RadixJournal - March 04, 2026


The Contemptible Nature of JD Vance

Topics
jd vance ideologies
Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
JD Vance Donald Trump Captive Dreamer Ben Shapiro David Frum John Darcher Nick Fuentes Gavin Newsom Peter Thiel Tim Mackey Amy Chua Spencer Hitler Obama Girl
The Feminist Syndrome Esoteric Shakespeare

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

169.08

Word count

2,090

Sentence count

172

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

J.D. Vance is a conservative writer and pundit. He has been around for a long time, and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Weekly Standard. But what exactly is he really all about? Is he a neocon? And is he a manchurian?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Let me ask you one more question, and then I'll go to the crowd
00:00:03.560 because we have a couple of hands up already.
00:00:05.940 But what do you make of J.D. Vance?
00:00:10.020 Because he is in many ways right smack dab in the middle
00:00:13.920 of what we've been talking about.
00:00:16.420 And he has changed his ideology, his ideologies,
00:00:21.560 almost as many times as he's changed his name.
00:00:24.640 Not as many times as he's changed his name, to be fair.
00:00:27.380 But he has changed ideologies quite a bit.
00:00:31.080 Now, you could make a couple of different interpretations of J.D. Vance.
00:00:36.180 You could say that this young man who was writing blogs at From Forum,
00:00:41.620 I remember back when I founded AlternativeWrite.com in 2010
00:00:47.300 on a complete shoestring.
00:00:50.000 We were making fun of From Forum all the time,
00:00:53.580 and we actually had an article written about us on From Forum by Tim Mack,
00:00:59.100 who's still a journalist, actually.
00:01:01.380 And he said they're Nazis, but they want to be fancy about it or something,
00:01:06.320 which is pretty much true.
00:01:07.740 I don't know.
00:01:08.360 But anyway, they sent so many people to the site that the server crashed, actually.
00:01:14.720 And I remember John Darcher wrote a little note in National Review on their little blog.
00:01:19.840 Like, he's, oh, I'm so glad that Spencer created this new website.
00:01:23.400 And then it got taken down by, like, the editors.
00:01:26.200 They're like, eh.
00:01:26.700 But where was I going with this?
00:01:28.600 Oh, J.D. Vance, at that time, was writing at From Forum.
00:01:34.080 I'm older than J.D. Vance.
00:01:35.700 So I was almost like the older antagonist towards it.
00:01:39.680 It's hard to even imagine these things when he was starting out as a writer.
00:01:43.840 Anyway, obviously, they wrote about a lot more than AlternativeWrite.com.
00:01:48.220 But we were on their radar screen quite prominently.
00:01:51.440 But anyway, you could make an argument that he is just this little neocon kid,
00:01:58.080 and he puts on different masks.
00:02:01.160 He still believes in the same thing that he did in 2008 through 2012-ish.
00:02:09.360 He put his finger up to the wind.
00:02:11.380 He recognized which way it was blowing.
00:02:13.160 And he decided, hey, I'm going to be the white Obama, but I'm going to be a little neoconny inside. 0.90
00:02:21.120 And so I'm going to talk about how we need to overcome racism, and Trump is a real Hitler, and blah, blah, blah.
00:02:28.540 But what I am on the inside is a neoconservative.
00:02:32.100 And then we now reach this point where there is some conflicting information coming out of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
00:02:40.480 The Wall Street Journal seems to lean on the notion that Vance was against it but reluctantly accepted it.
00:02:45.800 The New York Times is basically saying that Vance was slightly skeptical but said, if we go in, we better go in hard.
00:02:53.780 So you could make this claim that J.D. Vance is a Manchurian candidate of sorts.
00:03:01.160 He was invented by David Frum many years ago, passed off to Amy Chua at Harvard.
00:03:07.600 MSNBC bought their gambit, and they played right into David Frum's hands, and lo and behold, were invading Iran.
00:03:18.600 You can make that claim.
00:03:20.080 You could also make the claim that J.D. Vance believes in nothing.
00:03:24.660 He's a hillbilly nihilist, and he just says talking points, doesn't believe it, whether it's eating cats or nationalism or invading Iran, just whatever.
00:03:36.320 He'll just say it. 0.66
00:03:37.260 He's an utter cynical nihilist. 0.87
00:03:39.580 You can make that claim.
00:03:41.200 You could also make the claim, which you sometimes will hear from people on the left, which is that, oh, no, see, he's like into Duganism.
00:03:51.020 He's hardcore.
