0:00

How should we start? I mean, we don't

0:02

need to zing. Michael, Peter, what do you know about

0:04

the next vice president of the United States? I'm

0:07

proud of his advancement. Terrible.

0:09

Terrible. Oh my

0:11

God. Ridiculous. So, we

0:14

thought we would re-release our

0:16

Hillbilly allergy episode now that

0:18

the author, J.D. Vance,

0:20

has been selected by Donald Trump

0:23

as his running mate for

0:25

the presidential election. We have

0:28

also been a little bit late with episodes

0:30

lately because I got COVID and Peter

0:32

got the Elden Ring DLC. So,

0:34

we're doing this to hold you over until we're

0:36

back with Jonathan Haidt's Anxious

0:39

Generation. So, please stop emailing us asking us to do

0:41

it because we're already doing it. That's right. So,

0:44

I guess the only thing that I really

0:46

have to say about this is that we

0:48

did our episode and one of the underlying

0:51

themes of the episode was his cynicism.

0:54

The fact that this was this guy

0:57

who was willing to traffic in this

0:59

fake persona he created and

1:01

write a book that was sort

1:03

of built atop caricatures and very

1:06

nakedly meant to propel his political

1:08

career forward. That

1:10

cynicism is, I think, why he was

1:12

selected by Donald Trump, right? In

1:15

2016, he was saying he didn't like

1:17

Trump. Trump was a nightmare, awful. America's

1:19

next Hitler. By

1:22

2020, he was like, Mike Pence

1:24

should have done the right thing.

1:26

He's a man of pure naked

1:30

ambition and that's why Trump understands

1:32

him and relates to him and

1:34

likes him. The book also

1:36

fits very nicely into this pattern because it

1:38

was a book meant to capitalize on this

1:40

centrist kind of unity wave that was going

1:43

on. We need to understand the people in

1:45

Appalachia, which of course his book provides no

1:47

actual insight into and now all of that

1:50

shit has basically been swept away. They're basically

1:52

just bragging about the fact that they want a

1:54

far right theocracy. like

2:00

100% against abortion, all cases, a

2:04

guy who has ties to venture

2:07

capital and wants to grease the

2:09

wheels for business in

2:11

favor of aggressive use of law

2:14

enforcement in the military against protestors.

2:16

I also found an interview this

2:18

morning where he talks about how

2:20

Democrats want to flood America with

2:23

illegal aliens and then use taxpayer

2:25

dollars to fund gender reassignment surgeries

2:27

for those aliens. So

2:30

note to journalists, J.D. Vance

2:33

wants privately funded immigrant

2:35

gender reassignment surgeries. He doesn't

2:38

have a political platform per

2:40

se. He has a roadmap

2:43

to J.D. Vance rising to the top.

2:45

Yeah, he's the mirror image of Amy

2:47

Adams where he just keeps doing hit

2:50

after hit. The

2:52

sequel to Hillbilly Elegy, the movie

2:54

is gonna be really dark. Yeah.

2:57

Hillbilly Elegy 2, Civil War. Yeah,

2:59

so enjoy listening to us talk

3:02

about J.D. Vance and Hillbilly Elegy

3:04

when we were blissfully unaware of

3:06

just how bad things were about

3:08

to get. Michael.

3:12

Peter. What do you know about Hillbilly Elegy?

3:15

I know that the book made the argument

3:17

that we have to understand rural whites

3:19

so that they can run for Senate and take

3:21

our rights away. So this is sort

3:25

of a weird episode for us,

3:38

an unusual episode because this is

3:41

a memoir. The subtitle of Hillbilly

3:43

Elegy is a memoir of a

3:46

family and culture in crisis. Okay.

3:48

It is of course written by Senator

3:51

J.D. Vance. God. It

3:54

is. Jesus Christ. Sorry, but I'll be saying

3:57

Senator a lot just for emphasis throughout the

3:59

episode. in the could kill part of

4:01

the episode. What

4:04

makes this book pernicious, what makes it a

4:06

good book for a podcast is that when

4:08

it came out in 2016, it

4:11

was a sensation among mainstream liberals.

4:14

You have to sort of situate

4:16

yourself in 2016 to understand it.

4:19

We're in the midst of the ascendance

4:21

of Trump, his success,

4:24

I suppose, just leaves a lot of liberals

4:26

kind of stumped. And

4:28

the dominant media narrative that emerges

4:31

is that Trump was

4:33

kind of hoisted to victory by

4:35

the white working class. The economically

4:38

anxious among us. That's

4:40

right. The coverage of

4:42

this demographic was just

4:45

breathless. Like they had discovered a new

4:48

species of white people and

4:50

every piece of mainstream political reporting

4:52

for like six months was just

4:54

a reporter wandering into a

4:56

waffle house and being

4:58

like, today we're speaking to the complete

5:01

buffoons who love Donald Trump. Just

5:04

like physically shoving aside all the minorities

5:06

who live in the South. He's like,

5:08

no, I need the downtrodden whites. So

5:11

it's this moment that catapults J.D. Vance

5:13

to some fame because Hillbilly Elegy

5:15

came out in 2016 before the

5:17

election and it allowed

5:19

him to position himself as like

5:21

the white working class whisperer. The

5:23

guy who understood these people and

5:26

was here to explain them to the

5:28

New Yorker set. The blurbs in the

5:31

book speak volumes because

5:33

you have like the basic

5:35

conservative David Brooks liked it.

5:37

Rod Dreher. But then also

5:40

Mother Jones, Vox,

5:42

Slate, The Daily Beast,

5:44

The Atlantic, and Bill Gates. All

5:48

with kind words to say

5:50

about Hillbilly Elegy. That's

5:52

worth noting because this is a

5:55

book that maligns poor people. It's

5:57

a book with very weird racial

5:59

politics. So I want to

6:01

pull some of these themes out, but

6:03

also just talk about how and

6:05

why this stuff gets laundered for

6:07

mainstream consumption. Right. And why this

6:09

was such a hit with liberals.

6:11

It's the weird like self-flagellation industrial

6:13

complex. You know the old quote

6:15

that a liberal is someone who's

6:17

too fair-minded to take his own

6:19

side in an argument? Yeah. It's

6:21

like something about the sort of

6:24

I guess over-analytical centrist

6:26

relatively well-off liberals.

6:29

That it's like we have to

6:31

understand this and like basically keep

6:33

digging until you find something sympathetic.

6:35

Right. Which as a philosophical principle I

6:37

think is really good, right? Being generous, being fair.

6:40

But also when that is not matched

6:42

by any similar impulse on

6:44

the other side, what you basically

6:46

have is an entire media where

6:48

it's like the conservatives are bashing

6:50

liberals and liberals are bashing liberals.

