J.D. Vance is a Yale Law graduate, an Ivy League graduate, and a Harvard Law graduate. He s been around a long time, and he s a smart guy. And yet, he s not a politician. How did he get there?
00:00:00.000Before Trump came down the escalator in 2015, there was a model of what an American politician would look like.
00:00:14.520And a lot of people talk about identity politics. I think there was something about personal identity politics that Obama represented in the sense that one of the secondary taglines of that campaign was, be the change you want to see in the world.
00:00:36.020And you could take that phrase in multiple ways. One of the ways you could take that is just simply voting for Obama was the change you wanted to see.
00:00:48.860And so let's go back to Obama. Obama was and is a thoughtful man. He's sometimes too nuanced in his responses to things. He doesn't go for the jugular.
00:01:06.020He can sometimes be a little gray on gray or talk around things and so on. But he's clearly an intelligent person. He's clearly a thoughtful, a deeper person than, say, Donald Trump or George W. Bush.
00:01:18.780When he started running against Hillary, there was a very strong dynamic of, first off, he gives great speeches, but I can get the job done. That was kind of Hillary's case, along with the white people love me, which was what she was saying in 2008, believe it or not.
00:01:39.620But there was also a sort of Hillary Clinton voted for the war. And she's kind of tainted by the Bush era and we're moving off the war on terror. Barack Obama became a senator in 2004, so he couldn't have voted for the war. He did engage in some protests.
00:01:57.620He spoke at protests in Chicago against the war in Iraq. Now, it should be noted that in those speeches, he actually endorsed the war on terror and endorsed the Afghanistan campaign.
00:02:13.300I actually learned about this reading Spencer Ackerman's book, Reign of Terror, which is pretty good.
00:02:19.700And he is one of these leftists who is highly skeptical of Barack Obama.
00:02:24.760And as he should be, Barack Obama created a sustainable war on terror. He increased drone strikes. He never really moved off Gitmo or torture, etc., etc.
00:02:38.680He never fundamentally questioned the war on terror. And thus, he was kind of stuck in this, you voted for me because you hated George W. Bush, and you want the war to be over, but I kind of can't fully end it.
00:02:54.880It was this liminal kind of purgatory state that never really worked. And in that way, his whole movement was a failure.
00:03:06.340But I think what Obama represented, along with actual policy, like stop the war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney are evil, which is fair enough, it was this personal story where you vote.
00:03:28.460It doesn't matter what Barack Obama is going to do. Just the fact that he is the president is what is remarkable.
00:03:35.120You know, the fact that he's cast in this role, you know, isn't it amazing that the new James Bond is black, or the Little Mermaid is black, or, you know, Super Mario Brothers is gay, or whatever, that didn't happen.
00:03:53.060I'm just saying, where they're vampirically leeching off something that's old, and they're replacing the front man.
00:04:02.800And I think that's what he represented. And there was a kind of model of a new politician in the 2000s that would represent that.
00:04:10.840Someone like Pete Buttigieg, who, you know, comes from highly educated, comes from this consultant world, and he's kind of like the gay Obama.
00:04:23.520You know, I'm this nice, non-Elton John-like homosexual from the Midwest. I was a mayor of a small town, and only in America could I rise to become your president, blah, blah, blah.
00:04:37.700This, like, personal identity politics. It's personal politics more than anything. Wouldn't it be amazing if we, you know, vault Mayo Pete into the presidency?
00:04:51.140We're so proud of ourselves. It's a kind of virtue signal that you're voting for Barack Obama.
00:04:57.140J.D. Vance has always struck me as kind of like, why is J.D. Vance?
00:05:05.640So, when I first heard of J.D. Vance, and the fact that he was involved in venture capital, etc., I assumed that he was some sort of savant from the trailer park, or, you know, some quant kid who was able to offer all of this
00:05:27.080insight into investing, and it was one of the, you find them, you know, it's like, his parents were terrible drug addicts, but this kid is so damn smart, and he just gets taken up.
00:05:41.080And that's not the case. You know, there's a line from one of these Steve Jobs biopics where Waz asked him, what exactly is it that you do?
00:05:52.700And I don't know what J.D. Vance does. He's obviously articulate, and he can answer a question reporters, but so what? He went to Yale Law School.
