Vice President JD Vance is a busy man. Over the past three weeks, he’s traveled to France and Germany, addressed the crowd at a massive conservative conference, berated the Ukrainian president, and visited the US-Mexico border. Despite his busy schedule, Vance seemingly always finds time to engage in one of his favorite hobbies: posting.
During this period, Vance has gotten into online spats with enemies of the MAGA movement from across the ideological spectrum. He’s sparred with conservative historian Niall Ferguson, Rep. Ro Khanna, a columnist for the right-leaning publications Unherd and Compact, and the seemingly left-leaning X user @allahliker, who called Vance “soft.” He has written lengthy replies to posts about his speech at the Munich Security Conference and the tensions between his own “tech-bro libertarian” and “rightwing religious populist” leanings, and rebutted reports that his family had to move to an “undisclosed location” after protesters interrupted their Vermont ski trip.
Vance is also pushing the limits of microblogging on X, the social media platform owned by his administration’s employee (or possibly boss) Elon Musk. Taking advantage of his verified status, he often writes multi-paragraph posts, pontificating on foreign policy and the real meaning of Catholic doctrine about loving thy neighbor. Their frequency has prompted questions about what exactly he does all day. But Vance’s X power-user status is indicative of more than free time. As writer and host of the Know Your Enemy podcast Matthew Sitman recently pointed out, it’s an effective articulation of a post-Trump MAGA movement, and a revealing window into the thinkers — highbrow and otherwise — that inform Vance’s worldview.
Vice president is a largely symbolic role, albeit less so when the president is nearly an octogenarian. In 2016, Donald Trump picked Indiana Governor Mike Pence to appeal to anti-abortion evangelical Christians. Pence has since been roundly and violently expelled from MAGA, and Vance caters to a different constituency: Silicon Valley elites like Peter Thiel, who funded Vance’s Senate campaign, and the ultra-nationalist right-wingers that Vance dutifully courted during his two years in office.
Vance has admitted to being “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures,” and his X following list includes an array of far-right luminaries and pseudonymous right-wing shitposters. Among them are the geneticist Crémieux Recueil, who writes about the connections between race and IQ; Indian Bronson, whose work often focuses on the perils of mass immigration; and Raw Egg Nationalist, a wellness influencer-slash-bodybuilder.
The list goes on. There’s Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after reporters exposed indirect links to white supremacists before reemerging at Trump’s State Department in our post-woke era. The recently repatriated manosphere figure Andrew Tate. Jonathan Keeperman, founder of the right-wing Passage Publishing, whose releases include works by “neo-reactionary” blogger Curtis Yarvin, accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, and racialist writer Steve Sailer. It’s a mix of the semi-respectable and, in Tate’s case, the allegedly criminal.
But these are not the accounts Vance interacts with. He isn’t getting into spats about race science with Crémieux, or debating the finer points of a seed oil-free diet with Raw Egg Nationalist. Vance uses his public X account to reply to his critics, many of whom hail from the non-MAGA right.
Take the conservative but Trump-“ambivalent” Ferguson, whose bibliography includes Civilization: The West and the Rest and a two-volume biography of Henry Kissinger. Ferguson obliquely denounced Trump and Vance’s meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, at which point Vance devoted a 403-word post to calling Ferguson’s statement “moralistic garbage,” accusing him of being a “globalist” who trafficks in “moralisms” and “historical illiteracy” in pursuit of an endless war.
In January, Vance held up the British conservative politician Rory Stewart as the exemplar of the “false arrogance” that “drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years” after Stewart took issue with Vance’s interpretation of a Bible verse. Vance might take time to own the libs — he called progressive journalist Mehdi Hasan a “dummy” — but he reserves some of his harshest comments for members of the staid conservative establishment that rejected Trumpism. To Vance, these globalist conservatives are no better than liberals; both sides, in fact, are members of what his ideological influence Yarvin calls the “Cathedral,” the cabal of elite institutions that rule the world.
Vance isn’t just differentiating himself from the left; he’s drawing a line between the old conservative establishment and the hyper-nationalist MAGA movement. To troll his enemies, Vance relies on two rhetorical tendencies: corny millennialisms (“Hope this helps!” is a popular one) and the irony poisoned jargon of the esoteric, extremely online far-right. “I’ve said it before and I said it again,” Vance wrote on X in January, “the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.” (Is that Crémieux’s influence? Who’s to say. The online right is obsessed with IQposting.)
People follow accounts on X and other platforms for all kinds of reasons. We’re all familiar with the “retweets are not endorsements” disclaimer, which can also apply to likes and follows. Still, Vance’s following list provides an interesting window into his worldview.
These online influences often spill out into the real world. Months after perpetuating viral, racist rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance followed Captive Dreamer, one of the pseudonymous posters responsible for popularizing the smear. (Vance was smart enough to hold out on following the account until after the 2024 election.) The account, whose avatar is a photo of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh wearing a MAGA hat, frequently posts about its affinity for Adolf Hitler.
This week, Captive Dreamer — whose likely identity was recently revealed by the Daily Dot — thanked Trump for mentioning Springfield in his recent State of the Union Address. Like others on Vance’s following list, Captive Dreamer often posts about the dangers of mass immigration and the false promise of diversity, topics that are not unfamiliar to Vance. That’s not to say these anonymous posters are influencing the vice president, but that they’re likely reinforcing views he already holds.
Vance isn’t alone: young conservative staffers are increasingly steeped in similar online subcultures. Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon’s new deputy press secretary, is a prolific X user who buys into a number of conspiracy theories, including the Great Replacement. Beattie, who Vance follows on X, once said that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” And, of course, there’s Marko Elez, the 25-year-old DOGE staffer who the Wall Street Journal linked to an X account whose posts called for repealing the Civil Rights Act and reinstating a “eugenic immigration policy.”
After Elez resigned over these posts, Vance defended him and said he should be rehired. “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote on X. Posting, after all, might be what the vice president knows best.