6:53

Yeah. And I also

6:55

think that another component of that is

6:57

that when someone like Vance

6:59

comes along and offers

7:01

a criticism of like his own people,

7:04

liberals eat that up because to them it

7:06

seems like very thoughtful, almost like self-critical. Right.

7:09

And they're like, oh, this is fascinating. This is a

7:11

man who is reflecting on

7:13

his own culture. This

7:15

is like when there's a black conservative

7:18

who's like the left is making too big of

7:20

a deal about race these days. Yeah. And

7:22

conservatives immediately elevate them to like every talk show.

7:24

They should have put Candace Owens on the cover

7:26

of this to give you the typology.

7:29

Neema and my bootstraps. So I

7:31

will do my best to give you the basic narrative

7:33

here. And you know, we're not going to spend too

7:35

much time talking about the narrative itself, but I want

7:37

to go through it. So his

7:40

grandparents migrate from Appalachia into the

7:42

Rust Belt town of Middletown, Ohio.

7:46

He's raised by a combination

7:48

of his mother, grandparents, sister

7:51

and whatever man happens to be in his mother's life

7:53

at the time. There are times

7:55

when the book is compelling, at

7:57

least in the micro. stories

8:00

about drug use, about alcoholism, casual

8:03

violence all in and around his

8:05

family all throughout his life. His

8:08

mother suffers from addiction. She

8:10

is constantly cycling through relationships.

8:12

She frequently spirals into abusive

8:14

behavior. She attempts suicide at

8:16

one point. And because of all

8:18

this, it's sort of his grandparents and sister who

8:21

really do the work of raising him. His

8:23

grandmother is the family matriarch. She's

8:26

a firecracker, very profane, very protective

8:29

of the family, always giving him

8:31

life lessons. He says that

8:33

she has a sort of hillbilly morality.

8:35

And that means that she is

8:38

kindhearted, but also if someone like insults the

8:40

family or threatens the family in some ways,

8:42

she will immediately go to

8:45

violence. She already sounds like Oscar bait

8:47

for some ambitious actress who wants to

8:49

play this role. So at one point,

8:51

his mother has a particularly bad downward

8:54

where she begs like 11 year

8:56

old JD to give

8:58

her a clean urine sample,

9:01

after which he moves

9:03

in with his grandmother. He's

9:05

much happier, gets much better

9:07

grades. And he sort of credits that

9:09

period of stability for him being able

9:12

to get out of there, basically. He

9:14

goes straight to the military. He joins

9:16

the Marines out of high school. This

9:18

is where the book gets incredibly

9:20

dull and derivative because you're no longer hearing

9:22

fun anecdotes about growing up in Appalachia and

9:25

the Rust Belt. Instead, it's just like boot

9:27

camp turned me into a man. It's like

9:29

a- Yeah, the book just becomes the training

9:31

montage from G.I. Jane. Yeah. Doing one arm

9:34

pushups in a tank top. He gets sent

9:36

to Iraq and he says that he escaped

9:38

any real fighting. It turns out he was

9:40

a public affairs Marine, which

9:42

is a Marine who is essentially

9:45

like embedded PR. Tom Cruise in the first

9:47

10 minutes of Edge of Tomorrow. Yes, yes.

9:49

Everyone knows. I am so glad that we

9:51

can talk about Edge of Tomorrow fighting. The

9:56

weaselly shortkins of Hollywood. Yes.

10:00

He goes to Ohio State after that,

10:02

and from there he goes to Yale

10:04

Law School. And there are

10:06

just countless tedious anecdotes about all the

10:08

ways in which he's not accustomed to

10:10

fancy things. He's gawking at

10:13

how clean the wine glasses are

10:15

at cocktail receptions, how much silverware

10:17

there is at nice restaurants. He

10:20

spits out sparkling water because he didn't realize

10:22

what it was and had never heard of

10:24

it. Some of this feels fake. Yes. We

10:26

all saw Titanic. There's a whole fucking

10:29

thing about the silverware in there. That's

10:31

like the poor kid who doesn't understand

10:33

upper crust society, like starter pack. So by

10:35

the end of the book, he's lost any

10:38

remnants of his folksy charm because he is

10:40

an elite at the end of the book

10:42

by every material metric, right? But he's still

10:45

trying to do the same shtick. So it's

10:47

like, I'm just a simple country

10:49

boy from Ohio. How would I know which senator

10:51

to work for? And it's like, I don't know.

10:54

Am I supposed to relate to this somehow? These kinds of

10:56

political memoirs always have to kind of lie about

10:59

their own level of ambition, right? Because if

11:01

you end up going to Yale, like you really

11:03

wanted to go, which there's nothing

11:05

wrong with that, but it's like in

11:07

these books, I feel like they usually

11:09

have to present these entrance to elite

11:11

institutions as like something that just happens to

11:14

you. Right. It's interesting because in the book,

11:16

he's writing himself as if he literally stumbles into

11:18

Yale law. And it's sort of like, I

11:20

don't know, as someone who went through the law

11:23

school application process, you

11:25

didn't stumble your way into Yale law. You

11:27

worked insanely hard in college. You tried

11:30

very hard on the LSAT. He sort of

11:32

will mention as he's getting older, like, oh,

11:34

I took a job for this state senator.

11:37

He's sort of like acting as if he

11:40

was just like, taking a job so we

11:42

can get by, but no, he's climbing up

11:44

the political ladder so that he could build

11:46

his way to this very moment when he's

11:48

publishing this book, trying to get popular so

11:50

that he can eventually run for office. Oh

11:52

my God. It's like a Julia and

11:54

Julia where the end of the movie

11:57

is Amy Adams getting a call from

11:59

Nora Efron. wanting to turn her

12:01

book into a movie. What

12:04

you've just watched is the final chapter

12:06

of her arc. He's

12:08

written a best-selling political memoir about

12:11

becoming the kind of person who

12:13

could write a best-selling political memoir.

12:17

That's right. He

12:19

meets his future wife at Yale, Usha. She would

12:21

go on to clerk for Chief Justice John

12:23

Roberts. Impressive that he manages

12:25

to meet a conservative young lady at an

12:27

institution like Yale Law that is dominated by

12:30

Marxists. Yes, incredible that he was able to

12:32

embark on a heterosexual relationship on a college

12:34

campus without widespread protest. One

12:36

of the best cameos in the book is

12:39

his mentorship by Professor Amy Chua, the

12:41

Tiger Mom. Oh, the

12:43

Tiger Mom, yeah. Who has since gotten

12:45

into trouble at Yale for some inappropriate

12:47

remarks while partying with students and

12:50

whose husband was suspended after

12:52

various students made allegations of

12:54

sexual harassment. So, the real

12:56

cameo here is cancel culture. From

12:59

a young boy roaming the hills of Appalachia

13:01

to a young man befriending our nation's most

13:04

powerful sex perverts. It's

13:06

the American dream, Mike. Yeah, it's a

13:08

real Cinderella story of a prestigious law

13:10

school producing a social conservative. Incredible.

