In a Saturday op-ed, MSNBC opinion columnist Hayes Brown wrote that the Ohio Republican is hoping to shed the "weird" label by leaning into his nerdy past. Vance's wife, Usha, recently did an interview with Fox & Friends talking about her husband's prior obsession with the card game "Magic: The Gathering."
"He has all sorts of dorky interests that anyone of our age could relate to," Usha Vance told panelist Ainsley Earhardt.
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And earlier this week, Vance told Semafor that his favorite card from that game was "Yawgmoth's Bargain" from the game's "Urza's Destiny" expansion. He added that his main reason for walking away from the game was due to his desire to be more appealing to women.
"The big problem with transitioning from being a 13-year-old who likes Magic: The Gathering to being a 15-year-old who likes Magic: The Gathering is that 15-year-old girls do not like Magic: The Gathering," he said. "So I dropped it like a bad habit."
But according to Brown — who describes himself as a "card-carrying nerd" — the "weird" descriptor that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have assigned to Ohio's junior senator sticks precisely because "Vance’s love of stereotypically geeky interests has nothing to do with his creepy tendencies."
"If anything, he has shown himself to be the worst kind of nerd, one who reinforces the toxic masculinity that was at one point inseparable from overarching geekdom," Brown wrote. "It is to Vance’s discredit that he will likely be unable to see how deeply his rejection of all things 'woke' isolates him from a community that has come to embrace the 'good weird' that doesn’t fit into his homogenized vision of America."
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In his column, Brown argued that Vance was actually "bad at being a nerd," given his failure to understand the underlying message of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" books (that lust for power was self-destructive and that evil can be defeated by uniting with people from different cultures and backgrounds). He further observed that the Ohio senator's "purposeful blindness" to the fact that "nerds have won" the cultural narrative contextualizes the fluidity of his principles.
"Geek culture has become a pop culture Goliath. The most popular franchises in the world have realized that it matters that everyone gets to see themselves in the stories being told," Brown wrote. "For Vance and others, it’s not their interests in comic books or sci-fi that sets them apart now. What’s weird is their refusal to share that win with anyone who doesn’t fit the outdated stereotype of who and what a nerd is."
"Much like with Magic, he has opted to drop his morals like a bad habit, showing that he’s more than willing to shift and change himself to try to fit in with his chosen in-group," he added. "In doing so, he’s become the kind of nerd who has chosen to punch down out of fear of being punched himself."
Click here to read Brown's column in its entirety.
