We’d like to direct your attention to an Instagram post from Ms. Simone Biles, who along with her teammates Jordan Chiles, Suni Lee, Jade Carey, and 16-year-old Hezly Rivera took gold yesterday in the team gymnastics final at the Paris Olympics.
That caption: “lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions ❤️🥇🇺🇸”
That first comment from Suni Lee: “put a finger down if simone biles just ended you 🖐🏼”
We can think of quite a few people who are welcome to put their fingers down, perhaps none more than weird creep JD Vance.
Let’s flash back to the 2020 Olympics, which happened in 2021 because of COVID.
If you’ll remember the Team USA gymnastics women, led by the Greatest Of All Time Simone Biles, were supposed to win gold in Tokyo too. But then in the middle of the games, Biles came down with a severe case of what’s known as the “twisties,” which are kind of similar to the “yips” other athletes get.
It’s like a brain disconnect, where the mental signals and the physical execution can’t get aligned. For gymnasts — and we heard a lot of them talk about it in 2021 because of this — one of the main effects is that they lose themselves in the air, which is just about the most terrifying thing imaginable. Last night, we saw Simone Biles go over 12 feet in the air. Imagine twisting and turning rapidly in the air like that and having no idea where the ground is. That’s how a gymnast breaks their neck.
When Biles had to bow out — she ended up coming back to take bronze in individual balance beam, while the team took silver — we witnessed one of the greatest examples in recent memory of MAGA conservative men not understanding that there are times and subjects about which their mouths should remain permanently closed, things they simply don’t have the societal standing or intelligence to opine on.
Notably, none of the (mostly) men making these comments were well-known for their own athletic prowess or expertise in literally anything in life, not the kinds of guys any child looks up to or wants to be like when they grow up. In other words, they weren’t on Simone Biles’s level.
But they were racist toward her, and they called her — literally the greatest gymnast of all time, after whom a number of gymnastics moves are named — lazy.
Charlie Kirk, the dropout with the face God stapled on crooked and science apparently can’t fix, called Biles a “selfish sociopath” and a “shame to the country.” He bitched that “we are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles.”
And then there was JD Vance, that paragon of achievement. Wait, did we say “achievement”? We meant to say “Peter Thiel’s money and influence.”
The DNC war room sent out a press release that reminded us of Vance’s words toward Biles at the time. It began with this statement from DNC Rapid Response Spokesperson Aida Ross:
“While the rest of the country is celebrating the USA women’s gymnastics team’s performance at the Olympics, JD Vance is facing his weakest moment amid a gaffe-filled roll-out that has left him as the most unpopular VP pick in decades. Three years ago, Vance was called out on Fox News after choosing to attack Simone Biles and saying she shouldn’t be praised for putting her health first. Today, everything the American people are learning about Vance is making it obvious that he is an out-of-touch creep who is more focused on tearing Americans down than bringing the country together – and is in no position to be talking about anyone else’s ‘weakest moments.’”
Then they brought the receipts on that repellent pig. Like when he said he preferred gymnasts who don’t have the twisties:
“We tried to turn a tragic moment, Simone Biles quitting the team, into this act of heroism,” Vance stated. “I think it reflects pretty poorly on our therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments.”
The act of heroism was standing up for her own mental health, and for being humble enough to step aside from her team and let somebody else come in when she wasn’t able to be the Simone Biles they needed her to be.
And lookie there, Biles stepped away, took care of herself, came back, and look at all those gold medalists up there. The people who criticized Biles at the time were always beneath her, approximately on the same level as dogshit one steps in because it’s right in the middle of the sidewalk where it doesn’t belong.
That’s why Biles — again, the GOAT, and now the most decorated Olympic gymnast of all time — just had some fun clapping back at those who called her “lazy” and “untalented.” (It also appears to partially be a pointed reference to comments from a former teammate, the one who replaced her on the team in Tokyo, and who is very sorry and embarrassed.)
The DNC press release goes through what an unmitigated, embarrassing disaster JD Vance has been for the Trump campaign. His creepy fixation on whether women have birthed babies, his authoritarian Christian nationalist extremism, and all the people now talking about what a huge mistake Trump made when he listened to Uday and Qusay about who to pick as his running mate, instead of listening to professionals.
JD Vance is like if the twisties were a person, and also like if the definition of “twisties” was “huge pile of human butthair rolling down the street.” The most hated vice presidential nominee in human history. The guy who managed to make Sarah Palin look not so bad, in hindsight.
Biles and her teammates were calling this year their “Redemption Tour,” and sure enough they just earned their gold medals, in an Olympics host country that just five seconds ago punched all its Nazis in their face in snap elections called by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Nothing about either of those wins suggests that God has redemption or success in store for JD Vance or his bossdaddy Trump this November.
OPEN THREAD.
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