13:13

I just want to read you

13:15

a quote before we get to

13:17

the socioeconomic analysis within the book.

13:20

He says, I'm the kind of

13:22

patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh

13:24

at. Oh, my fucking God. I choke up

13:26

when I hear Lee Greenwood's cheesy anthem, proud

13:28

to be an American. When I

13:31

was 16, I vowed that every time I met

13:33

a veteran, I would go out of my way

13:35

to shake his or her hand, even if I

13:37

had to awkwardly interject to do so. Okay. I'll

13:40

say this, he's right about one thing. As an Acela corridor guy,

13:42

I do laugh at people like this. When

13:45

I was 16, I vowed to always immediately

13:47

assault any veteran that I saw. I keep

13:49

a stack of small American flags with me at

13:51

all times so I can burn them on

13:54

the Acela corridor in case I see

13:56

anybody in uniform. The

13:59

biggest issue with this book, book is the way

14:01

that Vance talks about poverty. One

14:04

of the first things that he does

14:06

is lay out his thesis about the

14:08

people of Appalachia. He says

14:10

that many people believe that the problems

14:12

in the region stem from the lack

14:14

of economic opportunity. He says that's

14:16

part of it, but it actually gets the real

14:18

problem backwards. The real problem

14:21

is a decaying culture, which in

14:23

turn creates or worsens poverty. He

14:26

tells the story of working

14:28

in a warehouse where there is a

14:30

worker who was chronically late and would

14:32

take multiple very long breaks every day.

14:35

When the guy is fired, he lashes out at

14:37

the boss saying like, how could you do this

14:39

to me? Vance says that

14:41

this experience taught him that the

14:43

problems with the region, quote, run

14:45

far deeper than macroeconomic trends and

14:47

policy and that there are, quote,

14:50

too many young men immune to hard work.

14:52

I thought there were all kinds of statistics

14:54

about social mobility in the United States, but

14:56

it turns out that a lazy guy got

14:58

fired and was mad about it. So

15:01

who's to say what's right? The prevailing theme

15:03

of the book is that working class whites

15:06

would be able to lift themselves out of

15:08

poverty if only they believed it were possible.

15:11

And it's their negativity, their

15:13

learned helplessness that keeps them

15:15

down. Einstein taught us that the

15:17

universe evolved from thought and that time

15:19

is an illusion. This is the overlap

15:21

between the secret and hillbilly elegy. It's

15:24

true to believe this about America. You

15:26

have to believe that compared to other

15:28

developed nations, we just have higher rates

15:30

of bad attitudes. I'm like, that's why

15:33

there's more poor people in America

15:35

than there are in Denmark. Right. You're

15:37

looking at an unemployment chart. And in

15:40

your mind, it's just measuring laziness over

15:42

time. Right. Exactly. That's

15:44

why he's always relying on anecdotes. He's not a data

15:46

guy. There are

15:48

21 citations in the book total,

15:50

which is low in

15:52

and of itself, but also especially weird

15:55

because he often makes factual

15:57

claims without citation. At

15:59

one point. He says that you can't rely on

16:01

surveys about how much people are working because

16:04

working-class people lie about how much they work.

16:07

Huge problem. Huge problem. And

16:11

then later he refers to a groundbreaking

16:13

study about upward mobility in America, but

16:16

he doesn't cite either one. And

16:19

I don't think he's lying about them. I

16:21

just think he's immune to the hard work of

16:23

citing them, I had to guess. So

16:25

let's get a little bit big picture here. I

16:27

don't want to harp on his inability to cite

16:29

things properly. He talks about data

16:32

that shows that people without degrees, without

16:34

college degrees are working less than people

16:36

with college degrees. There's competing data on

16:38

this, but I think that the best

16:40

data shows that that's basically true. They

16:43

work fewer hours overall. But the primary

16:45

reason that people without college degrees work

16:47

fewer hours is that there is less

16:50

work available to them. There's tons of

16:52

data about this. I used a lot of data from

16:54

the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Lance

16:57

is publishing this in 2016. In the

16:59

2008 recession, workers with a high

17:01

school education or less lost 5.6

17:03

million jobs.

17:06

In the recovery, they recovered 80,000

17:08

of those jobs. They

17:12

left the recession with 5.5 million

17:16

fewer jobs in 2016 than there were in

17:18

2007. If

17:21

you look at workers with bachelor's degrees, they

17:23

left that same period with a net gain

17:25

of 8.5 million jobs. This

17:29

is the fundamental problem with Vance's

17:31

thesis. He's claiming that the real issue

17:33

in Appalachia and the Rust Belt

17:35

is this cultural unwillingness to work.

17:38

But there is quite literally less work

17:40

to do than there was before. You

17:42

could snap your fingers and give everyone in his

17:45

town a great work ethic. Unemployment would still be

17:47

relatively high because you still run into the wall

17:49

of fewer available jobs. You're not going

17:51

to reopen the factories with good work ethic. The funny thing

17:53

is this has also ended up screwing over people

17:55

with bachelor's degrees because a lot of those

17:57

people graduated from college during their recession. and

18:00

ended up taking entry-level jobs for which they

18:02

don't even really need a bachelor's degree.

18:05

The people without bachelor's degrees, they just can't claw

18:07

their way into any entry-level position because all

18:09

those positions are taken up by people with

18:11

college degrees. Right. The data

18:13

bears all of this out. 50

18:16

years ago, a considerable

18:18

majority of jobs were available to anyone

18:20

without a college degree. Right.

18:23

Now, it's a small minority. I think it's something like 30%. It's

18:27

super bizarre to individualize this obviously

18:29

structural problem. It's also very funny

18:31

because conservatives never apply the same

18:33

logic to the wealthy. Right. Oh,

18:36

Americans make less money than people in other

18:38

developed countries. Maybe we just have shittier rich

18:41

people here, JD. Maybe our rich

18:43

are just the fucking worst. Right.

18:46

That guy who was a bad worker

18:48

and got fired and was mad about

18:50

it, like, okay, fine, I see you

18:52

and raise you Donald Sterling. Yeah.

