Bulwark Takes - JD Vance Defends DOGE Re-Hiring Racist Staffer

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Tim Miller is joined by Jeremiah Johnson to discuss Vice President JD Vance defending the re-hiring of racist DOGE employee, while supporting the firing of thousands of federal workers as Elon Musk’s team continues to take over government departments. Follow Jeremiah Johnson on Substack: https://substack.com/@jeremiahjohnson

Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark. We've been talking about asshole JD Vance and his very kind of strange and emotional defense of the young doge staffer who was initially fired for such wonderful tweets as, I was a racist before it was cool, and normalize Indian hate. That was just the tip of the iceberg, really. And the reaction to that firing was very interesting because the vice president felt it necessary to not only come out and defend the fired staffer, not only argue for him to be reinstated back into the administration uh but to like attack anyone who was was offended or was at

all outraged by the racist staffer particularly rokhana during exchange uh him and the uh indian american congressman uh had uh jd vance like him of getting emotional for caring about racism against Indians. It's a strange situation. And one of my friends and one of the people that I like to read over on Substack brought a little clarity to it. He's Jeremiah Johnson. His Substack is called Infinite Scroll. I will put a link to it here in the show notes. I could not recommend it higher.

And he has an article, JD Vance and vice signaling. And I wanted to talk to him about that. Jeremiah, how you doing, man? I'm doing good, man. I really do think the Rokana thing is amazing. That little spat that JD Vance had with Rokana. It kind of reminds me of what's that phrase? Like, you know, for my friends, everything for my enemies, the law where, you know, for, for my, you know, the people on my team, the, the Doge staffers who

are helping Elon deconstruct the federal government, if they say these things, they're just kids, you know, they're just, they're, they're small little beans. They're just little guys, you know, don't be so mean to them. for ro khanna who says well shouldn't they apologize before they get rehired like shouldn't we at least if we're gonna forgive them shouldn't there at least be an apology that was emotional manipulation and like you know and that was disgusting and i'm fed up with it and it's just it's very funny to see the very partisan motivated reaction, I would say. And I do think there's something deeper going on behind this whole story. Yeah, it is funny.

The JD is like on this for my friends, everything element. All this is happening amidst a time where there is mass furloughs happening across the government, places like USAID. You know, we'll see how that all shakes out legally. But it's funny that J.D. is like has this deep emotional empathy for the single person who was fired for like basically being like, I'm a racist. And like he expresses no empathy, sympathy. No, we need to be judicious nothing for you know the person working for usaid volunteering to go to uganda uh to help sick children nothing nothing for them and your article tried to bring an explanation into why so talk to us about vice

signaling so there's this thing that a lot of people have heard of, virtue signaling. And it's this very annoying thing that liberals do sometimes. And look, it's a real thing. And the idea behind virtue signaling is that you are doing something or saying something purely for the benefit of looking like a good person, right? You don't really feel sincerely about this issue. You don't feel sincerely what you're saying or doing. You just want the credit, right? You don't really feel sincerely about this issue. You don't feel sincerely what you're saying or doing. You just want the credit, right? You want people to think you're a good person. And sometimes this is fine. Like, look, if you donate a bunch of money to

charities that are saving people's lives and your only motivation is to look like a good person, well, fine. People's lives are still saved. Virtue signaling is a lot more annoying when it's just coming in the form of posting, when it's people who post all day about how much they care and how they're activists. And all of that seems to come through the form of Twitter posts, right? I'm going to put a black box on my Instagram feed to demonstrate that i care about black people people brands get accused of this a lot i think fairly brands literally try to signal their virtue they want you to think they're good yeah and so the uh lockheed drummond gay pride float you know the raytheon a gay plot pride float we love that and i think what's interesting is we're kind of seeing a backlash to that.

