00:00:43.920So I guess the only thing that I really have to say about this is that we did our episode and one of the underlying themes of the episode was his cynicism.
00:00:54.160The fact that this was this guy who was willing to traffic in this fake persona he created and write a book that was sort of built atop caricatures and very nakedly meant to propel his political career forward.
00:01:08.880Yeah. That cynicism is, I think, why he was selected by Donald Trump. Right. In 2016, he was saying he didn't like Trump. Trump was a nightmare. Awful. America's next Hitler. And by 2020, he was like, Mike Pence should have done the right thing. You know, he's a man of pure naked ambition. And that's why Trump understands him and relates to him and likes him.
00:01:35.200The book also fits very nicely into this pattern because it was a book meant to capitalize on this like centrist kind of unity wave that was going on of like we need to understand the people in Appalachia, which, of course, his book provides no actual insight into.0.97
00:01:49.080And now all of that shit has basically been swept away.
00:01:51.500I mean, they're basically just bragging about the fact that they want like a far right theocracy.0.98
00:01:54.880Yeah. When it comes to like his actual positions, this is a man who is like 100 percent against abortion, all cases, a guy who has like ties to venture capital and wants to grease the wheels for business in favor of aggressive use of law enforcement in the military against protesters.
00:02:16.900I also found an interview this morning where he talks about how Democrats want to flood America with illegal aliens and then use taxpayer dollars to fund gender reassignment surgeries for those aliens.
00:02:29.520So note to journalists, J.D. Vance wants privately funded.
00:02:59.600Yeah, so enjoy listening to us talk about J.D. Vance and Hillbilly Elegy when we were blissfully unaware of just how bad things were about to get.
00:03:12.320What do you know about Hillbilly Elegy?0.83
00:03:14.480I know that the book made the argument that we have to understand rural whites so that they can run for Senate and take our rights away.0.67
00:03:36.240So this is sort of a weird episode for us, an unusual episode, because this is a memoir.0.82
00:03:41.640The subtitle of Hillbilly Elegy is A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
00:03:48.660And it is, of course, written by Senator J.D. Vance.
00:06:54.240And I also think that another component of that is that when someone like Vance comes along and offers a criticism of like his own people, liberals eat that up because to them it seems like very thoughtful, like right, almost like self-critical.
00:07:09.680And they're like, oh, this is fascinating. This is a man who is reflecting on his own culture.
00:07:15.620This is like when there's a like black conservative who's like the left is making too big of a deal0.84
00:07:20.800about race these days and conservatives immediately elevate them to like every talk show.1.00
00:07:25.260They should have put Candace Owens on the cover of this to give you the typology.1.00
00:17:28.880This is like the fundamental problem with Vance's thesis, right?
00:17:32.060He's claiming that the real issue in Appalachia and the Rust Belt is this cultural unwillingness to work.
00:17:38.300But there is quite literally less work to do than there was before.
00:17:42.460You could snap your fingers and give everyone in his town a great work ethic.
00:17:45.860Unemployment would still be relatively high because you still run into the wall of fewer available jobs.
00:17:50.460Right. Right. You're not going to reopen the factories with good work ethic.
00:17:53.080The funny thing is this has also ended up screwing over people with bachelor's degrees
00:17:56.920because a lot of those people graduated from college during the recession and ended up taking
00:18:00.840like entry level jobs for which they don't even really need a bachelor's degree. The people without
00:18:05.980bachelor's degrees, like they just can't claw their way into any entry level position because0.95
00:18:09.520all those positions are taken up by people with college degrees. Right. And, you know, the data
00:18:14.180bears all of this out. Like 50 years ago, a considerable majority of jobs were available to
00:18:20.480anyone without a college degree. And now it's a small minority. I think it's something like 30%.
00:18:26.040it's super bizarre to individualize this like obviously structural problem it's also very
00:18:32.000funny because conservatives never apply the same logic to the wealthy right oh americans make less
00:18:36.960money than people in other developed countries maybe we just have shittier rich people here0.99
00:18:41.740jd maybe our rich are just the fucking worst right like that guy who was a bad worker and0.98
00:18:48.440got fired and was mad about it like okay fine i see you and raise you donald sterling0.99
00:18:54.040Yeah. If if we're building U.S. policy around like the cultural malignancy of certain societal groups, I would like to start at like the country clubs and work our way down.
