JD the coward

JD Vance cosplaying with Navy SEALS (Photo credit: (Vice President JD Vance's office)

There are two types of courage: physical and moral.

“The Last Republican,” a documentary about Adam Kinzinger and his wife Sofia Kinzinger’s journey through the MAGA filth, is a testament to both types of courage.

It is an outstanding documentary.

John F. Kennedy, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, Benjamin O. Davis, Medgar Evers, John McCain, James Stockdale and Christopher Reeves are all examples of people who demonstrated both moral courage and physical courage. There are many more.

Currently, there are seven Navy SEALS in the United States Congress. They are all Republicans. Each of them is physically brave, most are corrupt, and each is a titanic moral coward.

Eli Wiesel was a moral giant who survived a supreme test in Auschwitz. It is not the physical courage and endurance for which he is remembered, but rather, his incandescent moral courage.

What did he talk about?

What was his takeaway from the death camps?

What did he discover was the opposite of love?

It was not hate, but rather, indifference.

Indifference to what exactly?

Hate.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

During an October Turning Point USA event at Ole Miss, JD Vance profoundly betrayed his wife and children for politics in a despicable display of moral bankruptcy. It is perfectly captured in a brilliant examination of JD Vance’s poisonous character in The New Republic, which has profiled the most hideously deformed monsters of the Trump regime.

As Monica Potts writes:

At the Turning Point USA conference at the University of Mississippi in October, an audience member asked Vice President JD Vance about the tension between his interracial, interfaith marriage with Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and his beliefs that the U.S. should reduce the number of immigrants.

He began with his thoughts on immigration policy, then veered toward the personal by saying he hopes Usha converts to Catholicism.

“Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church?

I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way,” he said.

It wasn’t the most grotesque statement Vance has made—there are plenty of contenders for that—but it exposed his twisted priorities.

Here was the vice president defending the administration’s vile immigration policies in a way that fundamentally degrades the experiences and traditions of his own family, of people he is bound by vows—vows that should be sacred to a Christian—to love and protect.

It sums up Vance’s journey into public life and politics: There is nobody he won’t betray, and no principle he won’t cast aside, in his quest to accrue more fame and power.

This was not his first betrayal.

During the early days of the Trump administration, emails surfaced capturing the bigotry and hatreds of Marko Elez, who was part of Elon Musk’s Doge insanity. He said this:

Normalize Indian hate.

JD Vance took MAGA’s side against his children, whose humanity was assaulted by the unbridled racism.

Here is what he said at the time:

I obviously disagree with some of Elez's posts, but I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life.

The right answer would have been:

You’re fired.

When Donald Trump ran for president, JD Vance compared him to Hitler and “cultural heroin.”

Nine years later, he stood on another Turning Point USA stage, and welcomed Nazis into the fold as “Hitler’s vice president” and the “hillbilly” version of a dirty needle.

Here is what he said:

I didn't bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform.

I want to get this prediction on the record:

Usha Vance will not be on the campaign trail in 2027 and 2028 when JD Vance runs to be Hitler’s successor, but Ericka Kirk will be. She will be standing where Usha used to be, with Charlie’s kids serving as perfect props. Of course, the mourning must go on a while longer, and there needs to be time to curate the separation, manage the divorce, start dating, buy the ring and set the wedding date. No doubt, Donald Trump will walk the bride down the aisle.

The MAGA base — radicalized, racist and angry — will not tolerate Usha Vance as JD Vance ‘s wife and kids, so they are going to need to go.

It’s as simple as that. The third party that will break the marriage isn’t Ericka Kirk, but rather Nick Fuentes. The merger that will come after is between two opportunists who both love long eyelashes and too much liner.

Let’s get back to the SEALs.

Twenty-four hours after betraying his wife and his kids JD Vance was in San Diego cosplaying with Navy SEALS at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado:

Embarrassing doesn’t begin to describe the cringiest cringe yet seen from the vice president, who lacks both physical and moral courage in any meaningful way. He cannot demonstrate a single instance of himself having ever been brave for a cause beyond his self-interest. Ever.

He is a father who will not defend the dignity of his children.

While Donald Trump knows his boys are imbeciles, he also realizes that they are his. It is no easy feat to stand next to Donald Trump and be the bigger pig, but JD has managed to do it in this instance.

Why is MAGA so fixated on the Navy SEALs?

Among the very best writers on Substack is Daniel Barkhuff, an emergency room physician, Annapolis graduate and Naval Special Warfare Officer who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. He explains the phenomenon perfectly and brutally:

In fact, I’m increasingly convinced that the American SEAL myth could have happened only here, and only in this narrow window of time, during which technology, politics, capitalism, and masculine insecurity converged into a perfect cultural storm.