And maybe it's deserved in the way that there's been excess among what do you want to call it, the woke movement or DEI or a bunch of these things. Some of that is true. But the backlash has spilled over so far that I think the conservative movement has kind of moved into what I've called vice signaling, where they are no longer trying to signal virtue. They're actually in a weird way trying to signal that they are bad people and that they will put up with bad people. And it's not purely for the sake of like, well, I want people to think I'm a big old, you know, piece of crap. Some people might think like it, like some online edgelords actually do, you know, if you're thinking about like the Twitter poster category of this, there are some people who are just saying

it to get a reaction. They want to own the libs. But when JD Vance does it, when Marco Rubio does it, when Lindsey Graham does it, when people who control the levers of power do this and they openly side with just plain racism, they're doing it for a reason that, you know, they want to signal that they're on the team. And this is something I think about a lot in terms of, most communication is signaling. And one of the things that Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance all have in common is that they used to be pretty anti-Trump. Back when it was easy to be anti-Trump, back when it looked like Trump was going to crash out and not get elected president, it was, you know, J.D. Vance compared Trump to Hitler. He said Trump had,

it is something like it's an inarguable fact that there are racists at the core of Trump's base and that goes against everything I stand for. And so if J.D. Vance is going to have a future in Republican politics, how is he going to get back on Trump's good side? One thing you could do is you can agree with Donald Trump for very kind of costless things, right? You can agree with him when he says, like, I want to put a tariff on China. That's pretty easy. You can agree with him when he says, I don't think we should do non-binary dance sessions in the federal government ever. But you don't get a lot of credit for agreeing with him on those things because they're easy. What gets you a lot of credit, what really proves your loyalty to the movement is when you agree with him on something that's hard.

When people are on your team are doing something disgusting, like saying, normalize Indian hate, or, you know, I was racist before it was cool, or this kid has a bunch of other stuff, you know, I maybe we should just turn, you know, Israel and Palestine into bombed out wastelands. Like when you agree with that person, when you defend them, that actually proves your loyalty to the team. It's basically saying, look at what I'm willing to put up with and I will still be on your side. I am willing to degrade my moral purpose. I am willing to throw my sense of morality out the window. And I am still loyal. And that's what somebody like J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, et cetera, has to do in order to stay in Donald Trump's good graces. Yeah, I should say it's Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin.

I had that wrong over. You know, you can mix those up. It's like that's they could be in a polyamorous situation where the grumman and the locky to get together uh that jd uh to your point on this because i think it was very uh important insight right because like he could have said nothing you know he could he could he could have not engaged in this there's no reason necessarily for the vice president to weigh in on a, you know, a personnel matter regarding some young person on Elon Musk's staff, like it was not, he had no obligation to. And so deciding to weigh in, deciding to vice signal, deciding to make sure that everybody sees that he's on the side of the racist kid, I think is particularly powerful in this case because the kid went after Indian Americans, right? Like because he's married to

an Indian American because his kids are mixed race Indian American, right? Like the fact that he would go out and vice signal on this issue, like that's like the highest level, that's the superlative level of credit, right? Like that's not a hard thing. Right. But that's like saying, you know, to the groipers out there in the Macca base, I will go along with anything. You know, you can make racist jokes against my wife. And as long as you're on side, I'll be on side with you. It's very Ted Cruz coded, you know, in terms of just you can you can go after my wife. You can go after my father. Yes, sir. Please. Can I have some more, sir? I'm kind of like it.

It's a weird pattern where like Trump sycophants are just totally willing to throw their families under the bus. notable about vance is that literally like i don't know three days ago he was posting about some catholic theological point called yeah i'm gonna get the latin here wrong but it's like ordo amoris or something like that that's right and it's it's a point which frankly he doesn't actually understand very well i'm i'm a lapsed catholic i can claim to have some minimal same amount of this is an augustinian amount of expertise here, but basically an order of Morris that I'm, I hope I'm getting that Latin phrase, right.

Is the idea that you should love people close to you more than people far away. It doesn't actually mean more. It means Thomas Aquinas, I think introduced this idea, but Aquinas, his point was like, I live in the year 1200.

