The bitter leftists at MSNBC’s prime-time studio panel limited their initial reactions to Ohio Senator JD Vance’s vice presidential acceptance speech to stylistic observations. Additionally, there was some light grousing about Vance’s exclusion of such MSNBC content bait as abortion and Project 2025. Even racial bomb-thrower Joy Reid showed some initial restraint.
But not Alex Wagner, no sirree. Alex Wagner peered into the text of that speech until she found a white supremacy:
.@JDVance1: I want to my family to rest in our Eastern Kentucky plot
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) July 18, 2024
Alex Wagner: WHITE SUPREMACY REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE pic.twitter.com/SPO12sQjxR
ALEX WAGNER: One of the things that stuck out to me was when he started talking about what America is. He said, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” The thing about America is that it’s not a group of people with shared history, in fact, I think a lot of people would argue it’s quite the opposite. It's a lot of people with different histories, different heritages.
CHRIS HAYES: His in-laws don't share that history.
WAGNER: Exactly. And that's the other piece of it. He talked- he goes- he went on a long sort of…paragraph, at least, about this plot in eastern Kentucky where his seven or six generations of his family are buried. And his hope is that his wife and he are eventually laid to rest there, and their kids follow them.
And I sort of understand the idea of sharing the burial plot, but it also- it reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit, and indeed, the history that should be determinative in the story of the Vance family, is the history of the eastern Kentucky Vances, and not the Vances from San Diego, which is where his wife is from and from where her Indian parents are from. But in America, it doesn't have to be the white male lineage that defines the family history, that that branch of the tree supersedes all else.
And I just think the construction of this notion reveals a lot about someone who fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity, and it’s couched in a sort of halcyon re-visitation of his roots, but it is actually really revealing about what he thinks matters, and who America is, and that America is a place for people with a shared Western background. And that is the idea of America. That is the nation of America that he wants to resurrect.
Imagine being in the shoes of Joe Scarborough, watching this submoronic hot take after getting benched on Monday in furtherance of “lowering the temperature”.
We may have just witnessed the first known case of Vance Derangement Syndrome on national television. How else to explain Wagner’s crazy transmutation of the desire to be buried alongside one’s family into “the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity”? Has the temperature been lowered to everyone’s satisfaction?
“Unity” and “lowering the temperature” notwithstanding, Wagner’s unhinged rant leaves one thinking that Vance missed an opportunity to renew his epic blast at miserable cat ladies who want to make the rest of the country miserable.
