Let's Meet J.D. Vance's Creepy Crawly Christian Fascist Friends!

America's most dangerous white supremacist Christian nationalists are rooting hard for their boy.

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Wasn’t it great how we all got to see the softer side of J.D. Vance at the vice-presidential debate? He kept finding common ground with Tim Walz on all kinds of things, and he actively pretended throughout to be halfway normal, except for the numerous times when the mask would slip and it was like DOH! there’s Couchy The Donut Orderer.

Obviously that was a con, and a debate strategy. Pretend not to be creepy and gross for 90 minutes! The mask really fell off at the end, of course, when Vance had to answer hard questions like “Who won the 2020 election?” and, stuck between reality and his boss Donald Trump, he started weirdo-babbling about Kamala Harris censoring Facebook.

Whew, we are glad that debate is over, and we bet he is too. Now he can go back to blood libeling immigrants, and we can go back to focusing on what a uniquely dangerous threat he and his un-American authoritarian fascist friends are to this country, what a bizarre brand of misogynistic extremist he is, and so forth.

Which brings me to two articles that have come out in the past several weeks that shine a nice light on the company Mr. “The Rules Were That You Guys Weren’t Going To Fact-Check” really keeps.

This isn’t about J.D. Vance hanging out with pro-Russian fascist podcasters who gleefully platform Holocaust deniers, although that’s definitely a thing. And it’s not specifically about the libertarian/authoritarian Peter Thiel techbro creepers who basically created J.D. in a lab, without whom he’d literally be nothing. But both of those things are related to these things.

This is about the Christian nationalists who find themselves in J.D. Vance’s orbit, and he in theirs — people who are literally prayer-gasming themselves right now at the idea of having one of their own freaks a heartbeat away from the presidency.

To start off with, did y’all hear about the town hall Vance just did with Lance Wallnau, one of the most dangerous “Seven Mountains” Christian Nationalist Dominionists in the country?

Nobodies In The World, God’s Chosen Somebodies In The Spirit

Lance Wallnau is perhaps the foremost figure in what’s called the New Apostolic Reformation movement, which teaches that Christians have a mandate from Heaven to exert dominion over what they call the seven “mountains” of American life — family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. There is no room for democracy in this movement, it’s authoritarian, and it craves a dictator.

Wallnau is fucking bonkers. His movement is fucking bonkers. Wallnau believes people on the left are literal demons, that Kamala Harris has a “Jezebel Spirit,” and so much more.

Oh, and of course, Wallnau and the New Apostolic Reformation believe Donald Trump is a modern-day King Cyrus, a pagan emperor being used by God to bring forth his kingdom on earth. Ayup. So it’s not surprising that Wallnau and his movement are deeply entwined with the “Stop the Steal” movement, which did what it did on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.

Wallnau has been doing something called the Courage Tour. And sweet, kind, caring, moderate J.D. Vance was a special guest on that Courage Tour last weekend in Pennsylvania, though he was careful not to appear with Wallnau, and did his best to make the event seem as innocuous as possible.

As it happens, Stephanie McCrummen published an article in The Atlantic this week called “The Christian Radicals Are Coming,” which is all about the tour’s stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Half Pentecostal tent revival, half voter registration and mobilization event, the thousands who attended were treated to several days of the kind of radicalizing, violent rhetoric you usually hear in documentaries about, well, radicalized movements that turn violent.

Wallnau told congregants about a scene from Gladiator featuring its main character Maximus, and asked the crowd if they were ready to be “activated in your Maximus anointing.” He told attendees he suspected they were “nobodies on earth who are somebodies in the spirit.” That’ll make ‘em feel special.

Another speaker, a weirdo author named Bill Federer, who seems to think he’s a historian, told them they were “important people,” and that “God has chosen you” for this moment in history. He cited a quote from Peter Thiel — hi, gay libertarian techbro Peter Thiel! — which said that “The political slogan of the antichrist is ‘peace and safety.’ ” (Which is funny because isn’t that what all Trump’s Nazi scaremongering about being women’s protector is?)

Federer, jumping the shark completely, told the crowd that “Someday, you’re going to be dead” and in Heaven — specifically in Moses’s living room, some kind of celestial onesie party, I guess — and Moses will tell stories of all the hot shit he did and David will talk about that one time he fucked up Goliath, and then everybody will look at the MAGA Christians and ask them what they did.

I KNOW. But this is serious.

“What did you do when the whole world was against you, when the government was trying to kill you?” asked Federer.

(Always the hero or the victim, never the villain … )

Here’s the thing, though: this kind of talk is incredibly effective on cult-like MAGA Christians, who have been led to believe they are history’s most oppressed victims, people with a desperate craving to feel like they’re special, like they’re smart, like they’re wanted, needed, chosen, superior.

Like they’re really that goddamned important in the scheme of things.

So they get revved up on shit like this, and then they get their marching orders. Getting them so hard that they’re in the parking lot saying, “We’re going to have to go to extremes” And then some activist gets on stage and tells them all how to become election workers. Not volunteers. Workers. “I call this our Trojan horse in,” said that guy, about what they want to do to the election. He called them “warriors.”

The headlining evangelist, a dude called Mario Murillo, did some of the usual faith-healing crap, but he also told the crowd that God was “giving [them] the authority to stop” America from having a “devil in the White House.”

