How American ethnonationalism is rewarded and encouraged

This post is going to contain some strong language and slurs from quoted text messages by bigots

J.D. Vance knows what happened to Mike Pence. He knows that Mike Pence was more or less hung out to dry and possibly left for dead on January 6, 2021. I think that for Republicans, the writing was on the wall there that if you didn't get on board with Trump-style fascism, you were a threat. No exceptions.

I don't doubt that Vance is a true believer that is trying to ride the gravy train to the Oval Office if or when Trump dies from the accumulated bile of hatred in his mortal shell. He benefits every time he gets to point out that Democrats sometimes get nasty in text messages and deflect from the central problems of his own party. Vance has done so already in the latest news drop of text messages from Young Republicans. He said over Twitter: "I refuse to join pearl clutching when powerful people call for violence."

Vance's tactic is to avoid the specifics of the text messages by Young Republicans, because those texts are disgusting. Take for instance the jokes about what they want to do to Democrats that oppose them in legislatures:

Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic

We gotta pretend that we like them. “Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax”. Boom - they’re dead

Unfortunately, these posts are about the same quality as the ones I run into in video game lobbies. Doubly unfortunate is the fact that this is a networking group of people using their real names in a pseudo-work setting and not a bunch of teenagers trying to play a game with Spider-Man and Wolverine. Many of them mention that the group chats don't force them to adopt the pretense of being polite to minorities or refraining from referring to them as slurs.

When I approach these systems as an international relations specialist that's looked at China for a long time, I see not just the immediate ideological consequences but the setup for maintaining that ideological state of play. Chinese politicians like to promote through propaganda what is called 'positive energy,' or 正能量. What this refers to is essentially putting more of what they want to see in media, public discourse and civic spaces. In addition to censoring content that a regime might find unacceptable, positive energy reconfigures what is acceptable and uses resources to promote desired content within the system.

To give an example of positive energy in Chinese politics, take COVID-19. People within Chinese cities despised some of the conditions they were facing under Zero COVID lockdowns, which included poorly planned contingencies for people looking for prescription medication delivery, fresh grocery availability, and non-COVID access to hospitals and emergency rooms. After deleting complaints about these issues and other high-risk consequences of poor Zero COVID policy execution, Chinese propagandists posted bland celebrations of hero doctors or construction deeds of field hospitals. Similar propaganda approaches happen in ideological issues like ethnic minority administration, economic trouble or gender violence stories that go viral.

Current conservative politics operate in parallel to the positive energy propaganda system because they aim to maintain staying power and framing attacks on immigrants, Jewish people and minorities as positive to neutral contributions to discussions. Their institutions the type of thinking that these Young Republicans promote and circulate. They are being recruited into government and trained for political and media careers. They receive scholarships, mentorships and have conferences (like ones bankrolled by the abruptly departed Charlie Kirk's TPUSA). Under the environment that acts as a development league for conservative politicos, hate speech about gas chambers or equating Black people to monkeys is simply free speech. It's humor. To them, it's substantive discussion, no matter how bigoted the speech really is.

One last note on a specifically American distinction: though the term is positive energy propaganda, the amount of overt hater energy is kind of unique to the current iteration of Republican politics.

My explanation for this is simple: racial, nationality and and gender based hatred is positive for conservatives. They derive pleasure from saying this stuff, if the laugh emoji are any indication. I mean, their grandparents made postcards of lynchings, for crying out loud. It's not very large leap to make that they think using the n word or referring to me as a chink is fun.

Don't get me wrong, the bigotry was always there, but you start to get language like this from spokespeople in formal settings:

Only an activist, left-wing reporter would desperately try to tie President Trump into a story about a random groupchat he has no affiliation with, while failing to mention the dangerous smears coming from Democrat politicians who have fantasized about murdering their opponent and called Republicans Nazis and Fascists

With language like this, it's no surprise what is allowed to foster, grow and get paid the big bucks in the lower leagues of conservative American youth politics. The rest of us just need to see it for the ideological training regimen that it is.