Notorious Weirdo JD Vance Awkwardly Tries to Explain Masculinity

JD Vance has weighed in on what he thinks masculinity is, and it’s one big joke.

During an interview to kick off the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington Thursday, Vance pontificated over what makes him a man.

“I think about like, ‘What is the essence of masculinity?’ You could answer this in so many different ways,” Vance said. “But when I think about me and my guy friends, we really like to tell jokes to one another.”

It’s entirely possible that the simple question caught him off guard. After all, Vance has been more or less shunned from the public eye since entering office, in favor of Donald Trump’s actual favorite Elon Musk. So maybe he’s just warming up to answering questions again.

Vance’s comment is particularly ironic considering that on the campaign trail, the ineffectual vice president demonstrated time and time again that he’s actually too hostile to deliver a joke, let alone a funny one.

There are those of us who still remember his weak attempt to rib cancel culture over his choice of Diet Mountain Dew. Or his sexist “childless cat lady” comment. Vance claimed it was just a joke, but in reality, it stood only to demonstrate his actual approach to manhood, what Ginny Hogan for The Nation called his “insecure, backward-looking, and grievance-driven” brand of masculinity.

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency members have wasted no time making themselves comfortable during their efforts to take an axe to federal agencies and reshape them to the liking of tech bros, The Atlantic reported Thursday. 

One month after DOGE’s raid of USAID offices at the beginning of February, the non-agency of non-employees seems to be everywhere, or at least that’s how it feels, according to one USAID contractor. “It’s like the panopticon,” the contractor told The Atlantic. “There’s a sense that Elon Musk, through DOGE, is always watching. It has created a big sense of fear.”

While a memo barred USAID officials from returning to agency headquarters after the takeover, it made no mention of its other offices, providing a window into the goings-on of Musk’s minions. 

One USAID staffer told The Atlantic that after DOGE’s descent into her agency’s offices, she returned to find ample evidence of “activity overnight.” Some of her materials had been moved from where she left them, and there were Panera cookie wrappers strewn across her desk and in the nearby waste bin. 

“Books were open, and things had been riffled through,” another USAID staffer told the magazine. 

The impression that DOGE is always watching takes on a new meaning when considering the unprecedented level of access staffers have been granted to the offices of the agencies they’re gutting. The contractor told The Atlantic that she kept her government laptop under a pile of clothes in her closet, and her colleagues considered storing their computers in the fridge, in case DOGE was using it to spy on them.

During a town hall in Leesburg, Virginia, earlier this month, a man who identified himself as a federal worker claimed that a DOGE employee had moved into the federal building where he worked, bringing with him a wife and baby, according to The Daily Beast. 

It’s not clear where the rest of Musk’s minions reside, but DOGE headquarters, located at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, recently received a shipment of sleep pods to fuel their supposed efficiency.  

“In the last week, we had Elon Musk in our building, and after he visited the building, called for a 50 percent cut of the entire agency,” the man claimed. “My colleagues are getting 15-minute one-on-one check-ins with 19-, 20-, and 21-year old-college graduates asking to justify their existence.”

According to The Atlantic, DOGE has subjected federal employees to extensive corporate-style questioning as part of its efforts to learn even more about the staff it hopes to obliterate. 

Federal employees received short-notice invitations from nongovernmental email addresses, asking them to complete a form probing them for their recent “wins” and “blockers,” and to attend 15-minute interviews. Some people received short coding quizzes, while others were pressed to speak on their beliefs about DOGE itself. While the specific questions varied, many hit the same flavor. 

In one recording obtained by The Atlantic, an employee of the General Services Administration was asked by one of Musk’s twenty-something goons, “Like, what’s your superpower?” 

As one recently departed federal technology official wrote in a draft testimony for lawmakers, this level of access is an obvious double-edged sword. 

“At present, every hacker in the world knows there are a small number of people new to federal service who hold the keys to access all US government payments, contracts, civil servant personal info, and more,” they wrote. “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”

The sheer extent to which these agencies have become inundated with random tech bros may seem laughable, but the purpose of their permeation is much more sinister. 

In addition to sifting through government contracts for words such as “diversity” to put them on the chopping block (and then in an increasing number of cases, hurriedly reinstalled), Musk’s young technologists attempted to gain access to the U.S. Treasury system to stop the payments coming from USAID without having to order the agency to stop spending, according to The Atlantic. 

