On Friday, the soon-to-be vice president of the United States offered words of wisdom to his 2.6 million followers on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

“One of the most important skills I see in successful (and good) people is to constantly re-evaluate assumptions.” Senator J.D. Vance wrote about XHe added that those who think President-elect Donald Trump will lose on Tuesday should question some of their other assumptions about him.

“In the words of Cormac McCarthy, ‘What good was the rule if the rule you followed got you into this situation?'” the Ohio Republican wrote.

The aphorism that Vance attributes to McCarthy was actually not the worldly wisdom of the late American writer, but a dialogue by the ruthless murderer Anton Chigurh in his 2005 book “No Country for Old Men,” which was turned into an Oscar-winning novel in 2007. film.

In the story, Chigurh says this line just before blowing off another character’s head with a shotgun. You see, Chigurh is a psychopathic hitman who kills people for money, but he also operates from the crazy idea that he’s an agent of fate and that the victims are essentially plotting their own deaths just by getting in his way.

In an article published in The Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2013, two psychiatry professors with clinical experience analyzed the portrayals of psychopaths in movies and evaluated Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem in the movie, as one of the most realistic characters of all time.

“Anton Chigurh is a well-designed prototypical idiopathic/primary psychopath,” wrote Samuel J. Leistedt and Paul Linkowski of the University of Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. “We have no information about his childhood, but there is sufficient argument and detailed information about his behavior in the film to diagnose active, primary, idiopathic psychopathy, inability to love, lack of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, incompetence. learning from past experiences, cold-bloodedness, ruthlessness, complete determination and lack of empathy.”

In other words, Chigurh is not a good guy. His quip about the danger of rules is a self-serving justification for his habit of murder.

It’s possible that Vance loved this phrase because it changed the course of his life so many times; He has transformed from an anti-Trump Republican who most recently viewed the former president as an almost Hitler-like figure into a MAGA world favorite and Trump’s vice president-elect. .

Perhaps Vance used this quote as a deliberate provocation, knowing it would be fact-checked by a humorless media. Maybe Vance thinks Chigurh is the hero of the story? Or perhaps it’s a way to ingratiate himself with Trump, who frequently invokes the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lector on the campaign trail.

“The late, great Hannibal Lecter,” Trump said at a rally in May. “He’s a great guy. He often went to dinner with a friend. Do you remember the last scene?

Leistedt and Linkowski described Lecter as an archetype of the “unrealistic but sensational” character whose traits are not usually observed in clinical practice.

A spokesman for Vance did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday.