TOM EATON | JD Vance makes South Africa’s problems look like real kid stuff

South Africans worrying about the bona fides of Paul Mashatile were given a smidgeon of consolation this week: at least our vice-president isn’t JD Vance.

This realisation came to us via US website, Politico, which on Tuesday revealed a cache of texts shared earlier this year between people who are, in effect, the next generation of the US political party that used to be known as Republican and which is now a reality show in which winners are chosen according to how loudly they can mumble ‘Freedom!’ while having both lips fixed to Donald Trump’s buttocks.

According to the screengrabs provided by Politico, these young Republicans ― part of a broad umbrella body with the highly original name of Young Republicans ― enjoy sharing edgy jokes about being fans of Hitler and gassing and burning political opponents, while calling black compatriots ‘watermelon people’ and ‘monkeys’ and throwing around antisemitic and homophobic slurs.

While this is obviously abhorrent, it isn’t particularly surprising. It also goes without saying that the people named by Politico aren’t necessarily fanatical bigots. It’s possible they’re something even more contemptible: cowardly conformists who don’t truly hate anyone except themselves (and perhaps their mothers) and whose bigotry is merely an accessory or lifestyle choice that gives them access to a particular social set.

Certainly, if fascism steps fully out of the shadows in the US, I don’t think any of these soft little snowflakes will be firing on pro-democracy protesters or manning watchtowers in internment camps: this is the sort that stays home in their suburban McMansions, buying more shares in the companies that run those camps.

Still, it was a moment perfectly teed up for a senior member of the Trump administration to come down very hard and very publicly on a group of low-level functionaries who could be condemned and fired without costing the GOP anything.

Nobody would have believed them, of course, but still, in golfing parlance it was a gimme: express some fake shock, piously lament that this kind of hate has no place in the party of Lincoln, promise to suspend the guilty, and move swiftly on.

They wouldn’t even have had to push very hard against prevailing political headwinds: some of those implicated have already been fired, while the Young Republican National Federation, essentially the GOP Youth League, has called for the rest to step down, saying that their behaviour was “unbecoming of any Republican”.

These ‘kids’, of course, are between 24 and 35 years old, but Vance has never allowed facts to get in the way of enabling hate and stupidity to flower in the US.

So what did JD Vance do?

He explained that boys will be boys and that the real outrage was that the group had been caught and their comments published.

Appearing on a far-right podcast on Wednesday, the second-most powerful man on earth said that “reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes… And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives. And at some point we’re all going to have to say enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not OK."

These ‘kids’, of course, are between 24 and 35 years old, but Vance has never allowed facts to get in the way of enabling hate and stupidity to flower in the US.

The hypocrisy comes standard these days, but it was still quite something to see Vance imply that violent, fascist, racist, antisemitic and homophobic language by member of his own party should be written off as a youthful indiscretion while members of that same party are still trying to get people fired for writing hurty words about the death of Charlie Kirk.

What was most telling, however, was Vance’s decision to reject moral leadership in favour of whataboutery.

No sooner had the story broken than Vance was on Twitter, posting a 2022 screengrab in which Virginia Democrat Jay Jones engaged in some supremely vile rhetoric, suggesting that if he had two bullets, and was faced with Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot or a Republican Todd Gilbert, Gilbert would get “two bullets to the head”.

According to Vance, this post was “far worse than anything said in a college group chat”, adding that “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

I tend to agree with Vance in one respect: Jones’ hypothetical was aimed at a specific person, and could therefore arguably be construed as far more potentially dangerous. Certainly, most sensible people would agree that Jones should be ejected from the Democratic Party as unfit for public office.

Again, it was the perfect invitation to Vance to take the higher moral ground; to insist that people like Jones as well as the people on the chat group were not welcome in leadership positions in US politics; to serve his country instead of his stomach.

But instead, he held up Jones as the true villain while denouncing valid, bipartisan condemnation of the young Republicans as ‘pearl clutching’.

Yes, we’re in trouble down here in South Africa, especially when it comes to Cyril Ramaphosa’s likely successor; but watching Vance effectively condone the most barbarous ideas of his party’s youth, I can’t help feeling that the US is in entirely different and possibly far worse kind of trouble.