18:55

Yeah. Right. Building

18:58

US policy around the

19:00

cultural malignancy of

19:03

certain societal groups, I would like

19:05

to start at the

19:07

country clubs and work our way down. All

19:09

right. I'm going to send you a little excerpt.

19:12

This is a story from when JD Vance was

19:15

a young man working in a

19:17

local grocery store. That was my first job too.

19:19

I bet you didn't work as hard as JD

19:21

Vance, Michael. That

19:24

is fucking true. That is absolutely accurate. I

19:28

also learned how people gained the welfare

19:30

system. They'd ring up their orders

19:32

separately, buying food with food stamps and beer,

19:34

wine, and cigarettes with cash. They'd

19:37

regularly go through the checkout line speaking

19:39

on their cell phones. I could never

19:41

understand why our lives felt like a

19:43

struggle while those living off of government

19:45

largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed

19:47

about. Wow. American

19:51

social welfare famously too generous. This

19:53

is why we have such low rates of poverty and such

19:55

high rates of hammock naps. First

19:59

of all, yeah. Food stamp fraud happens

20:01

and is real fraud rates

20:03

are very low though something like 1% of

20:06

benefits Yeah, also some of

20:08

this is not even fraud right like buying

20:10

food with food stamps and then beer with

20:12

cash That's not illegal. That's just

20:14

how buying things works They also do that with

20:16

like they probably buy food with food stamps And then they buy

20:19

like diapers with cash because diapers aren't right covered by

20:21

food stamps just because you're on food stamps Doesn't mean

20:23

you're not allowed to buy other things with cash I

20:27

Love how he starts out by saying I saw

20:29

poor people gaming the system And then it's

20:31

just a description of people on the verge

20:34

of having a nice time Also, he says

20:36

that their life feels like a struggle while

20:38

those living off of government largess Enjoyed

20:41

trinkets that I had only dreamed about but

20:43

later in the book He admits that his

20:45

family did receive government benefits and in fact

20:47

It's a big part of how his grandmother

20:49

put food on the table it's just

20:52

this like deserving and undeserving poor thing

20:54

that he does right like of course

20:56

my family Should be

20:58

receiving welfare. We're some of the good ones

21:00

we put it to good use It's like

21:02

the debate online about like ghosting like whether

21:04

it's okay to just stop calling somebody that

21:06

you met on like a dating app On

21:08

the internet, and it's like ghosting is exclusively

21:10

something that is done to you Something

21:13

that you do to other people like by definition

21:15

I've never ghosted on anyone But it's

21:17

like this behavior that it's like the the

21:19

government benefits that I get like that's not government largess

21:22

That's just like helping us out in a difficult

21:24

time right people are on their cell phones

21:26

Peter They're playing Angry Birds when they should

21:28

be going to church and joining an NLM

21:32

That's right. Yeah, so I've

21:34

sent you something else Okay,

21:37

okay. I just read the

21:39

whole thing. Okay, I Like where

21:41

he's going with this all right He

21:44

says to many analysts terms like

21:46

welfare queen conjure unfair images of

21:48

the lazy black mom living on the

21:50

dole Readers of this book will realize

21:53

quickly that there is little relationship between that

21:55

specter and my argument I've known many

21:57

welfare queens some of them were my

21:59

neighbors and all were white. Love

22:02

it. So it's like, don't

22:04

use the welfare queen stereotype on

22:06

black moms, use it on everybody. You

22:09

might think that I'm racist. Wrong. I

22:11

hate all poor people. Yeah. He

22:14

basically says in so many words, racism

22:17

is real. I'm not saying it's not real, but

22:19

I want to talk about a kind of poverty

22:22

that is experienced by white people,

22:24

right? And if you

22:26

look at just the book, there's not much more

22:28

than that, but if you look at some

22:31

of his other work, there are

22:33

times when he trots out white

22:35

poverty as sort of

22:37

like a defense against

22:40

claims of discrimination. There

22:42

are poor white people too, so

22:45

the relative poverty of black people

22:47

isn't proof of anything. That's like

22:50

my favorite response to police brutality

22:52

accusations that is like, look, they shot

22:55

this white guy. Yeah. Right.

23:00

Like I'm not owned by this at all.

23:02

Vance does hedge quite a bit. He

23:05

will say like, look, we can't

23:07

discount systemic issues that cause

23:09

poverty, right? I think that he's

23:11

basically doing that to maintain an

23:14

appropriate level of deniability because

23:16

he never dives into

23:18

that meaningfully. It's always just sort of

23:20

a disclaimer. But of

23:22

course the primary thesis of

23:25

the book, I mean, it's called a

23:27

memoir of a family and culture

23:29

in crisis, right? It's not called

23:32

a memoir of a region that

23:35

has been systematically separated from the

23:37

wealth of the rest of the

23:39

country. It's also very funny because if you were looking

23:41

at a foreign country and you saw like

23:43

there's a really poor region of like Peru

23:45

or something, and someone told you

23:48

that like there used to be all these mines where

23:50

they employed a bunch of people, and then all of

23:52

those employers have like shut down and there's far fewer

23:54

jobs, you'd be like, oh, well, yeah, that's probably why

23:56

there's so much unemployment there. But he's like, no, no,

23:58

no, no, no. The attitudes of the

24:01

people changed. I mean, I think he has

24:03

sort of like a combination of explanations. One

24:06

of them is a very bizarre ethnic

24:08

explanation where he says that like the

24:10

region is primarily Scots-Irish heritage.

24:12

Oh my God. Really? He's

24:15

going back to like 1800s racism

24:17

where it's like, oh, there's too many Swarthi

24:19

Italians. The

24:23

more sensible sort of explanation that

24:25

he occasionally hints at is that

24:28

you have systemic poverty causing

24:30

these cultural issues to some degree, but

24:33

then the cultural issues perpetuate, which I think

24:35

is like sort of true in

24:37

a vacuum, but it's also

24:39

like the whole story. Right.

24:42

Like the systemic poverty

24:45

needs to come first. It must come

24:47

first. And the output is

24:49

these cultural artifacts that are

24:52

associated with poverty. So

24:54

he's sort of like skipping over the

24:56

fact that he's getting it exactly backwards.

24:58

Right. And also even if you want to

25:00

argue that it's like culture is the most

25:02

important factor or whatever, what can we

25:05

do about it? What would

25:07

fixing a culture even mean? I mean,

25:09

that's just like lecturing people until they have different

25:11

attitudes. Well, I think what he's

25:13

actually advocating for, although he

25:16

doesn't say it super explicitly,

25:19

is fewer interventions

25:21

by the government. Right. And

25:23

that comes back to, yeah. Right. To

25:25

punish them for their laziness rather than

25:28

reward, quote unquote, their laziness.

