(By Hayes Brown, MSNBC, 10 August 2024)
JD
Vance on July 22 in Middletown, Ohio.
I want to underscore that these two descriptors
— “weird” and “nerd” — are not synonymous. As a card-carrying nerd myself, I would have to say that Vance’s
love of stereotypically geeky interests has nothing to do with his creepy
tendencies. If anything, he has shown himself to be the worst kind of nerd, one
who reinforces the toxic masculinity that was at one point inseparable from overarching geekdom. It is
to Vance’s discredit that he will likely be unable to see how deeply his
rejection of all things “woke” isolates him from a community that has come to
embrace the “good weird” that doesn’t fit into his homogenized vision of
America.
Let’s start with Vance’s ties to M:TG (not the GOP congresswoman from Georgia). Earlier this week, an interview
with Usha Vance aired on “Fox & Friends,” aimed at helping to
soften her husband’s image and defend his now infamous “childless cat ladies” comments. “He has all sorts of
dorky interests that anyone of our age could relate to,” she told Fox News host
Ainsley Earhardt. Those interests, Earhardt told her co-hosts, include playing the collectable
trading card game.
Vance denied that it was a current interest when Semafor asked him about it Wednesday, calling it a
“phase.” More interesting, though, was the reason he said he ditched the game:
The big problem with transitioning from being a 13-year-old
who likes Magic: The Gathering to being a 15-year-old who likes Magic: The
Gathering is that 15-year-old girls do not like Magic: The Gathering. So I
dropped it like a bad habit.
He may have meant it as a laugh line, but it speaks to
something very real about how gatekeeping has worked in nerd spaces. It’s true
that back when Vance would have been playing, as depicted briefly in the movie adaptation of his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” the
game was not exactly popular among young women. Even as of 2015, only
an estimated 38% of the game’s players were female, according to one
of Magic’s designers. But arguably much of that was due to the self-reinforcing
habits of male players who would scoff at any girl who could possibly try to compete
against them. How many of the 15-year-old girls whom Vance wrote off as having
no interest would have been interested in learning how to play alongside him?
It’s only relatively recently that the game’s owner, Wizards
of the Coast, itself a subsidiary of Hasbro, has realized how much of the
population was being excluded from playing (and buying cards) thanks to
the perceived gender norms around the game. Since then, it
has moved to eliminate the sexist art that was the norm for the cards’
illustrations and tried to make the game feel more inclusive overall. It’s a
shift that of course drew some backlash from the JD Vances of the world.
Beyond this specific issue, I’d argue that Vance is
bad at being a nerd, given how deeply he has clearly missed
the point of “The Lord of the Rings.” J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal work was born in
part out of his view of the horrors of World War I. It stresses the need for
fellowship among different groups against the forces of evil and a rejection of
the desire for ultimate power. As The New York Times’ David French and Jamelle Bouie have separately noted, there’s little
evidence that those messages sunk in with Vance.
Vance shares that obliviousness with his benefactor, billionaire Peter Thiel, who made his
fortune as an early investor in PayPal. After all, Thiel named his giant data analytics company Palantir after the
all-seeing orbs that the villains use to spy on the heroes in “The Lord of the
Rings.” As a reference, that’s a deep enough cut to really show off one’s geek
credentials while displaying exactly zero comprehension about why Thiel’s
pursuit of military contracts would be something that the story’s protagonists
would frown upon.
We can see this determination to miss the values for the
merchandise among many branches of nerd culture. Recently, a post on Reddit’s r/Conservative message board detailed how a
group of “Star Trek” fans were appalled to hear politics brought up at a Las
Vegas convention. It’s truly a mystery as to how these supposed fans missed the
very transparent left-wing tilt throughout the “Trek” franchise, which
is set in a post-capitalist utopia where diversity is the
greatest of strengths.
Along with this purposeful blindness comes the lack of
recognition from Vance and those like him that the nerds have won. Geek culture
has become a pop culture Goliath. The most popular franchises in the world have
realized that it matters that everyone gets to see themselves in the stories being told. For Vance and
others, it’s not their interests in comic books or sci-fi that sets them apart
now. What’s weird is their refusal to share that win with anyone who doesn’t
fit the outdated stereotype of who and what a nerd is.
Considering who Vance has become, it’s easy to clock the
kind of nerd he once was. Over the last eight years, he’s transformed himself
from someone who correctly saw Trump as a threat to the country into
Trump’s potential vice president. Much like with Magic, he has opted to drop
his morals like a bad habit, showing that he’s more than willing to shift and
change himself to try to fit in with his chosen in-group. In doing so, he’s
become the kind of nerd who has chosen to punch down out of fear of being
punched himself.