I can love all men all around the world, but like in a practical sense, how is my love going to translate in the year 1200 for somebody in China? It's not. So I should focus on the people near me. And that's a fine point to make in the year 1200. I don't think it actually translates to like, we should not save African babies when we can do so for like a couple dollars each. Right. Right. This was also the point. I don't believe there was nothing in the Aquinas or the Augustinian teaching that was like, I care mostly about your neighbor and say fuck off to everybody outside.

Like that was not that was not part of the message. But that was I think that was where JD got a little confused. But yeah, yeah. So I think he's misinterpreting this to begin with. But he's talking about it. His whole point is that you should put your very close family before anything else. And then two days later, he's like, yeah, the guy, the kid who thinks Indians are subhumansans are you know hire him back and we should note that like this is not something the guy said when he was 12 years old this is something he said like four months ago it's like in october three months ago and he has not apologized there's been no public apology no reckoning he just quit in shame and said nothing and so like and this also isn't even a case where it's like random libs on the internet are like i i've i've looked at this person's posts and i've determined them to be racist in this case this person was literally posting i am a racist i am racist cool to be racist yeah um so what the other thing i wanted to grab you on on this because

infinite scroll which which covers a bunch of stuff and kind of like internet culture um just in general i just was wondering if you had any observations about the kind of doge minion side of this i mean like a lot of these guys were posting uh on on some pretty far like extreme platforms like kiwi farms and like you know the types of things like you really got to be in the deep web you know uh to even know uh the types of platforms these guys were posting on and i and i do think there's like a little bit of like uh because elon has been so prominent in going along with conspiracies and lifting up like very niche, far right accounts on X that like he's kind of been a magnet for people that are posting in the dregs of the internet. So I just figured you might have some interesting observations on that subject. Yeah, I mean, two things.

The first thing, not really related to internet culture, but I would just like to say, as we make fun of Doge and point out how terrible some of the things that are happening, I think the idea of Doge is great, and it's a shame how it's being implemented. Yeah, I agree. Doge is great and it's a shame how it's being implemented. We really do need a push in the federal government for more efficiency, for the government to be more effective at what it does. If this was being done in an intelligent way, it would be really important and really valuable. And it's a shame that it's not being done in an intelligent way. You know, the idea that you're going to find like two trillion dollars of budget savings the way that Elon Musk thinks he will by like going after USAID or going after the consumer, the CFPB, you know, the Financial Protection Bureau like that. That's all such small potatoes. It's just right wing chum. It's just stuff that in a partisan way

republicans have decided that they're against i i really it's it's just a shame first of all that doge is is a wasted opportunity to do something that really needed to be done but instead is just a partisan sledgehammer that's being used in the stupidest way possible. But the other thing that's interesting is the kind of whole idea about, we're having conversations about doxing and about cancel culture. And doxing has become a big thing. And again, I feel like it's used

in a very partisan manner where when somebody you don't like is doxxed or when their name is revealed online, right, when libs of TikTok, you know, one or one of these big conservative influencer accounts find some green haired middle school teacher in the middle of Iowa who said something about gender and posts their full information, you know, and name to millions of followers and Elon Musk retweets it with like an emoji and says, wow, like, that's fine. Elon's all in favor of that, that kind of doxing of the random middle school teacher. But when, you know, I give a 21 year old with near zero experience, you know, access to the levers of power, access to control of the federal government, you know, and you and then like somebody reports on their name.

Hey, this person works for the federal government in a pretty high level role. That's doxing. And, you know, at some level, these kind of things are like contradictory because people are talking up these oh it doesn't matter that they're 21 they're like real cracked genius coders they're blah blah blah but at the same time they're they're little you know i don't know they're just they're little precious boys who must be protected and i don't know the the conversation about doxing is really interesting to me. And I think that this whole episode of like, you know, this kid turns out to have said this 25 year old turns out to have said a bunch of really horrifying racist stuff proudly and like, not ambiguously at all. you should have a spotlight on people who are in control of the federal government. Like we should know their names. We should know what they're saying. Are they too young? Are they too extreme?

