JD Vance just proved he meant it.
At the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps, attended by Vice President Vance, live-fire artillery rounds were fired over Interstate 5 in California—a 17-mile closure, a motor-patrol car hit by shrapnel, and a military celebration turned near-miss. Governor Gavin Newsom had objected to the risks. Vance mocked the concerns. Then the danger manifested.
This isn’t symbolic. This is real.
It’s what happens when someone who once said we’re in a “late republican period” gets the keys to real power.
If a CHP officer had been in that vehicle or a civilian wandered into the blast zone, we’d be talking manslaughter from a demonstration the Vice President presided over.
No one died. A federal investigation was launched. But the pattern is undeniable.
This is the moment when everyone who dismissed Vance’s prior statements needs to update their priors. When Vance cited Andrew Jackson defying the Supreme Court as a model, when he talked about purging civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, when he told Jack Murphy “we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with”—maybe you thought that was rhetorical positioning. Edgy talk for podcast audiences.
A demonstration he oversaw just endangered civilians after explicit warnings about those exact dangers. Those warnings were mocked. The danger manifested anyway.
This isn’t governance. This isn’t infrastructure policy. This is an act of reckless endangerment masquerading as power.
The Vice President cannot oversee military operations over civilian infrastructure against state governors’ safety objections, mock those objections, and then have the exact feared incident occur. Not in a constitutional republic. Not under any framework where democratic accountability and basic competence matter.
But it happened anyway. Because Vance fundamentally believes constitutional constraints are obstacles for the weak. Because he’s internalized Curtis Yarvin’s neo-reactionary framework where executive power should be unconstrained by democratic process. Because he thinks demonstrations of federal dominance matter more than whether people get hurt.
This is Peter Thiel’s investment made manifest. This is what you get when you fund a Senate candidate who admires authoritarian theory, elevate him nationally, and then hand him real power. Thiel didn’t buy Vance because he was a moderate conservative who’d govern responsibly. He bought him because Vance genuinely believes democracy is failing and elite rule through executive dominance is the answer.
And now we’re seeing exactly what that looks like: military operations directed over civilian infrastructure to demonstrate federal power doesn’t need state permission.
This is criminal negligence at minimum. This is reckless endangerment elevated to federal spectacle. This is what happens when the people who’ve been warning about authoritarian escalation are proven right in the worst possible way.
So for everyone still operating under the assumption that Vance’s prior statements about constitutional overthrow were just provocative rhetoric—for everyone who thought “extra-constitutional” was intellectual posturing rather than actual intent—for everyone treating democratic alarm as overreaction:
A military demonstration the Vice President oversaw just endangered civilians after explicit safety warnings. Those warnings were mocked. The danger happened anyway.
What part of his previous statements should we still be treating as metaphor? At what point does the pattern become undeniable?
JD Vance isn’t just a Thiel protégé who read too much Curtis Yarvin. He’s a dangerous executive who oversaw operations that almost got people killed—proving he doesn’t think democratic constraints or safety warnings apply to him.
The question isn’t whether he means it. It’s whether we will treat his actions as literal.
Because the clock is ticking—and our complacency might be the deadliest casualty.
Yes. JD Vance is proof that Trumpism, or whatever they call it, will not end with Trump. Instead it will move from Nero, obsessed with symbol and spectacle and fundamentally incompetent, to something approaching Caligula, truly violent and unconcerned with anyone even those closest to him.
Trump may have fascist tendencies, but Vance *is* a Fascist and a competent one at that. At this point we do live on borrowed time.
He is a timebomb armed and ready to go ... to take over from his predecessor without much of a hiccup. I used to see him as a bit of milk toast. He isn't. I couldn't have been more wrong. He is perhaps a bigger threat to Democracy than the idiot in the office right now.