Because the thing that people forget, or never learned, is that SEALs were not built to be what they have become. They were not created to be podcasts, or fitness brands, or political mascots, at least not intentionally. They weren’t meant to be motivational philosophers or avatars of “authentic toughness…”

SEALs were designed for a much older, darker purpose: to swim up to places like Omaha Beach, in the cold dark water, and blow up shit. They did the jobs that look, on paper, like the sorties of kamikaze pilots: missions where survival is nothing more than a statistical quirk.

The difference is that American battlefield dominance now lets us live. But the original blueprint was closer to “disposable drone” than “influencer monk.”

SEALs were the men you sent when something had to be done at night, in the surf, maybe under fire, with no guarantee of rescue and no expectation of applause.

Cause you were dead, floating in that same surf….

Because America sits on the largest media machine in human history, and the media needs stories. Hollywood, Madison Avenue, cable news, book publishing, and now podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram mean no one has ever had the type of access we have to fantasy.

It’s not propaganda; it’s capitalism fused to narrative.

When the post-9/11 wars demanded a new kind of hero, a national response to boxcutters and mass murder, one leaner, quieter, less bound to mass conscription and more evocative of surgical modern warfare, we filled the role almost too perfectly.

We were elite, “anonymous,” mysterious, and seemingly invincible.

No kidding, we didn’t have anyone die in Iraq until waaaay later than almost every other SOF unit (I’m not sure about the PJ’s).

We were small enough to be romanticized and real enough to satisfy a country that wanted to believe its warriors were doing the impossible while the rest of the nation went about its peacetime routines…..

Germany had Otto Skorzeny in World War II, a man whose missions were bold enough to fill a dozen Hollywood scripts even if he was a garbage human.

But Hitler never publicly drooled over him the way modern American populists worship Eddie Gallagher, a drug addict who was an expert at hurting people you aren’t supposed to hurt, including other Americans. Nazi Germany didn’t build a personal-brand ecosystem out of Skorzeny; they used him when he was useful and discarded him when he wasn’t.

Leni Riefenstahl never made a string of movies glorifying individual SS operators, because authoritarian propaganda doesn’t work that way.

Totalitarian states center the myth on the leader, not the subordinate. The idea of Hitler lifting up a specific commando as the embodiment of German masculinity the way Trump does with SEALs is absurd. It would have been a threat to the Führer, not a boon.

But America is different. Our authoritarian temptations are different, too.

Instead of worshiping the state, our populist movements worship rule-breaking as authenticity.

Someone like Gallagher isn’t a hero because he was disciplined; he’s a hero because he symbolizes contempt for the idea that the use of force should be restrained or morally accountable.

He fits perfectly into a movement that equates cruelty with courage.

It didn’t distort the SEAL myth so much as reveal what parts of it were always there for the taking. It found the operator archetype waiting like a loaded weapon and fired it into American politics.

Understanding Dr. Barkhuff on this point is key to appreciating what is happening in this country regarding the cruelty of ICE and the fetishization of that cruelty in a propaganda campaign with a budget of one quarter of a billion dollars. This story in The Washington Post, detailing the campaign and the emails celebrating the cruelty are irrefutable evidence of the accuracy of Barkhuff’s statement.

Here is how Barkhuff concludes:

Only in the last twenty years have former operators been able to speak directly to millions of men through their own curated channels. And only in this era have so many men been hungry for a story about shortcuts to being tough without doing tough things.

Here’s the truth: America is in a profound masculinity recession.

The old scripts have been erased. Many men feel aimless….

Here is a model of manhood that seems elemental: strong, quiet, purposeful, tribal, unquestionably competent.

And because this is America, that archetype was immediately monetized, franchised, politicized, and exported.

What should have remained a quiet professional tradition became a self-help brand, a workout program, a leadership seminar, and eventually, a political identity….

Navy SEALs could never have happened in another country.

Those cultures could have produced the operators, but they could not have produced the myth.

The myth required a fractured, media-drunk, lonely, hyper-capitalist America.

The SEALs became the vessel for that contradiction because the real work they do, silent, dangerous, disciplined, organizationally flat, was too boring or too painful for a country addicted to spectacle.

JD Vance is no Navy SEAL, and that’s okay.

He’s vice president of the United States, and he’s a moral coward.

That’s a problem.

Cowardice always is, and when it comes to the Congress, there are no greater group of cowards within it than the MAGA Navy SEAL caucus.

It’s what they share in common with JD Vance.

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