Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is a jerk. The Ohio senator is a feckless liar and inveterate blowhard whose squinty-eyed smirk solely flashes after he’s delivered a line that he thinks will trigger somebody ache. There’s an excellent cause why Vance is the most disliked determine on both occasion’s ticket this election 12 months: He’s an unmitigated asshole.
However there’s a gaggle of white males who imagine that he could also be one thing extra. They see Vance’s ugly assaults on girls, immigrants, and others as factors to be celebrated. And so they see him because the chief they’ve been on the lookout for, a sort of anti-diversity messiah—a “Christian Prince” for a white nationalist America.
As Mom Jones reviews, these males pore over Vance’s phrases, looking for hidden indicators with a sort of fervor often reserved for “Bible code” numerologists. When Vance says America is “a group of people with a shared history and a common future” they don’t hear patriotic pablum. They hear a transparent message that America was created for them and solely them—and everybody else must go.
For this group of Christian nationalist pastors and their followers, Vance’s message is a sign that they’ve it proper: America is reserved for the chosen few.
They see Vance as endorsing their central tenet—that America is for white Christians. Different individuals could also be in America, however they dwell there solely with the sufferance of the nation’s true house owners.
For these evangelical leaders, it’s a no brainer to help Vance’s racist assaults on authorized Haitian immigrants and his declaration that he’s going to maintain calling them unlawful. So far as they’re involved, there are no authorized immigrants and particularly no authorized Black immigrants whose non secular beliefs don’t fall according to their very own inflexible views.
For a lot of within the mainstream press, there’s an inclination to view Vance as Donald Trump 2.0—a Republican troll steeped within the hate speech and nastiness of on-line boards. And all of that’s true.
However dismissing Vance as simply the snarly new face of an much more aggressive Trumpism fails to seize the complete menace that he represents. Vance’s most enthusiastic supporters don’t see him as Trump’s sidekick, and even because the man ready within the wings when pricey outdated Donald lastly tumbles from his chair.
They’re trying past, to a nation Trump barely hints at. For Trump supporters, he could also be Orange Jesus, however for the “TheoBros” who thirst after Vance’s each phrase, Trump is extra John the Baptist—the man who made it attainable for the true deal to take heart stage.
Christian nationalists have been a menace to American democracy for many years, however as Mom Jones reviews, these aren’t the dusty outdated evangelists who’ve crowded the AM radio airwaves and supported previous Republican candidates.
They’re youthful. And meaner.
For all their youthful modishness, this group is definitely extra conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for instance, don’t assume girls belong within the pulpit or the voting sales space—and even wish to repeal the nineteenth Modification. For some, jail reform would contain changing incarceration with public flogging. Not like extra mainstream Christian nationalists, like Home Speaker Mike Johnson, who’re obsessive about the US Structure, many TheoBros imagine that the Structure is useless and that we ought to be ruled by the Ten Commandments.
Public flogging is definitely on the delicate finish of desired punishments for this group. In podcasts and on-line, executions are the same old demand: executions for treason, or executions for heresy towards their view of an indignant, violent Christianity.
The concept that the nineteenth Modification ought to be repealed provides a good suggestion of what they give thought to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. As one in all Vance’s largest admirers writes, the concept of being ruled by a lady is a “punishment from God.”
Along with her various ethnic background, her report {of professional} accomplishments, and her lack of organic youngsters, Harris would possibly as effectively be standing in a flaming purple pentagram so far as these males are involved. That her husband is Jewish will not be a plus.
Vance—a conservative Catholic married to a Hindu—doesn’t appear to be the plain candidate to hold the message of indignant, narrow-minded, Protestant purity. Nevertheless, he’s discovered that so long as he repeatedly voices their concepts on the nationwide stage, the TheoBros appear keen to miss his little peccadilloes and supply him with rabid help. He is aware of methods to blow their canine whistles, and he blows them repeatedly.
And people canine whistles sign the main themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining delivery charges, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of fastidiously curated misogyny. If you wish to know a number of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or a minimum of those that flock to him, it’s worthwhile to meet the TheoBros.
This isn’t an official group. It’s a conglomeration of males who imagine that oppressing girls and crushing variety is the best way to transform America into their white Christian paradise.
They pull their theological justification from writings that return centuries, combine them with books from the previous decade, and swirl in on-line postings from their revered leaders. They spice all of it with Biblical quotes usually faraway from context or given a brand new interpretation.
A few of them have already established mini kingdoms in native areas, whereas others are extra centered on crowning their Christian prince of America.
The TheoBros’ technique is bottom-up: They goal to transform small American cities into Christian enclaves. However it’s also top-down: Some are working to place themselves near the locus of federal energy.
Consider how Republicans have labored their means into management of native governments and state legislatures, mixed with Challenge 2025’s lust to purge the federal authorities. Solely on this case, the concept isn’t to repopulate these empty seats with Trump’s small military of sycophants, however to show the federal government into an engine for males who view “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a handbook.
Then they will begin rounding up the heretics.
The affect of this group is already being felt in the best way Republicans have ramped up assaults on variety, fairness, and inclusion efforts and rolled “DEI” into their assortment of condemned phrases. It’s there in what number of Republicans have been keen to defend the misogyny spewed towards “childless cat ladies.” It’s there within the widespread embrace of the vile racism being unfold about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
It’s there in all of the issues which might be making Trump much less a pacesetter of his occasion than a figurehead being swept alongside by the flood.
Vance’s largest supporters are males who see him as a possible prince. However there’s nothing charming about this story.