00:19:09.700All right. I'm going to send you a little excerpt. This is a story from when J.D. Vance was a young man working in a local grocery store.
00:22:12.620he basically says in so many words racism is real i'm not saying it's not real but0.98
00:22:19.100i want to talk about a kind of poverty that is experienced by white people right and if you look
00:22:27.180at just the book there's not much more than that but if you look at some of his other work
00:22:32.100there are times when he trots out white poverty as sort of like a defense against claims of
00:22:40.720discrimination. Right. Right. There are poor white people, too. So the relative poverty of black
00:22:46.720people isn't proof of anything. That's like my favorite response to police brutality
00:22:52.100accusations that it's like, look, they shot this white guy. Right. Like, I'm not owned by this at
00:23:01.780all. Vance does hedge quite a bit. He will say, like, look, we can't discount systemic issues
00:23:08.880that cause poverty. Right. I think that he's basically doing that to maintain an appropriate
00:23:14.580level of deniability. Right. Because he never dives into that meaningfully. It's always just
00:23:20.880sort of a disclaimer. Right. But of course, the primary thesis of the book, I mean, it's called
00:23:27.040a memoir of a family and culture in crisis. Right. Right. It's not called, you know,
00:23:32.660memoir of a region that has been systematically separated from the wealth of the rest of the
00:23:39.560country. It's also very funny because if you were looking at a foreign country and you saw like
00:23:43.760there's a really poor region of like Peru or something and someone told you that like there
00:23:48.420used to be all these mines where they employed a bunch of people and then all of those employers
00:23:53.340have like shut down and there's far fewer jobs. You'd be like, oh, well, yeah, that's probably
00:23:56.960why there's so much unemployment there. But he's like, no, no, no, no, no. The attitudes of the
00:24:01.380people changed. I mean, I think he has sort of like a combination of explanations. Yeah. One of
00:24:06.220them is a very bizarre ethnic explanation where he says that like the region is primarily Scots-Irish
00:24:13.120heritage. Oh my God. Really? He's going back to like 1800s racism where it's like, oh, there's
00:24:18.640too many swarthy Italians. The other, the more sensible sort of explanation that he occasionally
00:24:26.260hints at is that you have systemic poverty causing these cultural issues to some degree,
00:24:33.180but then the cultural issues perpetuate, which I think is like sort of true in a vacuum,
00:24:37.900but it's also like the whole story. Like the systemic poverty needs to come first. It must
00:24:46.940come first. And the output is these cultural artifacts that are associated with poverty.
00:24:53.360Right. So he's sort of like skipping over the fact that he's getting it exactly backwards.
00:24:58.600Right. And also, even if you want to argue that it's like culture is the most important factor or whatever, what can we do about it?
00:25:06.120Right. What would fixing a culture even mean? I mean, that's just like lecturing people until they have different attitudes.
00:25:11.780Well, I think what he's actually advocating for, although he doesn't say it super explicitly, is fewer interventions by the government.
00:25:22.540Right. Well, that's always where it comes back to. Yeah. Right. To punish them for their laziness rather than reward, quote unquote, their laziness. Right. That's what he sort of hints at. You can see it in his other writings at the time, like he wrote for National Review at the time that he's publishing this book. And he's got pieces about how he thinks welfare in Appalachia has failed and is not productive. So that is the end game here.
00:25:47.360Right. The irony is that, like, the decline of Appalachia economically actually lines up really well with cuts to welfare. Right. Right. So, yes, if cutting welfare worked, you would think you would have seen some improvement in Appalachian poverty rates rather than what we've actually seen, which is a severe decline in the standards of living across the region.
00:26:10.620Unfortunately, we have no choice but to keep cutting until I never see anyone at a grocery store with a cell phone.
00:26:15.340All right. I'm going to send you another quote.
00:26:18.580Okay. He says, this was my world, a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way
00:26:25.080into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high
00:26:30.500interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them
00:26:35.160for more spending money and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake.