00:03:52.460 He pro-Russia. 1.00
00:03:54.240 He's a racist. 1.00
00:03:55.440 Don't look at his wife and kids. 1.00
00:03:56.920 He hates women and cat ladies. 0.99
00:03:59.640 He's a resentful incel.
00:04:01.520 Now, you could make all of these arguments, and they're maybe equally plausible, but what do you think of J.D. Vance, where he was, where he is, and how he's positioned as Trump's successor?
00:04:16.240 I feel like he's toast, as things stand, unless somehow they're able to, like, pull some rabbit out of a, let's say they turn this around and make the Iran war into a tremendous success. 0.96
00:04:27.860 Maybe they'll get away with it, but that's a long shot.
00:04:31.380 It's probably even a longer shot than the people are going to rise up.
00:04:35.000 I feel Vance suffered two really mortal blows to his credibility.
00:04:39.520 One was the expose that Nick Fuentes did at the height of Fuentes mania last year.
00:04:46.240 Right.
00:04:46.760 Well, I don't know where people are on Nick now.
00:04:48.840 I know he turned a lot of people off with his stuff around Venezuela, but I think it was your influence that did it.
00:04:56.980 But I think about six, I think about six months ago, he had, he was, had a kind of peak of popularity.
00:05:02.680 Oh yeah, definitely.
00:05:04.200 And during that time, he absolutely exposed Vance in forensic detail, showed all the connections with Peter Thiel and so on.
00:05:12.720 And so in a way, and a lot of people watch that, like into the millions, watch that one.
00:05:17.300 And because of that, I think people were primed to see Vance as a bit of a fake.
00:05:22.420 I also think that your friend RFH and various other Mean Girl posse on Twitter, I think they also did a real job on him with the, the fat face Vance to the point where he actually had to reclaim it.
00:05:35.640 And if you want to talk about online and reality merging in a weird place, I remember Vance came to this country because he started slagging off British soldiers or something, which made Vance hated him.
00:05:48.760 Vance is hated in this country, even more than Trump because of those comments he made about British soldiers.
00:05:53.580 And so when he came here, and obviously the left hates him anyway, but I think he turned off a lot of patriots too.
00:05:59.740 When he came here, they put, they had these massive trucks, like with billboards of the fat Vance face going down the streets.
00:06:07.680 So the real life meme had now made it into a physical, like a six foot physical object going down the street.
00:06:15.920 And I think he was so nailed by it that he had no choice in the end to then to try to reclaim the meme himself.
00:06:23.180 So he then started posting Vance fat face memes, right?
00:06:27.140 Okay.
00:06:27.520 It's all fun and games, but I think that did real damage to his credibility and also in with it, there's this horrible, there was this sense when Vance became the VP that, oh my God, he's one of us.
00:06:40.460 He's within one degree of separation from following me on Twitter.
00:06:44.160 So he's a mutual, some of my mutuals are his mutuals and things like that.
00:06:48.520 And how exciting all this is.
00:06:50.160 We're one DM group chat away from the vice president.
00:06:53.520 Yeah. 0.99
00:06:53.900 And also weirdly, yeah, it's true, but it's also pathetic, right? 0.97
00:06:59.240 I agree.
00:07:00.720 Not only is it not that exciting, it's not that exciting because what they're doing is taking a few aesthetics and ideas and watering them down.
00:07:09.560 But also by the same token, it's like, why are you looking for my approval?
00:07:14.880 Isn't that weird that you're all looking for my approval all the time?
00:07:18.600 And it's strange.
00:07:19.720 And I think it's actually weak.
00:07:21.840 The moment I can think of is when people were making fun of his wife, because his wife is Indian. 0.57
00:07:27.900 And this was at the height of anti-Indian, anti-Indian racism online or whatever.
00:07:32.960 And he basically failed to come out and he failed to come out to protect her or to honor her in some way.
00:07:39.840 And it took him like a week or maybe even two weeks because he didn't want to be seen to counter-signal the dissident online.
00:07:47.200 You can't have a vice president who's behaving like this. 1.00
00:07:49.560 It's pathetic. 0.99
00:07:50.420 It is like he had to just come out straight away and be like, no, this is my wife. 1.00
00:07:54.400 Fuck off. 1.00
00:07:55.320 You know what I mean? 1.00
00:07:56.180 So all of that was coming into this.
00:07:59.340 And now, whether he likes it or not, he's part of the campaign that's doing the one thing that he and Trump said they'd never do, which is bomber art.