25:32

That's what he sort of hints at. You can

25:34

see it in his other writings at the time,

25:36

like he wrote for National Review at the time

25:38

that he's publishing this book. And he's

25:40

got pieces about how he thinks welfare in

25:42

Appalachia has failed and is not

25:44

productive. So that is the end

25:47

game here. The irony is that

25:49

the decline of Appalachia economically

25:52

actually lines up really well with cuts

25:54

to welfare. Right. Right. So

25:57

yes, if cutting welfare worked, you...

26:00

would think you would have seen

26:02

some improvement in Appalachian poverty rates

26:04

rather than what we'd actually seen,

26:06

which is a severe decline in

26:08

the standards of living across the region. Unfortunately, we

26:11

have no choice but to keep cutting until I never

26:13

see anyone at a grocery store with a cell phone.

26:16

All right. I'm going to send you another quote. Okay.

26:19

He says, this was my world, a

26:22

world of truly irrational behavior. We

26:24

spend our way into the poor house.

26:26

We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our

26:28

children wear nice clothes thanks to high

26:30

interest credit cards and payday loans. We

26:32

purchase homes we don't need, refinance them

26:34

for more spending money and declare bankruptcy,

26:37

often leaving them full of garbage in our

26:39

wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We

26:41

spend to pretend that we're upper class. And

26:43

when the dust clears, when bankruptcy hits or

26:46

a family member bails us out of our

26:48

stupidity, there's nothing left over. Nothing

26:50

for the kids, college tuition, no investment to grow

26:52

our wealth, no rainy day fund if someone loses

26:55

her job. We know we shouldn't spend like this.

26:58

Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we

27:00

do it anyway. Ooh, love the wee in here.

27:02

I was going to talk about the wee because

27:04

he's trying to create this impression that he's

27:07

like talking about himself too. I'm empathetic.

27:10

But the book is literally full

27:12

of tales of him making wise

27:14

financial decisions and like generally being

27:16

responsible, directly contrasted with those

27:18

around him. It's like here I was

27:21

working hard at the grocery store while

27:23

the poor people strolled by

27:25

me with cell phones and beer. It's

27:27

gross. And again, just

27:29

like another demand that poor

27:31

people lead like punishingly frugal

27:33

lives or else we can

27:35

write them off as moral failures.

27:37

Right. Like, oh, you say

27:40

you're poor, but you have a TV. Right. I

27:42

feel like conservatives always reach for TVs when they're like,

27:45

look how nice the lives of the poor. But

27:47

like TVs are unbelievably cheap now. Right.

27:50

I mean, there's the famous Fox News

27:52

clip being like, did you know that

27:54

99 point something percent

27:57

of people below the poverty line have

27:59

refrigerators? Right. It's

28:01

very well established that lower income

28:03

people spend a higher share of

28:05

their income on core needs than

28:07

higher income people. There were

28:10

a couple of economists from Duke

28:12

and University of Texas, Austin that

28:14

analyzed consumer expenditure data and found

28:16

that lower income families, and that's

28:18

families with income under two

28:20

times the poverty line, spend

28:22

about 75% of

28:25

their total income on food, transportation,

28:28

rent, utilities, and cell phone service.

28:31

The idea that there's this big

28:33

problem with frivolous spending in poor

28:35

communities, it's just fiction. Right. It's

28:38

just bootstrapped bullshit. They want

28:40

you to write off their suffering

28:43

by imagining that it's the product of a

28:46

series of terrible decisions that you don't have

28:48

to have any empathy for. Right. This

28:51

whole thing is so weird to me because it's always blaming

28:53

the people with the least amount of power. I think that

28:55

some people probably did buy way too much house in the

28:57

run up to the 2008 crash,

28:59

but also that's because those people were being

29:01

told systematically that that was a good investment

29:04

and the housing market couldn't crash. Who's

29:06

the villain in that scenario? The person who

29:09

should have known better, who was fucking lying

29:11

to them, or the people who believed someone

29:13

who they thought had more expertise. Right. Also,

29:16

frankly, you shouldn't have to make a

29:18

flawless series of financial decisions to get

29:21

through life. Also, say on the cell

29:23

phones thing, if you're a

29:25

poor person, getting a smartphone is probably

29:27

one of the best investments you could

29:29

possibly make. How would you get a

29:31

job without one? You either need email

29:33

or phone. You need a phone. You

29:35

need a phone to function in our

29:37

society these days. The idea that it's

29:39

a luxury is just false. It's objectively

29:41

not correct. Also, note that he says,

29:43

are children wearing nice clothes thanks to

29:45

high interest credit cards and payday loans?

29:48

Usually notable because later in the book

29:50

there's a weird digression where he defends

29:52

payday lending. Nice. Which

29:56

is great because he's hiding the fact that

29:58

at the time of writing this book, he

30:00

He's a creepy venture capital guy now. Yeah.

30:02

And then payday loans are good and you're

30:04

like, oh, right. I forgot that he's a

30:06

Silicon Valley asshole. Yeah, he's just defending whoever's

30:08

in power. I mean, this is just the

30:10

classic conservative thing of whatever hierarchy exists in

30:12

the world must be just and right. So

30:14

of course you defend the payday lender and

30:16

criticize the people who take out payday loans.

30:19

Right. So Vance tells a story about

30:21

how a payday loan once helped him avoid an

30:23

overdraft fee. And then he

30:26

says that government officials who want to

30:28

ban the practice are ignoring stories like

30:30

his. What? When

30:34

I moved to Sydney when I was 19, I was

30:37

all of a sudden like drinking age, which I hadn't

30:39

been before. And I started going to gay bars and

30:41

I didn't know how to hit on dudes. So I

30:43

would walk up to them. This is when you could

30:45

smoke in bars and restaurants. I would walk up to

30:47

people and bum a cigarette because I like didn't know

30:49

how else to start conversations. And

30:52

so I basically ended up making out with

30:54

a bunch of like chimney mouth dudes because

30:57

I didn't know what else. And I could

30:59

just imagine myself testifying at like a congressional

31:01

hearing and being like when you regulate cigarettes,

31:03

you're taking that experience away. You're

31:07

preventing 19 year old me from having

31:09

regrettable sex. This is disgusting. Oh

31:11

man. When this book first came out,

31:13

it was very interesting to see the spate

31:16

of great reviews and

31:19

then a handful of people being like, this

31:21

is gross. And it's gawking

31:24

and pointing at poor people.

