JD Vance, the vice-president of the United States, said this weekend that he considers aliens to be “demons”.

As the war in Iran continues, petrol and grocery prices soar and chaos continues at US airports as a partial government shutdown endures, Vance appeared on the conservative Benny Show podcast, released Saturday, to promise that he would spend time looking into what he called his “obsession” with UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors.

Johnson, who bills his show as the place for “cutting, behind-the-scenes insight into the global conflict for freedom”, wondered if Vance, who has been noticeably quiet about Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East that he is said to oppose, had yet looked at any of the files about unidentified flying objects – known these days as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) – which the president has promised to release.

“I actually haven’t,” Vance replied, mustering significantly more enthusiasm than for any previous question about the US-Israel military strikes on Iran.

“I have not been able to spend enough time on this, but I am going to. Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.”

The God-fearing vice-president’s fixation, it was further revealed, extended to the question of the existence of extraplanetary beings, and where they might fit into a wider conversation about religion.

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion,” he said.

    • Etterra@discuss.online
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      9 hours ago

      He’d make a hilarious zoo exhibit. “In order to study his human reproduction, we needed a human who would accept a proxy. This specimen was, fortunately, ideal for our research purposes.”

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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      Neither in this case, I think Vance is on that good old-fashioned zealotry of the convert.

      • 8oow3291d@feddit.dk
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        9 hours ago

        Vance famously said that Trump was America’s Hitler. And then when given the chance for power, enthusiastically became Trump’s VP. Vance is also quite intelligent, if lazy. Vance is obviously a nihilist opportunist.

        So my money is on Vance not believing a word of it. But just saying it because Vance thinks it will give him votes when he runs for US President.

  • Sculptus Poe@lemmy.world
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    BS. For one thing he is an atheist who is claiming to be religious because he thinks it will help him politically. Also, if he was “obsessed” he could pop down to Area 51 at any time. He is just a moron or trying to play to the paranoid morons of the Republican party.

    • Skyrmir@lemmy.world
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      I was curious, and apparently while the VP does get full clearance automatically, they don’t get full access automatically, due to need to know compartmentalization rules. So Vance is cleared for anything area 51 reports to the White House, but not cleared to go there unless Trump says there’s a reason. I doubt that would be much of a speed bump, but technically there is a restriction.

      • Sculptus Poe@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Thanks for looking into that. I was running on bad assumptions.

        Even so, that feels shady. I know when looking at the Snowden thing that I found out that the CIA threatens even members of congress with “treason” if they look too closely at their stuff and only select congressional members can provided very limited oversite at all… I guess the military is just as bad. It feels like the VP, being the second-highest person actually voted by the people into their position, should be able to take a look at whatever, but I guess all of those machines chug on without meaningful oversight at all.

        • Skyrmir@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          The IG departments really need to be given full clearance and taken away from the executive. The parties have also almost completely broken checks and balances at this point, the orange turd is of course abusing it, but in general too much power has been given to the parties, and our checks have been badly eroded by a lazy and weak congress.

          • Sculptus Poe@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            I guess there isn’t a good answer. I think parties should be outlawed anyway. The VP should have his own election, independent of the President. The congress needs to have a tighter rein on war declaration and the definition of “war” needs to be broadened to include all engagements. The re-definition of “war” to whatever nonsense they use now is the source of many problems. Once somebody gets into the top tier of the government: Supreme court, Senate, President, they need full clearance for everything. There shouldn’t be things hidden from those lawmakers. Also, as you say, IG departments need to have full clearance, and they need some kind of whistleblower protection from sitting presidents. I actually like that the President holds the leash on the military, mostly because you can’t trust the military not to blow the world to smitherines out of convenience. All the new evidence shows that the military pretty much railroaded Truman into letting them drop the bombs on civilian cities, and they wanted to continue and wipe out every city in Russia if the president didn’t finally get a hold of them and nix it.

            I’m not optimistic at all that anything will or even can be done to fix the problems. Of course that goes for every government on the planet, so any other governments weighing in with their two cents are usually hypocrites.

    • Fondots@lemmy.world
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      For the record, I don’t think the government is in contact or aware of alien life, at least not any technologically advanced civilization (I’m open to the possibility of maybe them being aware of microbial life on Mars or Europa or something and keeping it under wraps)

      But, if they were, and assuming we’re talking about a civilization based in another star system (as opposed to somewhere in our solar system or maybe in interstellar space somewhere) I think it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s being handled by people in the military and the president, etc. are all kept out of the loop.

      Because it would take too damn long to get a message back and forth to them assuming they don’t immediately give us the key to FTL travel or communications.