00:26:39.960Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we're upper class. And when the
00:26:44.780dust clears when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity, there's1.00
00:26:48.980nothing left over. Nothing for the kids, college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth,0.99
00:26:53.580no rainy day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn't spend like this. Sometimes we
00:26:58.400beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway. Ooh, love the we in here. I was going to talk
00:27:03.240about the we because he's trying to create this impression that he's like talking about himself
00:27:08.120too, right? I'm empathetic. But the book is literally full of tales of him making wise
00:27:14.060financial decisions and like generally being responsible directly contrasted with those around
00:27:19.700him. It's like here I was working hard at the grocery store while the poor people, you know,
00:27:24.840strolled by me with cell phones and beer. Right. It's gross. And again, just like another demand
00:27:30.140that poor people lead like punishingly frugal lives. Right. Or else we can write them off as0.98
00:27:37.060moral failures. Right. Like, oh, you say you're poor, but you have a TV. Right. I feel like
00:27:43.020conservatives always reach for TVs when they're like, look how nice the lives of the poor. But
00:27:46.900like TVs are unbelievably cheap now. Right. I mean, there's the famous Fox News clip being like,
00:27:53.940did you know that ninety nine point something percent of people below the poverty line have
00:27:58.740refrigerators? Right. It's very well established that lower income people spend a higher share of
00:28:05.980their income on core needs than higher income people. There were a couple of economists from
00:28:10.840Duke and University of Texas Austin that analyzed consumer expenditure data and found that lower
00:28:17.760income families, and that's families with income under two times the poverty line, spend about
00:28:23.42075 percent of their total income on food, transportation, rent, utilities, and cell
00:28:29.880phone service. The idea that there's this like big problem with frivolous spending in poor
00:28:35.520communities. It's just fiction. It's just bootstrap bullshit. They want you to write off
00:28:42.340their suffering by imagining that it's the product of a series of terrible decisions that you don't
00:28:48.720have to have any empathy for. This whole thing is so weird to me because it's always blaming the
00:28:52.120people with the least amount of power. Like I think that some people probably did buy like
00:28:56.180way too much house in the run up to the 2008 crash. But also like that's because those people
00:29:01.360were being told systematically that that was a good investment and the housing market couldn't
00:29:05.500crash. Right. Who's the villain in that scenario? The person who should have known better, who was
00:29:10.420fucking lying to them or the people who, like, believed someone who they thought had more0.99
00:29:14.440expertise. Right. And also, frankly, you shouldn't have to make a flawless series of financial1.00
00:29:20.200decisions to get through life. I will also say on the cell phones thing, if you're a poor person,
00:29:25.880getting a smartphone is probably one of the best investments you could possibly make.
00:29:29.820How would you get a job without one? Right. You either need email or phone like you need a phone.
00:29:35.040You need a phone to like function in our society these days.
00:29:38.180The idea that it's a luxury is just false.
00:29:40.080It's not it's like objectively not correct.
00:29:42.100So also note that he says our children wear nice clothes thanks to high interest credit
00:30:34.340When I moved to Sydney when I was 19, I was all of a sudden like drinking age, which I hadn't been before. And I started going to gay bars and I didn't know how to hit on dudes. So I would walk up to them. This is when you could smoke in bars and restaurants. I would walk up to people and bum a cigarette because I like didn't know how else to start conversations.
