Ian Ward

I was talking to a lot of young MAGA conservatives in Washington who I was asking, who on the national stage shares your worldview?

And so many of them were telling me that it was J.D.

Vance and J.D.

Vance alone who really encapsulated a lot of the political and intellectual currents that were swirling in that space.

He's embraced it.

One notable example was there's this sort of famous meme of the vice president overweight with long curly hair and big bulging eyes that started circulating around the election.

And for Halloween this year, Vance dressed up as that meme and took a picture with big bulgy eyes and posted it online.

He's part of a generation, the millennial generation that grew up at peak era of online blogging and sort of early social media.

And he understands that those are very potent political and communication tools.

And at the same time, I think he understands really innately that

Conservative politics are flowing upwards from the internet at this point.

So if you're not engaged in the online fight, you're not really engaged in the engine of conservative politics at this point.

I think he understands that.

And by engaging with some of those memes, he's signaling that he's kind of in the engine room.

of the right at this point, and that he gets it in a way that an older generation of politicians didn't.

That's pretty good.

I think if he was too self-serious, right, or sort of dismissed these things and was offended by them, it would be sort of boomer-coded, right?

That's not really how younger generations operate on the internet.

It's a lot of exchanging insults

And exchanging digs as a way to build solidarity across the coalition.