      Let’s assume that first contact was made in January 1993, and one of Clinton’s first acts as president is to acknowledge that we received their message, introduce himself, and signals that he’s willing to open a dialogue with them.

      He fires off that message, let’s say it’s to proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, it takes a little over 4 years to get there, arriving around early to mid 1997.

      They reply and we get their next message probably mid to late 2001 (I really don’t feel like crunching the exact numbers of how long these messages are taking to travel or speculating how long it’s taking to draft our messages.)

      Bubba is out of office, and Dubya needs to be brought up to speed on the alien situation right around the same time 9/11 is going down. He fires off a reply, and gets back to starting a war in the middle east.

      Aliens get that reply around late 2005, and send another reply. We get that around early 2010. Obama’s been in office for about a year, things have kind of settled down a bit. He fires on another reply, it arrives around 2014, aliens are starting to get the picture that they’re probably not going to have a real back and forth conversation with the same president. They send a reply.

      Their reply reaches Trump in 2018 sometime. He rambles at them a bit, they get it in about 2022, the aliens aren’t at all sure what to make of that, they think maybe the transmission got corrupted somehow. What they do make out sounds like insane raving bullshit, but at least this guy will be gone soon and they can get back to talking to a real grown up with the next message.

      They don’t learn about COVID, or Jan 6, or any of the other stuff going on. Biden get skipped over, Donny is about to receive that reply in a few months, he’s gonna be the first president to have an actual back and forth with the aliens, and he’s probably gonna be pissed that they’re asking if we can put Obama back on the phone.

      So yeah, not a great way to be having a conversation. It probably makes a lot more sense to give that responsibility to maybe some career military types, or maybe some unelected pencil-pushers whose government careers can last decades and have more of an opportunity to select and train their successors to ensure smoother communications, and to keep the president and politicians as far out of the loop as possible, because there’s a good chance they could be out of office before they can actually get anything done.

      The dynamic changes a bit if we’re talking to someone closer, if maybe we’re dealing with a fleet that’s parked somewhere in or near our solar system that’s authorized to act autonomously from their home planet. Maybe then we could loop the president in a little more, but if they do ever need to phone home for something we’d still have the same problem.

      Or if they’re further away than the closest star to us, the problem gets even worse. Let’s say instead of proxima Centauri at about 4¼ light-years away, they’re instead based around Altair at about 16.7 light-years away. They would have gotten Clinton’s message in around late 2009 or 2010, and we’re probably just about due to finally hear back from them in the next couple of months.

    • starik@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      He doesn’t believe any of this. He’s pandering to the dumb, too-online young right wing men who get their news and opinions from comedians’ podcasts.

  • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksOP
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    Jfc. The shit this administration spews - and expects the American public to swallow - is epic in its proportions.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      The entire and sole reason they say dumb shit like this, is because they know useful idiots will spread it and suck up everyone’s bandwidth for political news.

      Everyone that pays attention to this obvious distraction, has less fucks and time to give about important shit.

      The media at least has the excuse of being owned by billionaires with a financial incentive to spread it…

      • rossman@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        we should call this out as engagement bait. the media gets ad revenue and these posts are rage comedy identification depending on your politics. No actual journalism here.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Try telling OP that…

          They do it constantly and likely have blocked me for trying to explain things to them already.

          Replying to someone to say “this” tho…

          Almost always useless, go tell someone else that doesn’t know if you think it’s a good idea

          • rossman@lemmy.zip
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            1 day ago

            yeah meant no negativity. i upvoted and agreed with you cause i feel the exact way after seeing enough of these posts.

  • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    We get it. He’s trying to distract everyone from the Epstein files. Even for Vance, though, this is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  • wuffah@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    As the war in Iran continues, petrol and grocery prices soar and chaos continues at US airports as a partial government shutdown endures, Vance appeared on the conservative Benny Show podcast, released Saturday, to promise that he would spend time looking into what he called his “obsession” with UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors.

    This is a standard deflection job where the chronic magical thinking of the electorate is leveraged to distract from the real problems representatives cannot solve - Hypernormalisation.

    If we’re dead from famine, drought, climate change, and war, do Aliens and Demons really fucking matter?

  • kingofras@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Are you getting it yet? Gobble it up, read it, be outraged, comment and that’s another 5 minutes you’re not talking about the Epstein Files or the fact that the world is run off a cliff by a child rapist who has a couch fucker as backup.

    Stop posting this, stop reading it, stop upvoting it. Take him down, don’t fall for the distractions, educate others on flood the zone.

  • andrewta@lemmy.world
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    Plot twist: he’s actually telling the truth and is just getting us ready for the video game Doom too come to life.