JD Vance said Black Lives Matter was a Jeff Bezos attempt to destroy rival busi—hang on, he said WHAT?

I know we've asked this before, but do you think Team Trump did even the most cursory vetting on "what if discarded toenail clippings became a real person" JD Vance? The Christian Science Monitor has a report up today highlighting a 2021 speech Vance gave at a conference hosted by the notably fascist Claremont Institute. In it, he directly accused hypermegacompany Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, of being the secret string-pullers behind the Black Lives Matter protests:

“Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos,” Mr. Vance said, referencing the riots that broke out in the summer of 2020, amid a wave of racial justice protests. “The people who are invested in destroying America via our corporate class are also getting rich from it. This is an important piece of the puzzle to understand.”

Is it, now. Is it an important piece of the puzzle to understand.

There's a whole lot going on here, but it's again striking how little agency the far-right deems Black Americans to have in their own thoughts and actions. It's not that Black Americans were and remain genuinely furious at the regularity with which racist police departments kill young Black men and women, resulting in an organic nationwide movement to demand reforms. No, those Americans must have been goaded into it. Secretly, behind the scenes. By conservatism's ever-changing laundry list of enemies.

That one crackpot quote from Vance should be enough to discredit the buffoon forever but, no, anyone familiar with Vance knows that he just keeps on goin'.

In the same 2021 speech, Mr. Vance argued that companies supporting abortion rights really just want a pool of “cheap labor,” with workers unburdened by the cost and time commitment of caring for children. Citing former Georgia Democratic House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams’ assertion that a Georgia abortion ban would be “bad for business,” he said: “She was right. When the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children, she’s right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business.”

Jeebus McCrackers, this man may be genuinely out of his mind. Off his rocker. Five cards short of a full deck. The wheels may have fallen off his cart. The trolley, off the tracks. The cheese has slipped off his cracker. Weird doesn't begin to cover it.

The Trump-Vance campaign did not provide any evidence supporting Mr. Vance’s claim that the organizations Amazon donated to had supported the riots that sporadically broke out alongside the widespread, largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

Yeah, well, good on you for asking.

I admit I'm a bit lost even on the logic of the "corporations want you to get abortions because if you became a parent you'll quit" or whatever-the-hell that was supposed to mean. It's probably not even worth parsing out, he probably burped it out spur-of-the-moment and couldn't tell you what he meant himself.

The direct accusation that Amazon funded Black Lives Matter as an attempt to "destroy" small businesses is worth parsing out, because it once again shows Vance, Claremont, and the rest of the MAGA movement to be three feet up their own intestines with their crackpot conspiracy theories about just who their enemies might be and what might need to be done about it. We don't need to imagine how a Project 2025-premised government would lash out at companies that they believed were donating to "radical" causes like social justice, because they've told us outright that government needs to ban such programs.

What it's more likely to translate into, if past fascist movements are any guide, is just another program for ensuring "good" American companies donate to MAGA-approved causes while ending donations to anything else. But it will be couched in terms of ending "divisive" programs, and the efforts will be managed by people who believe that Black Americans were never really angry about police violence, but instead were mere puppets doing the secret bidding of anti-MAGA elites who, says Vance, are "invested in destroying America."

These people are all crackpots. Top to bottom, a whole movement of paranoid conspiracy-addled crackpots. Yikes.