process. This... being supported by people like Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, who call themselves Roman Catholics.
And here we have Rosalía, who’s not even baptized into the church, who speaks with the true voice of the best of the Catholic tradition. And so I would ask those who follow JD Vance or follow Tucker Carlson or who follow Donald Trump, which kind of morality and family values are you going to choose? Is it going to be the moral and civic language stripped of meaning by the billionaires with their shadow puppet, JD Vance, put in power by them so they can have their own use of loneliness and alienation and monetize it by getting all these kids to just stare into their phones? Or are you with Rosalía who asks a question here in her new album and says, “I’m always hungry for you. You’re the king who commands her. She feels more loved in the vertigo of the body, an absence that satisfies. Chasing after grace, pain and delight, the divine emptiness and the rays of the moon.”
The poetry based on the lives of the saints told to us by a young woman. In contrast to loneliness and alienation being monetized by these billionaires. Buskirk’s entire strategy begins from the observation that Americans feel unseen and disconnected. Then he exploits this ache in our hearts and uses it by funneling it through curated membership and emotional manipulation. They don’t care about lonely people. They love the loneliness because they can weaponize it and say, we have a solution for you. And then by the time you get to Peter Thiel and these people who want to genetically engineer the human race into something superior—and by the way, didn’t they ever see Gattaca? Haven’t they seen all the science fiction films that are issued as warnings against this? Haven’t they read Huxley’s Brave New World? Haven’t they read 1984? Haven’t they paid attention to the warnings all through the 20th century after the fascist incursions of Germany and Italy that we will never do this again? And now they’re back into the manipulation of the human race to produce a super race modeled on the type of world billionaires thinks we ought to inhabit?
This is the world JD Vance will bring us!
And unlike Donald Trump, who’s just about himself and revenge and these other things, he has a program. It’s a program being dictated to him by the billionaires of whom both he and Tucker Carlson are sycophant lickspittle creatures.
Wealth and business are mistaken for virtue. The future they imagine is profoundly anti-human. But we have a counter-narrative. And Rosalía and her album Lux is part of it. And so is my new book, The Gospel of Zip. Which is about relationships and the humans in our lives being more important than these billionaire programs. And I offer it as an alternative, just like Rosalía offers her album Lux, in which we can contemplate the true spiritual meaning and value of relationships and love and connection instead of this manipulative, elitist view of the world that Thiel and Carlson and JD Vance represents, twisting it and using it to their own ends. But here’s the good news. What they can’t package, can’t monetize, and can’t manipulate is the simple, the ordinary miracle of love.
The love that happens between real people who show up for one another without profit, platform, or performance. The real love that I have for my dog Zip in his hero pose on the front of my book.
And we really have a choice. Are we going to buy the false spirituality of JD Vance, including a genetic engineering program of his billionaire buddies who want to perfect the human race, and trash both the left’s view of feminism and human agency on one hand, and the right wing’s traditional Catholic view of the sanctity of life? The billionaires hate both of these things because they place themselves at the center of the universe. And they want to remake us in their image.
And my book, The Gospel of Zip, reminds us that the smallest acts of kindness, a walk with a dog, a meal shared with a friend, the care of a loved one, a call returned to a grandchild, forgiveness offered to someone, that these are the things that make life worth living. And what we need is a leader who goes up against J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson and these manipulative billionaires who reflects that. Human values. Instead of commercial values, the things that never change that Rosalía talks about in her album Lux. Indeed, it is time to meditate on the wisdom of the saints and not the wisdom of the billionaires.