And he made it extremely clear that he was talking about violence, comparing their role to a husband defending their wife from somebody who had just jumped their backyard fence. He said:

“I am not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.” He went on: “I am not on the Earth to feel good. I’m not on the Earth to do my own thing. I’m on this Earth as a God-appointed warrior in a dark time.”

Like I said, when J.D. Vance stopped by the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania, he stayed away from all that kind of shit, for the most part, and all the sorts of speakers who would say that kind of shit.

But, y’all? He was there. That’s all you need to know he endorses this.

Which brings us to …

THE THEOBROS … Are Sofa King Weird, You Guys.

Another piece of excellent journalism comes from Kiera Butler in Mother Jones, which suggests that to truly understand J.D. Vance, you need to understand the “TheoBros.”

First of all, now I have a name for the mostly bearded, highly misogynistic Stranger Danger reaks who have been non-consensually invading my “For You” tab on Twitter. (For those not participating in Elon Musk’s Nazi playpen anymore, this is the first tab you see on the app, which you can’t get rid of, the one where Elon’s algorithms seem designed to hurl the vilest, sickest white supremacist bigots at non-consenting users. I guess it’s in the name of Elon’s needy conception of “free speech,” where freedom of speech doesn’t exist unless we are all forced to sit and listen to vile, sick white supremacist losers. Otherwise they are being “silenced.”)

Anyway, the “TheoBros.” This is a more buttoned-up, extremely online group than the faith-healing New Apostolic Reformation group above, not that they aren’t just two versions of the same tacky commemorative plate.

The TheoBros are mostly Calvinist, AKA “Reformed,” which is not surprising considering how smugly certain they are that their personal theology is the Way, the Truth and also the Life. (This would be the flavor of evangelical Christianity that contends that not a blade of grass has ever moved without God first giving it permission, thus everything, including salvation, is predestined.)

Many if not most of them don’t believe women should be able to vote. They all have highly performative beards. They all look like they spend a lot of time at church with their sex-segregated men’s Bible study and fellowship groups, if you know what I mean. They’re extremely obsessed with masculinity, it’s like a fixation for them.

Last week when Missouri executed a very possibly innocent man, the TheoBros were exuberant. They really, really love capital punishment. I saw one of them discussing the merits of bringing back public stoning. One of their favorite spank bank books suggests execution for heretics.

Just really sick, fucked up individuals.

And yes, though J.D. Vance is a conservative Catholic and most of these men are Reformed Protestant — think of the most Handmaid’s Tale version of Presbyterianism that exists, denominations like the PCA and the OPC, for example — Butler does a fine job explaining why all these dumpy-faced white men are like peas and carrots with each other.

As Butler explains, when J.D. Vance said at the Republican Convention that “America is not just an idea, it is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation,” these people heard it loud and clear as something else:

“America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.

What? White supremacist Christianity? Not sweet, moderate J.D. Vance!

I encourage you to read the whole thing, because Butler shows how Vance’s rhetoric doesn’t have rhetorical overlap with the TheoBros, it’s basically just a barely dogwhistled version of it.

The unofficial leader of the TheoBros, who are mostly Millennials around Vance’s age, is a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho, named Douglas Wilson, who has turned that place — in America’s Nazi country, naturally — into his own weird Calvinist Christian fiefdom.

Wilson and Vance know each other:

In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.

Surprise, this Wilson freak has been on the Tucker Carlson show, just like Tucker’s Holocaust denier pal, just like J.D. Vance.

Wilson and his acolytes cling to the sickest, most pathetic beliefs about their own white male superiority, the inferiority of everyone else, and their right to have dominion over everyone and everything.

Here’s a charming thing about sex from Wilson:

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote [in his 1999 book Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.”

Wait until you hear dude’s whitewashing defenses of slavery. He also, like J.D., loves the idea of parents having extra votes to cast on behalf of their children, though he frames it more in terms of the idea of one household, one vote.

Really, this is a subject where Handmaid’s Tale comparisons aren’t trite or cheap.

Here’s a very J.D.-esque thing from an attention-addicted Twitter TheoBro pastor/podcaster named Brian Sauvé:

In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”

Such a desperate need these boys have to believe they have some kind of authoritative, God-given knowledge on, well, anything.

Shocker, Sauvé, like so many MAGA conservative Christians, is also a raging anti-Semite. As Butler explains, he tweeted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”

On top of the Handmaid’s Tale comparisons, Nazi/KKK-type ideology runs thick through this movement of mediocre white men. Consider this from TheoBro pastor/podcaster Joel Webbon:

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Again, I have no response other than that Matthew 7:21-23 is Jesus Christ’s candygram to these godforsaken motherfuckers, and not a damned one of them will ever possess enough capacity for self-reflection to figure that out.

Now watch Butler tie these men to J.D. Vance by following the money:

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer [the Theobros’ favorite magazine] and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher. In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”

Holyshitdamn.

There is so much more, I only scratched the surface. In all honesty, I’m not even finished reading the article, that’s how much there is in there to read, and also absorb. You might want to print it out and put it on the back of the toilet.

J.D. Vance wants to be, again, literally one heartbeat from the presidency. Every fascist patriarchal bastard in this post wants him there too.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is approximately 4,680 years old, he looks like an infected nail bed, and his body and mind are deteriorating by the day.

That should terrify every patriotic American so much we each take a busload of newly registered voters to the polls.

We’re a month from the election. Let’s make it count.

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-Evan