00:08:08.880 So here we are.
00:08:09.800 Isn't it interesting that J.D. Vance is almost like a reversal, like a black mirror reversal of Trump?
00:08:20.660 Because Trump doesn't pander in the way that word is used.
00:08:27.240 Now, all politicians pander to some degree and so on.
00:08:32.420 Whenever Trump panders, it's almost like he's insulting the group.
00:08:36.080 It's like we love our uneducated people.
00:08:40.040 They're big Trump fans, people who dropped out of high school.
00:08:43.680 You know, the Vangis, they love.
00:08:45.800 He was asked at one point, do you believe in God?
00:08:48.380 And he said, the evangelical Christians do and they vote Trump.
00:08:52.560 It's just totally cynical, contemptuous in many ways, attitude towards his followers.
00:08:59.140 He doesn't pander.
00:09:00.620 And what he does is he allows himself to be a screen onto which you project your hopes and dreams.
00:09:10.400 And for example, and maybe this isn't even the best example, but he could say something like, if I were president, the Ukraine war never would have happened.
00:09:20.180 And OK, so the Ukrainian supporters, they're like, oh, he must be one of us.
00:09:24.400 Yeah, that's great.
00:09:25.340 The Russian supporters, it's oh, yeah, he's one of us.
00:09:27.720 He's pro, right?
00:09:28.380 The people who are anti-war.
00:09:30.640 Oh, we love this guy.
00:09:31.900 The people who are pro-war love this guy.
00:09:33.520 It's a and I think he does it.
00:09:35.280 I'm not even sure he does it consciously.
00:09:37.540 I think it's just like an instinctive way that he acts this sort of Rorschach test as politics.
00:09:43.920 So he doesn't pander.
00:09:45.580 He allows you to pander to him.
00:09:47.640 He allows you to project your hopes and fears and dreams on him.
00:09:51.280 Whereas J.D. Vance, in this like cloying way, like literally doesn't want to offend Captive Dreamer or something.
00:10:01.220 Yeah.
00:10:01.440 And it's Captive Dreamer is a shell. 0.99
00:10:04.000 It's two shills having sex or something. 0.87
00:10:06.360 It's what doesn't work.
00:10:07.640 It's just it's insane.
00:10:10.200 And you can see that in that.
00:10:12.000 Yeah, it's weak.
00:10:12.860 Like at TPUSA, when he's I'm not here to divide the Republican Party or whatever, and it's OK, I get that on some level.
00:10:20.860 But Ben Shapiro took out a switchblade and started cutting people up.
00:10:25.460 Now, I don't agree with Ben Shapiro on 99 percent of things, but like he has ballsy, actually.
00:10:32.660 Like he's a man.
00:10:33.920 And J.D. Vance just ain't.
00:10:36.740 And if whenever you feel contempt for something, that's when you know it's over.
00:10:42.280 In a marriage, whenever you can argue and whatever, but like you start having contempt for the other person, it's over.
00:10:50.580 There's no reconciling it.
00:10:52.140 You can't bring it back.
00:10:53.480 Just move on.
00:10:54.880 And I feel like that is the emotion that people feel about J.D. Vance.
00:11:00.220 Whereas the emotion that I feel about Donald Trump is sometimes, hey, to my modest,
00:11:04.880 sometimes a weird love that I just can't help laughing at his stand-up comedy routines that he performs every day,
00:11:14.140 a sort of just amused delight in his insanity.
00:11:18.820 Those are my emotions.
00:11:19.900 It's not really contempt.
00:11:21.500 I don't think I've ever had contempt for Donald Trump.
00:11:23.820 I have just outright contempt for Vance, and I don't think I'm alone.
00:11:28.000 And it just doesn't work.
00:11:30.280 And I don't think the people who think that he's one of them or that he's cool or he's smart really grasp that, like, the visceral level.
00:11:40.120 Yeah, I don't know anyone who does think he's cool, to be honest.
00:11:43.780 Yeah.
00:11:44.000 I think he's always been, I mean, people can tell if somebody's lacking in character and authenticity and things like that.
00:11:52.080 And I haven't, I'd be honest, I haven't felt those, like, I haven't laughed with Trump for quite a long time at this point,
00:11:57.700 because I genuinely think he's gone a bit mad in his old age.
00:12:00.460 Yeah.
00:12:00.800 Like, he's become, like, kind of Napoleon or something.
00:12:02.860 He's just gone a bit crazy now.
00:12:04.580 But he certainly had that.
00:12:06.260 He kept me going for, what, nine years or something.
00:12:08.340 Even as late as last year, I still had moments where he was bringing me back with his jokes and things.
00:12:14.920 But, yeah, Vance just doesn't have that.
00:12:16.780 But I get the feeling that somebody like Gavin Newsom, if that's the election, he's going to reach him for toast at the minute.