JD Vance and the Pro-Slavery New Right

A bit of context before we get to the beginning of this series, which is definitely the scariest thing I’ve ever published. (Yes, including that piece where I talked about getting a colonoscopy.)

“It sure seems like JD Vance wants to bring back honest to god slavery” is an argument I am going to make in this series. I understand it also sounds like the overblown rhetoric that’s become increasingly common in our polarized two party-system.

But if you’ve read my work for any amount of time, you know I don’t really do partisan rhetoric. By my last count, I’d written and published over half a million words about the harms perpetrated by both parties - domestically and internationally.

I have never written anything like this before. And I wish I didn’t have to write it now. 

I also know the vc-funded Creator Economy is designed to scale. Writers are incentivized to use panic-pocked predictive persuasion to grow readership and build community. It’s never profitable to be a Cassandra, but a person can make a killing pretending to be a Cassandra. 

I am particularly vulnerable to those incentives, because I am an autodidact trying to make a living from my kitchen table. And so I’ve deconstructed my own success over and over again to keep myself - and my readers - away from the mechanisms of influence. 

I refuse to participate in profitable, but potentially inflammatory projects. I do not write clickbait pieces to compel donations or shares. I left Substack because I understand how the network effect is being weaponized. I am on track to earn 1/4 of what I earned last year. 

(None of this is brilliant of me, by the way. It means my words get to less people and I may have to stop writing them so that I can go make a living. So please, support your favorite writers no matter what platform they’re on.)

This series will not help me close that gap. When I removed myself from Substack’s network of mentions and recommendations, my readership stopped growing. Most donations and subscriptions come from new readers. 

While new supporters won’t find this piece, new scary people will. They don’t rely on the network effect to discover victims. They go looking for them. And those people will send me death threats, they will tell me they aren’t afraid of hurting my kids, they will keep coming long after you’ve finished reading this series.  And so, as I wrote last week, there is a temptation to just not publish this. To figure out how to quietly survive whatever comes next. 

But I don’t want you to have to quietly survive it. I don’t want my daughters to have to quietly survive it. And so I am not going to temper what I’ve learned about these intemperate men. I am going to describe it to you, in detail, every day until the election. 

When we describe an order of power - in writing, on a group chat, over dinner - we are observing its limits. We are helping each other see the boundaries of the world that order creates. Once we've marked every boundary, we can see where that world ends. - I feel afraid

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All right. Now, let’s get to it. 

JD Vance is the latest New Man to put himself forward as leader of the New Right,  a long-simmering extremist movement that wants to retvn to … something. The movement changes names almost as often as it makes new men old news. But it’s fundamentals remain the same: 

The Once and Future New Right is a reactionary movement that is fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-republic, anti-egalitarian, anti-liberation, anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, antisemitic, anti-Black, anti-family, anti-woman, and anti-child. 

That’s a lot of fundamental hate, even for a guy like Vance. But he doesn’t have to loathe alone. Other leading lights of the New Right include Project 2025 architect Kevin D. Roberts, Sauron cosplayer Peter Thiel, simpering speaker of the House Mike Johnson, stockfluencers Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, 4Chan sophist Curtis Yarvin, and Nepo Baby Donald Trump. 

It’s a coalition of the creepy. 

These men represent just a portion of the different factions within the New Right. Each faction claims a different cut and paste political ideology gives them the authority to disrupt democracy - Postliberalism, Christian Nationalism, Techno-Optimisim, Dark Enlightenment, Maximalism, The Network State, Making America Great Again…again. This performance of ideological incoherence is just dazzle camouflage -pattern disruption designed to conceal through confusion. 

And you know what? I have to admit - it kind of worked! Because for a very long time, I could tell where the New Right movement was headed but I didn’t understand where it was going. 

Like, I could see that Trump and Vance are headed toward one-man rule. But I could not tell how close the US is to actually being subjected to one-man rule. And I could not discernwhat exactly a Vance or Thiel or [insert Soft-Bellied Embodiment of the How Often Do You Think About Rome meme] dictatorship would mean for the day to day lives of average Americans.I was disoriented by the dazzle!

But only for a little while.

The impact of pattern disruption diminishes with steady observation. So I looked into the New Right until its structure and object became clear. Once I could see how the New Right works and what its leaders want, I understood where they plan to put us.

These men do not have enough imagination to invent new systems, they just have enough imagination to exploit old structures.

According to the New Right, a well-ordered society requires slavery.

The New Right wants to establish dominion over us. And I mean that literally. These people want to bring back slavery. Like actual slavery, modeled on the Ancient Roman system of enslavement. They believe the “natural relationship” between a master and a slave is the foundation of good governance. According to them, a well-ordered society requires slavery.

And like, okay, Meg! You’ve got all this research - including actual quotes from these creeps - that shows the New Right wants to disenfranchise most of us and enslave some of us. That’s really disturbing, but that doesn’t mean it’s possible! Like how would America even get to that point? 

That’s a great question! And it’s the one I’ve been laboring over for weeks. 

Figuring out the route they are taking wasn’t easy, but it was doable. I knew the type of information I needed to calculate their course, I just had to go out and find it. (I am trying to be chill about this part like it was NBD but the tips of my fingers are actually bruised from all the note taking. I obviously need to get a new keyboard.) 

It helps too that the COTC (coalition of the creepy) is brimming with uninspired. For all their talk of disruption, JD Vance and the rest of the New Right, are using previously proven paths to get to well-documented waypoints. So I can see where they are going. Not because I am some kind of savant, but just because I took the time to look at what was already there.

Do I think it is likely these wannabe Caesars will push us all the way to the exit point of their subjugation sequence? No, not really. I mean…I can see how it could happen. But I don’t think it’s probable.

That’s not very comforting. 

Because there is plenty of violence and oppression waiting for us at every waypoint on their chosen path. And the New Right is already using surveillance, privatization and an extremist Supreme Court to re-order power and authority in America. They hope to use a second Trump presidency to push us to the next waypoint. And yes, even if Trump's in office, JD Vance plans to do the steering. 

So every day until election day,  I am going to explore one segment of this route to subjugation. I’ll touch on the pro-life movement, financialization, Roman emperors, Scottish bastards, billionaires, student loans, school shootings and time itself. (You know I can’t leave time alone.) I’ll include citations and further reading - because frankly, I wouldn’t believe me without that stuff either.

Tomorrow, I’ll introduce the men of the COTC in greater depth. I’ll explain their obsession with enslavement. And I’ll show you how they plan to use the concept of liberty to strip you of your freedom. 

It’s going to be eleven days of pretty upsetting writing and reading. But it’s got to be done. Mostly because I do not know what else I can do for us. (If you think of something better, let me know. Especially if it requires less of my fingertips.)