31:27

A lot of those reviewers were

31:29

from Appalachia, right? And they could

31:31

immediately clock this. Right. Whereas

31:33

I think a lot of mainstream sources that

31:35

review this book were relatively

31:37

well off journalists, et cetera,

31:40

who are happy to believe this stuff

31:42

if someone kind of gives them the

31:44

right framing and the right sort of

31:46

excuse. But then did we skip over

31:48

the part where like he's not even

31:50

really from Appalachia. So not

31:53

only is he not really

31:55

from Appalachia, but even

31:57

his grandmother left when she was sort

32:00

of young. The book

32:02

sort of bounces between the Rust Belt and

32:04

Appalachia because he's growing

32:06

up in Middletown, Ohio, and

32:08

he's often in Jackson,

32:11

Kentucky. A big part of

32:13

his narrative is that people

32:15

moved from the mountains into the Rust

32:17

Belts, and so a lot of the

32:19

culture carries over. I guess. You could

32:21

say that about anywhere in America, though.

32:24

I mean. Yeah, it felt

32:26

a little bit squishy. And I will note

32:28

that there have been people who basically said

32:30

he's not from there. My dad is from

32:33

Ohio. I wouldn't describe myself as from the

32:35

Midwest. I didn't know I was talking to

32:37

a real hillbilly, Michael. But

32:43

which fork do I use, Peter? Which one's in front

32:45

of me? There's just this

32:47

weird sort of stolen valor thing that's over all

32:49

of this. Yeah, I mean, I think

32:52

he would claim that he spent

32:54

a lot of time there, et

32:56

cetera, and

32:58

that he's basically familiar enough with the culture.

33:00

But I think it's safe

33:03

to say that based on what we

33:05

know about J.D. Vance's opportunism

33:07

and his relationship to

33:10

the truth, it's more

33:13

accurate to look at him as just

33:16

sort of part of the

33:19

let's all go into a rural diner

33:21

and do some interviews style

33:24

of journalism than it

33:26

is to view him as someone

33:28

who is really from there telling you

33:30

the story, right? There

33:33

are people from Appalachia who

33:35

study Appalachia, who have all

33:38

sorts of interesting and

33:40

nuanced things to say

33:42

about the region. There was

33:44

more than one book that was written in

33:47

response to this book. There was

33:49

one called Appalachian Reckoning, which is like a

33:51

collection of essays. And it's

33:53

a good reminder that there are

33:55

academics who study this stuff, right?

33:57

Right, right. What J.D. Vance.

34:00

is, is a guy who

34:02

is really in his soul

34:04

a cosmopolitan type, right?

34:07

This is someone who wanted to

34:09

be in politics, who wanted to go

34:11

to a snazzy law school, who wanted

34:15

to do venture capital. Perhaps

34:18

he exaggerated his association with

34:20

Appalachia to allow

34:22

himself to write this book. The

34:25

funny thing is, if you really want to understand Trump

34:27

voters, it's not even clear to

34:29

me that you would be looking

34:31

to like poor people in Appalachia.

34:34

You would be looking to well

34:36

off used car dealers in the

34:38

Philadelphia exurbs. Yeah. That's probably

34:40

a good segue into this book's

34:42

relationship with race, which is very

34:44

weird. It's certainly not

34:47

the book's focus. But

34:49

again, he starts off talking about

34:51

how much of Appalachian ancestry is

34:54

Scots-Irish. He is

34:56

describing the distinct ethnography of that

34:58

region. He's also

35:00

consistently talking about the white working class.

35:03

So there's like this implied racial discussion

35:05

happening throughout the book. But

35:07

whenever the question of race comes

35:09

up directly, he is always

35:12

downplaying it. As soon

35:14

as page eight of the book, he

35:17

says that he hopes people avoid, quote,

35:19

filtering their views through a racial prism

35:21

when they talk about poverty. I'm

35:24

going to send you a page of the

35:26

book. He is talking here about negative

35:29

perceptions of Barack Obama in the Rust

35:31

Belt. He says, many of my new

35:33

friends blame racism for this perception of

35:35

the president, but the president feels like

35:37

an alien to many Middletonians for reasons

35:39

that have nothing to do with skin

35:41

color. Recall that not a single one

35:43

of my high school classmates attended an

35:45

Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two

35:47

of them and excelled at both. He

35:49

is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a

35:51

constitutional law professor, which of course he

35:53

is. Nothing about him bears

35:56

any resemblance to the people I admired growing

35:58

up. He made his life in Chicago a

36:00

dense... Metropolis and he conducts himself with a

36:02

confidence that comes from knowing that the modern

36:04

American meritocracy was built for him. Of course

36:07

Obama overcame adversity in his own right adversity

36:09

familiar to many of us But that was long

36:11

before any of us knew him. Barack

36:13

Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest

36:16

insecurities He is a good father while

36:18

many of us aren't he wears suits to his job

36:20

while we wear overalls if we're lucky enough to have

36:22

A job at all his wife tells us

36:24

we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods

36:26

and we hate her for it Not

36:28

because we think she's wrong, but because we know

36:30

she's right What is

36:33

this? This one black

36:35

dude did fine. So racism doesn't exist

36:37

or something I mean, he's trying to say

36:39

that Obama is just sort

36:41

of like an elite right and that's

36:44

why People in the

36:46

rust belt don't really like him and it's like,

36:48

okay, that's almost certainly Part

36:51

of sure but he's like look

36:53

he wears a suit to work

36:55

and it's like yeah He's

36:58

the president, right? When's

37:00

the last time you saw a president

37:03

who didn't consistently wear a suit? Yeah

37:05

It's just like this weird excuse making

37:08

to avoid the idea that race is

37:10

a part of why People

37:12

did not like Obama. It's also

37:14

weird because his description of Obama here sounds

37:16

like a description of him Yes, and the

37:18

fact that these like rural whites don't hate

37:21

JD Vance to the same extent Yeah does actually

37:23

indicate that race might have something to do with

37:25

it Right, although they also kind of hate JD

37:27

Vance Well,

37:30

that's different because he deserves it fine There's a

37:32

couple other areas where he just like downplays race

37:34

in weird ways he describes

37:37

the racial makeup of his hometown

37:39

as Quote lots of

37:41

white and black people but few others. It's

37:44

actually 85% white Okay,

37:46

I don't get why he would

37:48

imply that it wasn't overwhelmingly white

37:50

Except to like avoid a conversation

37:53

about race right early in the

37:55

book Vance lists a handful of

37:57

academics who He thinks

37:59

have done valuable work on social mobility

38:01

and one of them is Charles Murray, author

38:04

of The Bell Curve. Unfortunately, the

38:06

IQs are just too low. The IQs just aren't

38:09

there for people to have jobs. And

38:11

it goes a little beyond that.