00:30:50.820And so I basically ended up making out with a bunch of like chimney mouth dudes because I didn't know what else. And I could just imagine myself testifying at like a congressional hearing and being like, when you regulate cigarettes, you're taking that experience away. You're preventing 19 year old me from having regrettable sex. This is disgusting.0.99
00:31:11.120Oh, man. When this book first came out, it was very interesting to see the spate of great reviews
00:31:18.060and then a handful of people being like, this is gross and it's gawking and pointing at poor
00:31:26.200people. A lot of those reviewers were from Appalachia, right? And they could immediately
00:31:31.260clock this. Whereas I think a lot of mainstream sources that review this book were relatively
00:31:38.000well-off journalists, etc., who are happy to believe this stuff if someone kind of gives them
00:31:44.140the right framing and the right sort of excuse. But then did we skip over the part where like
00:31:49.640he's not even really from Appalachia? So not only is he not really from Appalachia,
00:31:56.620but even his grandmother left when she was sort of young. Right. The book sort of bounces between
00:32:03.180the Rust Belt in Appalachia because he's growing up in Middletown, Ohio, and he's often in Jackson,
00:32:10.980Kentucky. A big part of his narrative is that people moved from the mountains into the Rust
00:32:18.480Belts, and so a lot of the culture carries over. I guess. You could say that about anywhere in
00:32:23.340America, though. I mean... Yeah, it felt a little bit squishy, and I will note that there have been
00:32:29.600people who basically said he's not from there my dad is from ohio i wouldn't describe myself
00:32:35.060as like from the midwest i didn't know i was talking to a real hillbilly michael
00:32:39.120but which fork do i use peter which one which one's in front of me like there's just this weird
00:32:47.400sort of like stolen valor thing that's over all of this yeah i mean i think he would claim that
00:32:53.440he spent a lot of time there etc um and that he's basically familiar enough with the culture
00:33:00.420but i think it's safe to say that based on what we know about jd vance's opportunism and his
00:33:08.840relationship to uh the truth yeah it's more accurate to look at him as just sort of part of
00:33:18.120the let's all go into a rural diner and do some interviews style of journalism than it is to view
00:33:27.400him as someone who is really from there telling you the story, right? There are people from
00:33:33.940Appalachia who study Appalachia, who have all sorts of interesting and nuanced things to say
00:33:42.580about the region. There was more than one book that was written in response to this book.
00:33:48.120There is one called Appalachian Reckoning, which is like a collection of essays.
00:33:52.620And it's a good reminder that like there are academics who study this stuff, right?
00:33:58.360I think what J.D. Vance is, is a guy who is really in his soul, a cosmopolitan type, right?
00:34:06.860This is someone who wanted to be in politics, who wanted to go to a snazzy law school, who wanted to do venture capital.
00:34:17.260Perhaps he exaggerated his association with Appalachia.
00:34:54.720He is describing the distinct ethnography of the region.
00:34:58.920And he's also consistently talking about the white working class.
00:35:02.940So there's like this implied racial discussion happening throughout the book.
00:35:06.840But whenever the question of race comes up directly, he is always downplaying it.
00:35:13.400As soon as page eight of the book, he says that he hopes people avoid, quote, filtering their views through a racial prism when they talk about poverty.
00:37:31.680There's a couple other areas where he just like downplays race in weird ways. He describes the racial makeup of his hometown as, quote, lots of white and black people, but few others. It's actually 85 percent white.
00:37:46.220I don't get why he would imply that it wasn't overwhelmingly white, except to like avoid a
00:37:52.240conversation about race. Right. Early in the book, Vance lists a handful of academics who0.86
00:37:58.100he thinks have done valuable work on social mobility. And one of them is Charles Murray,
00:38:04.120author of The Bell Curve. Unfortunately, the IQs are just too low. The IQs just aren't there for
00:38:09.680people to have jobs. And it goes a little beyond that. In November of 2016, the American Enterprise
00:38:16.120Institute, a big conservative libertarian think tank that employs Murray, hosted an event where
00:38:22.760Murray interviewed J.D. Vance about the book. Nice. At one point, they joked about Vance having
00:38:28.700pretty clean Scots-Irish blood, quote unquote. If there's one thing I love about this J.D. Vance
00:38:36.220guy, it's his skull shape and his brain pan. Now, there's almost no discussion of sexuality
00:40:03.800Even his firecracker grandmother didn't really care if you're gay or not.0.94
00:40:08.400But spoiler alert, J.D. Vance is a senator now, so we might have some insight into his
00:40:14.340views about LGBT people that we didn't in 2016.1.00
00:40:18.220God, over the last 15, 20 years, I've become so frustrated with the way that like being
00:40:24.980cool with gay people has become a cover for just like a huge iceberg of evil reactionary
00:40:31.520beliefs of like people like Peter Thiel who are just like straightforward far right. But then it's0.83
00:40:36.920like, oh, but he's gay. Oh, OK, well, it's complicated. And it's like this sort of stuff,0.81
00:40:40.920too, where it's like just because you're OK with gay people doesn't invalidate the other like
00:40:45.260ninety nine beliefs that you're laying out. And also now there's like an extra asterisk where
00:40:50.660it's like, well, other than the groomers. Yeah. So let's talk a bit about the liberal response
00:41:01.020to this book. Again, liberals and moderate mainstream media sources just loved it. The
00:41:08.780New York Times called it a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white
00:41:14.660underclass. Oh, my God. He spoke at the Brookings Institute. Vox gave him extensive coverage.