Is one of them going by the internet handle Big Balls? Yes, it turns out. Big Balls has access. And this is not a joke. Big Balls has access to the federal treasury payment system. So there you go. That's politics in 2025. Is Big Balls the guy that has like the lettuce haircut?

I don't remember which one is the haircut, is the broccoli haircut guy. Big Balls is the one who was, I believe Big Balls is the one who was fired from his previous job for data security breaches and now has access to important data systems in the federal government. That's wonderful. Yeah, no, I'm with you on the doxing thing. I mean, I was always into this, even if it's like going after some random person and their job for some wrong thought they've had on the internet. I don't like and i don't i don't think that that is a good use of anybody's time uh this is not that i mean like right like this is people that are taking prominent jobs in the government and like they should be vetted and we should be making sure we know uh who is working for us it is public service you know that's like part of part of the deal so it

doesn't even have to do with the fact that that. To me, the only interesting part about their age is just how of this culture, of this kind of online trolly far right culture some of them are. And maybe some other ones. I've talked about the guy that did the decoded the scrolls. He seems like a smart dork, to be honest. And, you know, maybe he's wrapped up in some bad stuff, but is an earnest person. But some of these other guys, I think, are just really seeped in this toxic far right online culture.

And I like that's, that's not great. I don't think those are the folks we want, you know, in charge of treasury payments. What's interesting to me, as we talk about the idea of cancel culture that's the other big thing you know first we talked about doxing is it good to dox kids and then once we found hey one of them seems to be a pretty horrifying racist is it good to cancel the kids the fact that they're you know young it doesn't bother me. There's a lot of instances of, you know, like there are plenty of 22 and 23 year olds who helped like the moon landing happens. That's fine. like generous as I could to the conservatives I'm talking to. This is the most generous I could be is that they've seen so many instances of what they consider unjust liberal cancellation that they are now just knee jerking against the entire idea of cancellation to begin with that, you know,

somebody canceled somebody for forgetting a pronoun. And that happened so many times that now I just refuse to cancel anyone ever. But the thing is like cancel culture, like everybody believes in cancel culture to some extent. Everybody thinks that if Hitler himself was back from the grave and literally saying like, Hey, let's kill all the Jews again. Oh, maybe we shouldn't put him in charge of the federal government. Um, and, and this is surprisingly close to that in that it's a guy who literally says we should hate other races and they should not be here. And you're, you're giving him access to systems that impact hundreds of millions of people. And I think they've just, you know, their minds have gone insane from what they view as the overreaches of cancel culture,

that they are no longer able to distinguish between something like, oh, here's a cheerleader in high school who's getting mobbed online because she accidentally said the N word when she was singing a rap song. Like, oh, that seems bad, right? We shouldn't ruin the 16-year-old's life for that. This kid has access to the entire federal treasury payment system and basically is like Kanye West's live streaming his tweets. That's much worse. There's a difference in scale here. And, you know, what's

probably going on is just, again, pure power politics. We get to do what we want because we won, you know, go cry about it, libs. But even the generous version is like your brain has broken. You are no longer able to distinguish, you know, good from evil, from evil from you know what is moral from what is not and your brain is just rotted sloshing around in the bottom of your skull because you've gotten caught up in too many online cancel culture wars you're not able to actually form an independent opinion anymore independent of like what libs are getting mad at. Yeah. You're just, you're just a anti canceled culture NPC, which I think is the worst, the,

the worst insult that you can give in this culture. So anyway, let's leave it there. The vice signaling, right? That's the vice signal is I'm so mad at cancel culture that when you try to cancel this kid who says, Hey,

Nazis are great i'm gonna react against it i'm gonna signal how much i love that kid anyway that's the vice signaling that just i want to piss you off no matter what indeed people should read the whole article jd vance and vice signaling infinite scroll it's very interesting it's internet culture stuff i was reading an article about uh uh a powerpoint that goes into into video game business modeling. He's looking in dark corners of the internet. There's a lot of good stuff. You guys should check it out.

And we'll be back here, as always, for more on the Vork YouTube page. Subscribe, tell your pals. See you all soon. Thanks, Jeremiah.