38:14

In November of 2016, the American

38:16

Enterprise Institute, a big conservative libertarian

38:18

think tank that employs Murray, hosted

38:21

an event where Murray

38:23

interviewed JD Vance about the

38:25

book. At one point, they

38:28

joked about Vance having pretty

38:30

clean Scots-Irish blood, quote unquote.

38:34

If there's one thing I love about this JD Vance guy, it's

38:36

his skull shape and his brain

38:39

pan. Now, there's almost no discussion of

38:41

sexuality in this book at all. Okay.

38:43

There's one anecdote about homosexuality. JD is

38:45

eight or nine years old. Okay. And

38:47

he thinks that he might be gay

38:50

because he doesn't really like girls and

38:52

his friends are boys. Okay. He hears

38:54

about gay people and he's like, that

38:56

might be me. That's what gay is.

38:58

And this is the anecdote that ensues.

39:01

He says, I broached this issue with

39:03

Mamaw, confessing that I was gay and

39:05

worried that I would burn in hell. She said,

39:07

don't be a fucking idiot. How could you know

39:09

you're gay? I explained my thought

39:11

process. Mamaw chuckled and seemed to

39:13

consider how she might explain to a boy

39:16

my age. Finally, she asked, JD, do you

39:18

want to suck dicks? I was flabbergasted. Why

39:20

would someone want to do that? She

39:23

repeated herself and I said, of course not. Then

39:25

she said, you're not gay. And even if

39:28

you did want to suck dicks, that would be

39:30

okay. God would still love you. All right.

39:32

I'm into this book now. It's fine. It

39:35

is interesting that presumably the implication here is that

39:38

eight year old JD Vance did want to eat

39:41

pussy. That's

39:43

not my memory of being an eight year

39:45

old, but you know, to each his or

39:47

her own. Although according to the Sopranos, that's

39:49

also gay. That's right. That's right. So either

39:52

way, this is a good example of

39:54

just like fairly open deception, right? This

39:56

is like a little aside thrown

39:59

in. to reassure liberal readers

40:01

that he's on the level,

40:03

right? Like even his firecracker

40:05

grandmother didn't really care if

40:08

you're gay or not. But spoiler alert,

40:10

JD Vance is a senator now, so

40:12

we might have some insight into his

40:14

views about LGBT people that we didn't

40:16

in 2016. God, over

40:18

the last 15, 20 years, I've

40:21

become so frustrated with the

40:23

way that like being cool with

40:25

gay people has become a cover

40:28

for just like a huge iceberg

40:30

of evil reactionary beliefs of like,

40:32

people like Peter Thiel, who are just

40:34

like straightforward, far right, but then he's like,

40:36

oh, but he's gay. Oh, okay,

40:38

well, that's complicated. And it's like this sort of

40:40

stuff too, where it's like just because you're okay

40:43

with gay people doesn't invalidate the other like 99

40:45

beliefs that

40:47

you're laying out. And also now there's like

40:49

an extra asterisk where it's like, well,

40:51

other than the groomers, you

40:53

know? Like, yeah. So

40:58

let's talk a bit about the liberal response

41:00

to this book. Again, liberals

41:04

and moderate mainstream media sources

41:06

just loved it. The New

41:08

York Times called it a

41:10

compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of

41:12

the white underclass. Oh my

41:15

God. He spoke at the

41:17

Brookings Institute, Vox gave him

41:19

extensive coverage. There were only

41:21

a handful of negative reviews

41:24

for the book. Sarah Jones, who I spoke

41:26

with to prepare for this, she was writing

41:28

for the New Republic at the time and

41:30

she wrote a critical piece. Jacobin published a

41:32

critical review also by someone who was

41:35

from Appalachia. And so I was

41:37

sort of like, why? Like

41:39

what is causing all

41:42

of these libs to embrace

41:44

such an obviously reactionary message?

41:46

And when I asked people

41:48

from Appalachia about this, their

41:51

response first and foremost was like, well,

41:53

this is just how mainstream Americans, liberal

41:56

or not, have always talked about us.

41:58

Poor people within Appalachia. and Alasha have always

42:01

served as a bit of a punchline

42:03

in American culture. And I do think

42:05

that that helps explain why so many

42:07

people are comfortable with it. But

42:09

I'm not sure that it explains like

42:12

the media phenomenon of the book, right?

42:14

It doesn't explain it getting so

42:16

much attention and J.D. Vance being elevated

42:18

to the degree he was. My

42:20

best educated guess of what happened here was

42:23

that at a time

42:25

when liberals were so frustrated with

42:27

the ascendance of Trump, it

42:30

was cathartic for them in that

42:32

political moment to hear these people who

42:34

they associated with Trump disparaged

42:37

and blamed for their own

42:39

predicament. There's this sort of

42:41

predisposition in American culture to

42:43

disparaging the poor, right? It's just part of

42:45

our culture that it's sort of their fault.

42:48

But the political moment allowed liberals

42:50

to sort of grab that with both hands

42:53

because in their minds,

42:55

this book was insulting to

42:57

Trump voters and it was

43:00

telling them that what was really happening

43:03

with Trump voters was that

43:05

they were like society's losers and they're

43:07

lashing out at you, society's winners. But

43:09

then what's so weird is, because I didn't read the book,

43:12

but at the time I always saw it

43:14

framed as like sympathy for

43:16

poor rural whites and almost like a

43:18

distraction from the very obvious

43:21

racism that drove Trump's victory in

43:23

the election. There was this weird

43:26

explosion after the election of looking

43:28

for any explanation other than like

43:30

the most obvious one. Someone

43:32

appealed to the racism of white people.

43:34

And so it's weird that the actual

43:36

book is like blaming rural whites, but

43:39

the framing of the book by people who

43:41

didn't read it or people like me who

43:43

just read reviews was exonerating rural whites. Yeah,

43:45

I mean, I think that a lot of

43:47

that is the output of him doing that

43:49

like faux empathy where he's, you know, we

43:52

spend too much on TVs, right?

43:54

I think that that gave people

43:56

just enough deniability, right, I mean,

43:58

the New York Times. times is

44:00

calling it compassionate. It's not a

44:02

compassionate view of these people. It's

44:05

a sharply critical view. One

44:08

interesting thing about this is that

44:10

as much as liberals read

44:13

this and heard what they wanted to hear, conservatives

44:16

did too. And

44:18

when you read National Review

44:21

of the book, it

44:23

is embracing these

44:25

really reactionary aspects.