00:41:21.440There were only a handful of negative reviews of the book. Right. Sarah Jones, who I spoke with
00:41:26.360to prepare for this, she was writing for the New Republic at the time, and she wrote a critical
00:41:30.040piece. Jacobin published a critical review also by someone who was from Appalachia. And so I was
00:41:37.440sort of like, why? What is causing all of these libs to embrace such an obviously reactionary
00:41:47.520message? And when I asked people from Appalachia about this, their response first and foremost was
00:41:53.500like, well, this is just how mainstream Americans, liberal or not, have always talked about us.
00:41:58.380Yeah. Poor people within Appalachia have always served as a bit of a punchline in American culture. And I do think that that helps explain why so many people are comfortable with it. But I'm not sure that it explains like the media phenomenon of the book. Right. It doesn't explain it getting so much attention and J.D. Vance being elevated to the degree he was.
00:42:20.000My best educated guess at what happened here was that at a time when liberals were so frustrated
00:42:26.840with the ascendance of Trump, it was cathartic for them in that political moment to hear these
00:42:34.000people who they associated with Trump disparaged and blamed for their own predicament. There's
00:42:40.260this sort of predisposition in American culture to disparaging the poor, right? It's just part
00:42:45.780of our culture, that it's sort of their fault. But the political moment allowed liberals to sort
00:42:51.700of grab that with both hands. Because in their minds, this book was insulting to Trump voters.
00:42:59.320And it was telling them that what was really happening with Trump voters was that they were0.98
00:43:05.040like society's losers. And they're lashing out at you, society's winners. But then what's so weird0.53
00:43:10.340is because, you know, I didn't read the book. But at the time, I always saw it framed as like
00:43:14.960sympathy for poor rural whites and almost like a distraction from the very obvious racism that
00:43:21.780drove Trump's victory in the election. There was this weird explosion after the election of looking
00:43:28.240for any explanation other than like the most obvious one. Yeah. Someone appealed to the racism
00:43:33.860of white people. Yeah. And so it's weird that the actual book is like blaming rural whites,0.95
00:43:38.920but the framing of the book by people who didn't read it or people like me who just read reviews
00:48:31.020During the campaign, he says that he opposes codifying the right to gay marriage, that he opposes anti-discrimination protection for LGBT people.
00:48:39.820He used the term groomers to describe anyone who wants to teach sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom.0.97
00:49:51.500They embraced a conservative opportunist who is now moving with the winds of Republican politics.
00:49:58.400Right. He wasn't doing weird culture war shit about gender ideology in 2016 because the Republican base wasn't fixated on it.0.94
00:50:05.460Right. The liberals who are saying, like, well, we think he changed.0.96
00:50:09.440They were letting themselves off the hook a bit. Right. Politics have changed.
00:50:13.240Right. But he's been a reactionary the whole time.
00:50:15.860I feel like the sort of liberal establishment keeps having this happen to them where it's like they just keep stepping on the same fucking rake.0.99
00:50:23.220It's like, oh, weird. Another one turns out to be like a far right grifter. Huh.
00:50:26.640It's because of that phenomenon that you identified earlier.
00:50:29.080They love someone who sounds self-reflective.
00:50:33.120That's something that the liberal set embraces because the idea of someone being willing to like wag their finger at their own political set is very appealing to the liberal establishment media.1.00
00:50:48.700Right. And then you look around five years later and you're like, wait, were we instrumental in the country electing its first neutral Terminator?1.00