00:06:09.500So what? I've met people who went to Yale Law School. When my graduate career, I met highly intelligent people at U of C or Duke. I met people who I found to be sub-mediocrities at both places.
00:06:27.800I just don't care what diploma you have. He's never really practiced law. Again, it's just this, like, venture capital guy. He seems to have been chosen or kind of anointed by Amy Chua and then the Peter Thiel people and others as kind of, like, our guy.
00:06:51.920But I don't really see the point of it all. And even by the age of 30, he was already focused on this politics of personal success of, like, isn't it amazing that I exist?
00:07:07.040And I guess my response to that is not really. I don't know what to say. I actually watched his TED Talk from many years ago, and I think this really sums up the kind of fakeness, narcissism on his part, and also just meaninglessness of his, like, working class thing.
00:07:36.620Where, you know, like, to compare him to Obama. Obama has a Muslim-y background. I mean, obviously, we have the birthers who are obsessed with the fact that he wasn't born in this country and grew up in a mosque or whatever they were saying.
00:07:51.220I don't believe that. But he ultimately did nothing for Muslims. Like, as Spencer Ackerman demonstrates in his book, the FBI and Homeland Security were still, like, rounding up Muslims, infiltrating their mosques, kicking them out of the country, drone-striking innocent people, including an American citizen.
00:08:16.560I mean, it's just Barack Obama. It's his personal story. You almost, like, invest revolutionary politics in one person. And just by the fact that he exists, that's enough. You've accomplished it. Let's not actually change anything. Let's not even do anything for the supposed constituency of Barack Obama.
00:08:40.580Just by the fact that he is existing as our president is enough. And I think there's the same thing for J.D. Vance. Whether he cultivated this himself, whether he grasped that that was in the zeitgeist, or whether other people found him as, like, a kind of malleable person to construct in this image.
00:09:00.760I don't know. It's probably a combination of the two. I don't know which was more prominent. But it's just all fake.
00:09:09.300And let's just watch this TED Talk, because, you know, you can tell a lot about people from the masks they wear and how they present themselves and the sort of anecdotes they tell.
00:09:24.080I found this extremely revealing. I imagine he wrote this himself. I have not read Hillbilly Elegy. I've seen smart people who have read it on Twitter, and they're just like, it was a self-serving naval gaze, basically. And I don't doubt it. I might actually read the book. I don't want to buy it, though, because I don't want to give this son of a bitch any money.
00:09:45.900But I remember the very first time I went to a nice restaurant, a really nice restaurant. It was for a law firm recruitment dinner. And I remember beforehand, the waitress walked around and asked whether we wanted some wine. So I said, sure, I'll take some white wine.
00:10:03.680And she immediately said, would you like Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay? And I remember thinking, come on, lady. Stop with the fancy French words and just give me some white wine.
00:10:17.240But I used my powers of deduction and recognized that Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc were two separate types of white wine. And so I told her that I would take the Chardonnay, because, frankly, that was the easiest one to pronounce for me.
00:10:28.280So I had a lot of experiences like that during my first couple of years.
00:10:33.280First off, that's not a terribly interesting anecdote. The fact that you open with that is wet.
00:10:41.820There's this theme of J.D. Vance of putting on a mask and pretending to be another person and congratulating himself for that and never really being comfortable in his own skin.
00:10:58.480And so, like, I would imagine a true, like, Scotch-Irish Appalachia guy would maybe order a beer or say, like, hell, lady, I don't care.
00:11:13.880So long as you fill up this glass to the brim, that's good enough.
00:11:17.300Like, there's a sort of, like, earthy way of responding to that and saying it with a, you know, twinkle in your eye where it's kind of funny.
00:11:24.660But he instead pretends to be someone, he pretends to know the difference between those things.
00:11:30.600Just hear this whole thing out, because throughout this speech, which I presume he wrote himself, there are numerous examples.
00:11:39.120The only, the way he, his survival mechanism throughout his life is pretending to be someone else.
00:11:46.120And this is just the, he, this is the opener.
00:11:49.640And it's just, again, another example of the way he survives is he puts on a mask and a costume.
00:11:56.720This man comes from a sociopathic, excuse me, a psychopathic family of drug addicts and criminals.
00:12:03.780And he is one, he's just really good at it.