Perverting Truth

 What's most unsettling about J.D. Vance—the thing that makes him so eerily effective in the dark wizardly of propaganda—is not only that he lies and cheats. Anyone could do that. It's that he always manages to seem so righteously aggrieved when he lies. It's like, at the very moment he's picking your pocket, he genuinely feels he has the moral high ground. He is the past master of putting on the "seeming-to-be-wronged-when-actually-you-yourself-are-doing-wrong" look (to quote Aristophanes).

This weekend's controversy about a fired "DOGE" employee is a typical example. The Wall Street Journal had earlier managed to link the 25-year-old employee to a social media account that posted overtly racist comments about Indian people and other minorities (the racism of the posts, by the way, was not something subtle or questionable. It was stuff like: "Normalize Indian hate" and "I was racist before it was cool").

The employee was subsequently fired for it—but then J.D. Vance leapt into the fray, saying that he ought to be rehired, because it was wrong to "ruin someone's life" over a bit of "stupid social media activity."

Vance's comments came—of course—at the very same moment that his own administration is purging the federal workforce on frankly ideological grounds. The hypocrisy could not be more glaring. What a time for Vance to suddenly claim to be very concerned about fairness and due process for federal employees facing termination.

After all—at the same moment Vance is opining against the cruelty of cancel culture or of rushing to judgment on social media, his own MAGA team is laying off thousands of career civil servants on the basis of such thought crimes as daring to participate in DEI trainings, or using forbidden words like "transgender" and "LGBTQ."

I happen to agree that people should be given some "grace" for comments they made a long time ago, and which they have since repudiated. But that is not at all the case here. It's not clear the guy apologized or walked back these remarks. Nor were they posted a long time ago—he was writing this stuff in the months leading up to the election, and presumably still believes them. 

More fundamentally, I don't in any way want to "ruin his life." I don't want him to never work again. I just don't see why he should access the most sensitive inner workings of our government. 

But if firing him for saying he "hates" Indian people really is a case of impermissible, hard-hearted "cancel culture"—if it really is "ruining someone's life" disproportionately for a minor "mistake," as Vance claims—then what is one to say of Vance's own campaign to lay off thousands of USAID employees, because one project that one of them funded one time had something to do with transgender identity. Where is the "grace" for them? 

This is what is so creepy about Vance—it's that he knows how to invoke the words of actual moral thought. He can turn his eyes heavenward and mouth pieties about "mercy" and "grace" and "forgiveness."

But all the time, he is flagrantly prostituting these valid ideals for the most diabolical ends. If Trump is sometimes described as a wolf in wolf's clothing—Vance is perhaps a false prophet on the more classic model: a wolf in sheep's clothing, deliberately muddying the distinctions everywhere he can between good and evil. 

And that, of course, is what makes him a true and gifted propagandist. It's not just the way in which he lies. It's the way in which he can manage to abuse and exploit kernels of moral or factual truth to serve his malevolent purposes. This is the true secret of the propagandist's art. As Edgar Lee Masters once wrote, in his poem about a fictional yellow journalist, "Editor Whedon":

To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose, 

To use great feelings and passions of the human family 

For base designs 

That is what Vance does so well. He manages to plead with wet eyes for "mercy"—and he does it with such conviction that people almost believe him. But at the very same time he does so, he is helping Trump grind his boot heel into the face of everyone who dares to do anything other than pledge fealty to his personalistic cult...