PECKERWOOD'S WEEKLY LUNOCRACY POST! For the Week of 7/21/2025

 

The Hollow Man: JD Vance’s America

There are men in power who are dangerous because of what they believe. JD Vance is dangerous because he doesn’t seem to believe in anything at all.
Once a bestselling memoirist with a confused sense of empathy and a media halo the size of Appalachia, Vance now floats through Washington like an animatronic specter: the kind of man who smiles while slicing the brake lines on the country, then waxes poetic about family values. He’s no longer selling books — now he’s selling us out. And the terrifying part is, I don’t think he even knows to whom.
 

This week, Vice President Vance appeared at a crypto conference in Las Vegas to deliver what can only be described as a sermon written by a libertarian ChatGPT clone on its third Monster Energy drink. Cryptocurrency, he said, isn’t just an asset — it’s a movement. A movement toward what, exactly, was unclear. Possibly toward a future where all financial transactions are untraceable, unregulated, and inspired by Ayn Rand’s diary entries during a meth binge. He delivered it with the placid smile of a man who’s just realized the Kool-Aid was spiked but drank it anyway because he didn’t want to seem uncool.
 

 

 

Back in Washington, he cast the tie-breaking Senate vote to gut PBS, NPR, and USAID. Apparently, nothing keeps JD up at night more than the idea of a publicly funded puppet or a Somali child with a vaccine. To hear him tell it, Elmo is Marx in disguise, and Big Bird has been radicalized. We are, it seems, living through the “Let’s Defund Big Bird” era of the American experiment.
 

He also found time for a secret summit in Montana with Rupert Murdoch, which definitely doesn’t scream “shadow government,” no sir. No press was allowed. No schedule was released. A few hours later, the Wall Street Journal mysteriously broke a scoop on the administration’s next move. If you think that’s a coincidence, JD would like to sell you a podcast about the benefits of off-grid living — sponsored by Raytheon.
 

At the Munich Security Conference, he called Denmark “a NATO welfare queen,” accused Germany of “milking the West’s military teat,” and managed to insult China and Ukraine in a single paragraph. His foreign policy style can best be described as “drunken Reddit moderator gets ahold of the nuclear codes.” No tact. No filter. No idea what he’s doing — just vibes and vengeance.
 

And yet, none of it is shocking. Because this is what happens when a man has no center. JD Vance is not real. What stands at the podium is an avatar built by ambition, stitched together from Twitter arguments and the discarded bones of Steve Bannon’s political strategy. He is hollow. The lights are on, but the soul has long since moved out — possibly around the time Peter Thiel bought it for scrap.

 

There’s something uniquely chilling about a man with power who is utterly unmoored from conviction. JD Vance is not interested in governance. He is interested in performance. In pleasing the shadowy billionaires behind him. In using “the people” as camouflage while he helps dismantle every policy meant to protect them.
 

If he seems blank behind the eyes, it’s because he is. There’s nothing left in there but calculations and old Fox News monologues. He’s not the future of America — he’s the warning.
 

And make no mistake: we are being warned.