Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is a jerk. The Ohio senator Irresponsible liar And deep-rooted Nagging people The only time he would smile was when he said something he thought would hurt someone’s feelings. Most hated person No matter which party’s candidate he is in this year’s election, he’s an undeniable jerk.
But there’s a group of white men who believe he might be something more. They saw Vance’s ugly attack and woman, Immigrationand others They see him as the leader they have been looking for: an anti-diversity savior, a “Christian prince” for white supremacist America.
As Mother Jones According to the report, these men pored over Vance’s words and usually wrote:Bible Code” The numerologists say that when Vance says America is “a people with a common history and a common future,” they don’t hear patriotic nonsense; they hear a clear message that America was made just for them, and everyone else must get out.
For the Christian nationalist pastor and his followers, Vance’s message signals that they are right: America is a country for a select few.
They believe Vance upholds their core belief that America is a nation for white Christians. in America, but they live there only with the permission of the country’s true owners.
For these evangelical leaders, it makes sense to support Vance’s racist attacks on legal Haitian immigrants and his declaration that he will continue to call them illegals. teeth Legal immigration would not be allowed, especially black immigrants whose religious beliefs did not align with his own strict views.
Much of the mainstream media portrays Vance as Donald Trump 2.0— hate speech and vicious Republican trolling in online forums. And it’s all true.
But to dismiss Vance as merely a petulant newcomer to a more aggressive form of Trumpism fails to grasp the full extent of the threat he represents. Vance’s most ardent supporters don’t see him as Trump’s buddy, or even as someone waiting for Dear Old Donald to finally fall out of his chair.
They are looking for BeyondTo Trump supporters, he may be an orange Jesus, but to the “Theobros” who hunger for Vance’s words, Trump is more like John the Baptist, the man who allowed the real thing to take center stage.
Christian nationalists have been a threat to American democracy for decades, but as Mother Jones reports, they’re not the old-fashioned preachers who have dominated AM radio airwaves and supported past Republican candidates.
They are young. And they are mean.
Though this group is youthful and trendy, they are actually more conservative than their older counterparts. For example, many Theobros don’t think women should be in the pulpit or at the polls, and they even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. Some believe prison reform requires public flogging instead of incarceration. Unlike mainstream Christian nationalists who cling to the U.S. Constitution, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, many Theobros believe the Constitution is dead and we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.
Public flogging is actually on the lighter end of the group’s preferred punishment list, with calls on podcasts and online typically for executions for treason or heresy that go against their angry and violent view of Christianity.
The idea that the 19th Amendment should be repealed says a lot about how they feel about Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As one of Vance’s biggest admirers wrote: Being ruled by a woman isPunishment from God.”
To these men, Harris stands in a blazing red pentagram, given her diverse ethnic background, professional accomplishments and lack of biological children. The fact that her husband is Jewish doesn’t help matters.
Vance, a conservative Catholic married to a Hindu, hardly seems the right candidate to deliver a message of anger, bigotry and Protestant purity. But as long as he expresses his views regularly on the national stage, theobros seem willing to overlook his minor faux pas and give him their enthusiastic support. He knows how to blow their dog whistle, and he does it regularly.
And those dog whistles hint at the major themes of this election: hyper-masculinity, declining birth rates, ethno-nationalism, and no small amount of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flocked to him, you need to meet Brother Theobros.
This is not an official organization, it’s just a group of men who believe that oppressing women and squashing diversity is the way to turn America into a white Christian paradise.
They draw theological evidence from centuries-old sources, mix it with books from the past decade, include online postings from respected leaders, and top it all off with Bible quotations that are often taken out of context or given new interpretations.
Some of them have already established small local kingdoms, while others are focused on crowning a Christian prince for America.
Brother Theobro’s strategy is bottom-up, aimed at turning small towns in America into Christian enclaves. But it’s also top-down, with some seeking to position themselves closer to the center of federal power.
Consider how Republicans have taken control of local governments and state legislatures, and how Project 2025 has attempted to clean up the federal government. In this case, the aim was not to fill vacancies with a small army of Trump acolytes, but to turn the government into a “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published as a handbook.
Then we can start arresting heretics en masse.
The group’s influence is already being felt as the Republican Party steps up its attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, adding “DEI” to its collection of stigmatizing terms, and in the willingness of many Republicans to defend misogyny against “childless, cat-loving women.” Vile racism A story spread about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
All of this has led to Trump becoming more of a symbolic leader swept away by the flood than a leader of his party.
Vance’s biggest supporters are the men who see him as a future prince, but there’s nothing glamorous about this story.
