Freaking out over J.D. Vance's beard.

This is a bit strange — by Simon van Zuylen-Wood in the Washington Post — "The Radicalization of J.D. Vance/As he runs for the Senate, the ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author has gone from media darling to establishment pariah. Is his new, fiery, right-wing persona an act? Or is something more interesting going on?"

It begins: "Let’s start with the beard." Okaaaay.

J.D. Vance didn’t used [sic] to have one. 

Pretty much true of everyone with a beard, but he didn't have one when the elite first encountered him... and adored him:

The Vance who in 2016 achieved incandescent literary fame with his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” was all baby fat and rounded edges.

Back when he was right where you wanted him, you loved his fat face. Or so you say.

The Vance I’m watching now, from the back of a coffee shop in the depressed steel town of Steubenville, Ohio, has covered up his softer side....

Because if you cover your ill-defined chin line, you're covering it up.

Recently, I asked one of his law school friends to tell me about his personality. “He’s lovely,” the friend said, describing Vance’s smile and laugh. Then he paused. He wanted to talk about Vance’s facial hair. Even as a slightly older law student — Vance had served four years in the Marines before enrolling at Ohio State as an undergraduate — he came across as guileless, boyish. No longer. 

“He looks different,” the friend said. “He’s going for a kind of severe masculinism thing. He looks like Donald Trump Jr.”

He looked chubbily babyish before, and now he's — what? — tricking us into perceiving him as a man?!

Toward the end of our conversation, which was mostly about the way the culture shock of Yale Law School informed Vance’s politics, I asked the friend if he wanted to discuss anything else. He returned to the beard. “That’s honestly occupied an outsized amount of my attention,” he said. 

The beard isn’t a bad symbol for Vance’s U.S. Senate campaign — or at least for how that campaign is being received....Vance’s new political identity isn’t so much a façade or a reversal as an expression of an alienated worldview.... Vance has become one of the leading political avatars of an emergent populist-intellectual persuasion that tacks right on culture and left on economics. Known as national conservatism or sometimes “post-liberalism,” it is — in broad strokes — heavily Catholic, definitely anti-woke, skeptical of big business, nationalist about trade and borders, and flirty with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban.... 

I don't know how the beard symbolizes that, other than that those things are masculine. How weird to get caught up in his beard!