44:28

They summarize the book by saying

44:30

that it chronicles how

44:32

white Appalachians have, quote, followed

44:35

the black underclass and Native

44:37

Americans, not just into

44:39

family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies,

44:42

but also perhaps into the most

44:44

important self-sabotage of all, the crippling

44:46

delusion that they cannot improve their

44:48

lot by their own effort. Jesus

44:51

Christ, that's dark. It's

44:53

fucking nasty. A lot of

44:55

what slips under the radar

44:57

to liberals is

45:00

immediately clocked by conservatives and

45:03

held up as the crux of the

45:05

book. National Review, as disgusting as that

45:07

quote is, is correctly identifying the precise

45:10

theme of the book. If you're a

45:12

conservative, you've been blaming the black

45:14

poor and Native American poor

45:17

for their plight for decades,

45:19

and this is Vance doing the same exact thing

45:21

to the white poor. It's very funny that he

45:23

was cast at the time as the conservative who's

45:26

pushing back or like, he's not like the

45:28

other conservatives. And then actual conservatives were like,

45:30

no, we like this guy. It's liberals

45:32

who are missing it. It's incredible how many people heard

45:34

what they wanted to hear when they were reading this

45:37

book. Does that come through in the movie? I haven't

45:39

seen it. It's hard to say that the movie has

45:41

a message because it's just

45:43

taking the narrative portion of

45:46

the story, removing everything else

45:48

and holding it up and throwing Amy

45:50

Adams and Glenn close at it and

45:52

asking for Oscars. Wow. I'm

45:54

a big Amy Adams fan and a

45:57

real enemy of her agent. Yeah, yeah.

46:00

Hashtag save Amy something happened after she

46:02

did the arrival. Yes, she forgot to

46:04

read her career backwards to herself Yeah,

46:08

the movie I mean it got its bizarre it

46:10

takes like the usual liberties with the story I

46:13

didn't need to talk about the most Inexplicable

46:16

edition which is a line about

46:18

the movie Terminator 2 judgment day.

46:21

What? Yeah in the book Mama

46:23

is a fan of the Terminator But

46:26

in the movie they add a

46:28

line where she says Everyone

46:30

in this world is one of three kinds

46:33

a good terminator a bad terminator

46:35

and neutral what? That doesn't

46:37

even make sense with the the cannon of the

46:40

Terminator films What

46:42

is a neutral terminator? What's

46:44

a neutral? What would its mission be? Is

46:48

that is that Andrew Yang? Is that who she's

46:50

talking about? Oh? Terminator

46:52

neutral terminator We my wife

46:54

and I paused it and we're like what? They

46:58

went out of their way We need something more

47:00

here Ron Howard's that like a table read he's

47:02

like are they really just two kinds good and

47:04

bad and someone's like well no I Think

47:07

there might be neutral as well Well

47:11

now J.D. Vance is terminating welfare

47:13

benefits for struggling families, so Way

47:19

to transition us back Flawless

47:23

segue, let's talk about his Senate

47:25

campaign It's so bleak Vance was

47:27

like comparing Trump and Hitler like

47:30

really aggressive criticism and Then

47:33

he sort of like begins campaigning

47:35

a couple years later And

47:38

things change he grows a beard to cover

47:40

up. What can only be described as a

47:43

Disturbingly boyish face yeah, yeah, he

47:46

pivots hard right he starts buttering

47:48

up Trump to get his endorsement

47:51

And it's like the usual groveling where he's like

47:53

you know I said some pretty mean things about

47:55

mr. Trump, but he's actually the best president ever

47:57

and the coolest guy ever met turns out He's

48:00

a hero. He gets Trump's endorsement

48:02

with that. He wins a messy

48:04

primary fight. And then he goes

48:06

on to win a tight race

48:08

for Senate in Ohio against Democrat

48:11

Tim Ryan. His

48:13

public facing platform,

48:16

you could see the alignment

48:18

with the book, right? There's a heavy

48:20

focus on economic issues, but then these

48:23

little cultural resentments are built in. If

48:25

you remember, sort of had that live and

48:28

let live approach to gay rights

48:30

during the book. During the campaign, he

48:32

says that he opposes codifying the

48:34

right to gay marriage, that he

48:37

opposes anti-discrimination protection for LGBT people.

48:39

He used the term groomers to

48:41

describe anyone who wants to teach

48:43

sexual orientation and gender identity in

48:45

the classroom. Apparently

48:47

that does not apply to a grandmother

48:50

who talks about sucking dicks to

48:52

an eight year old child, but you know. Yeah,

48:54

that's just me mobbing folksy. There's no folksy gays. He

48:56

talks about critical race theory and

48:59

gender ideology indoctrinating children, right? He's

49:01

like really leaning in to right

49:03

wing culture war shit. He

49:06

just becomes a Republican. Right.

49:09

It's actually so bleak because the debate

49:11

about people like this is always like, are they

49:13

faking it? Like, are they doing this cynically? Or

49:16

do they really believe this shit? And like, I

49:18

could not be less interested. I don't fucking care.

49:21

Whether he's faking it or he's become this way,

49:23

it's like, this is what it takes to run

49:25

as a Republican now. Right. If

49:28

people are pretending to have authoritarian

49:30

tendencies to win, that's

49:32

indistinguishable from actual authoritarianism. Right.

49:35

I don't think that the purpose

49:37

of those pieces is entirely to

49:39

actually explore what happened to

49:41

J.D. Vance. I think a lot of it

49:44

is to just give journalists an escape hatch

49:46

for the fact that they swallowed his

49:49

bullshit in 2016. Yeah.

49:51

They embraced a

49:53

conservative opportunist who is now moving with

49:56

the winds of Republican politics, right? Right.

49:58

He wasn't doing weird. culture war

50:00

shit about gender ideology in 2016 because

50:02

the Republican base wasn't fixated on it,

50:05

right? Right. The liberals

50:07

who are saying like, well, we think he changed, they're

50:09

letting themselves off the hook a bit, right? Politics

50:12

have changed. Right. But he's

50:14

been a reactionary the whole time. I feel

50:16

like the sort of liberal establishment keeps having

50:18

this happen to them where it's like they

50:20

just keep stepping on the same fucking rake.

50:22

Yeah. It's like, oh, weird. Another one turns

50:24

out to be like a far right grifter. Huh? It's

50:27

because of that phenomenon that you identified earlier. They

50:29

love someone who sounds self

50:32

reflective. That's something that

50:34

the liberal set embraces because the

50:36

idea of someone being

50:38

willing to like wag

50:40

their finger at their

50:43

own political set is very

50:45

appealing to the liberal establishment

50:47

media. They love that shit. Right.

50:50

And then you look around five years later and you're like, wait, were we instrumental

50:53

in the country electing its

50:55

first neutral terminator?