With a few clicks on a keyboard, DOGE has snatched the purse strings for the entire federal government out of the hands of Congress, and into the hands of the executive—or more likely, the executive’s technocrat buddy. 

Donald Trump’s new commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, says the president wants to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service.

“His goal is to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,” Lutnick said to Jesse Watters on Fox News Wednesday, adding that the president’s planned “External Revenue Service” will fund the government with tariffs from the rest of the world.

Trump has already started cutting the government agency, with plans to lay off about 7,000 IRS workers beginning Thursday, despite tax season being in full swing. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has also demanded access to the private data of every single taxpayer, business, and nonprofit, and Musk claimed earlier this month that he killed a popular government program that allowed Americans a free and easy way to file their taxes.

In December, in negotiations to avert a government shutdown, Republicans already set the stage for Trump’s plan, cutting $20 billion in funding for the IRS, hurting its ability to conduct audits and adding $140 billion to the national debt, the Biden administration said at the time. Trump’s choice to run the agency, former Representative Billy Long, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, but he repeatedly sought to abolish the IRS while serving in the House.

While killing the IRS might once have been a half-baked scheme for Republicans, that no longer seems to be the case. Trump has already destroyed one government agency, barring legal challenges. But will he actually be able to get rid of the IRS, which is responsible for bringing in the money that runs the federal government? It remains to be seen if he can overcome all of the legal issues with his goal, as well as Congress.

Vice President JD Vance is asking the American public to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, the vice president insisted that Donald Trump still held all his cards in negotiations over Ukraine’s fate—just one week after his defense secretary told NATO they didn’t.

“I think President Trump—what makes him such an effective negotiator, I’ve seen this in private—is that he doesn’t take anything off the table,” Vance told CPAC host Mercedes Schlapp. “When he walks in a negotiation, he says, ‘Everything is on the table.’”

But Vance’s comments came barely a week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explicitly told the NATO conference that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had actually taken several bargaining chips “off the table.”

That included Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-war borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

The announcement came as a complete 180 on American and NATO policy regarding the eastern European country, and left U.S. allies and defense experts reeling. The deal, per Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, amounted to Russian propaganda and was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

Hegseth walked back the brazen settlement terms the following day, insisting that, despite having already shown the American hand, “everything is on the table” when it comes to arranging peace between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Trump denied telling Hegseth to walk back his comments during an Oval Office press conference, describing them as “pretty accurate.”

Hot heads and rocky promises have resulted in several days of tumult on a potential peace deal, including Trump branding Zelenskiy a “dictator.” But beyond the administration’s seismic hiccups, perhaps the most egregious error remains that Trump has continued to relegate Kyiv to the sidelines of a negotiation that will decide Ukraine’s future.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership. Critics excoriated the administration for doing so, but Vance did little more than brush off the global concern at CPAC.

“And of course that makes the heads explode in the American media, because they say, ‘Why are you talking to Russia?’” Vance told the conference. “Well, how are you going to end the war unless you’re talking to Russia? You’ve got to get everybody involved in the fighting if you actually want to bring it to a close, and I know the president does.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

Mitch McConnell has finally decided to call it quits.

The longest-serving Senate leader in history announced on Thursday that he will not run for reelection in 2026.

“Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,” McConnell said to the Associated Press. “Every day in between I’ve been humbled by the trust they’ve placed in me to do their business here. Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”

This ends McConnell’s decades-long reign of conservative terror that upended years of liberal and progressive policy, cemented conservative courts across the nation, and saw the rise of Donald Trump—leading to McConnell’s own eventual dethroning.

McConnell spent his leadership tenure obstructing campaign finance reform and packing the federal courts with likeminded conservatives, providing fertile ground for Citizens United and the debilitating influx of corporate influence onto American politics. He also helped create the correct circumstances for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, as he held up Merrick Garland’s nomination under former President Barack Obama and then helped Trump confirm three justices to the high court.

McConnell unsuccessfully tried to thread the needle near the end, critiquing Trump’s brand of conservatism while protecting it and the power his proximity to it gave him. He backed the president for years, fighting against his impeachment and supporting his claims of a stolen election even after lambasting January 6 as a “violent insurrection.”

McConnell’s exit serves as a fitting end to the Republican Party’s rejection of traditional conservatism and full embrace of Trump’s MAGA movement.

This story has been updated.