J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a hugely popular best-selling memoir about his life growing up in Ohio and before that in Kentucky. And he s considered a whisperer of the white working class that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016.
00:01:44.540I laughed, I cried, I felt all the feels.
00:01:48.700And I have a history with J.D. Vance going back to 2017 when I interviewed him in an interview that remains my very favorite interview I've ever done.
00:01:57.420The 12 minutes or so of air that we produced and it's still available on YouTube just touched me really deeply emotionally with his sister, with his honesty about his own life, a background that included abuse, drug addiction by his mom.
00:02:13.520You know, talking about how he had Pepsi in his baby bottle, about how all the kids grown up in his area, didn't sleep in pajamas, they all slept in jeans.
00:02:22.640Sometimes there were serious questions about where the food was going to come from.
00:02:26.680Not as much in J.D.'s house, but he had some of that.
00:02:29.260And, you know, just sort of this resort to violence too often, to abuse too often.
00:02:34.280And ultimately it winds up being a hopeful message because somehow this little boy with really no advantages wound up getting up, getting out, getting himself into Yale Law School and has gone on to have a really prominent and important national voice.
00:02:52.560So really happy to have him here with us today and we will get to him in just one second.
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00:04:30.440They do believe there was funny business in connection with this election.
00:04:35.620And I was thinking about you because hellbilly elegy tells us the code to follow when one feels that one has been wronged and that code is to fight to fight.
00:04:58.620If I'm laying my cards on the table, right.
00:05:00.820So you had this election in 2016 where Trump won.
00:05:04.260It was very upsetting to a lot of people in the establishment press and other institutions.
00:05:10.540And for basically, you know, like two weeks, there was this period where all of these people asked themselves, oh, have we gotten something wrong?
00:05:17.780Have we missed an important part of the country?
00:05:20.600You know, we're going to read Hillbilly Elegy or some other book to try to understand people in the middle of the country.
00:05:24.680And then that just stopped. And it was all about Russia.
00:05:29.640It was all about how the election in some ways was illegitimate.
00:05:34.160And I think there's just this this this real frustration that for four years we've had this constant sense and messaging from certain quarters that the Trump presidency is illegitimate.
00:05:48.380And, you know, we're three weeks after the election and there are these legal challenges working their way through the courts.
00:05:53.340And people are just preoccupied with Trump needs to accept the legitimacy of the election.
00:05:59.260So I think that hypocrisy, the fact that nobody accepted his election and his supporters are supposed to accept the election so quickly after it's done, I think just causes some some real frustration.
00:06:11.660I don't think I mean, you look at the last three weeks, you've had a lot of court filings.
00:06:16.840You've had a lot of peaceful protests. You've had a lot of people complaining on social media.
00:06:21.260But I really don't see any any reason to think that this is going to become violent or chaotic.
00:06:26.920I think, you know, people certainly feel that they they need to fight and they need to see this through to the end.
00:06:32.560But I think they're supportive of the president continuing the litigation.
00:06:35.100But I also don't think, you know, frankly, these are the sorts of people who are going to go burn up stores and set cars on fire and make life a living for hell for everybody.
00:06:45.720I think that when Biden is inaugurated, people will more or less accept it.
00:06:52.060Yeah, exactly. The fight can take many forms.
00:06:54.360It doesn't have to be looting. It can be opposing Biden's policies and making sure that they don't get forgotten again, that the working class stays in the forefront of of one's mind, which wasn't the case during the Obama years.
00:07:07.480I mean, I think as we've been told so many times by, you know, these sort of elite media types that Trump supporters are all they're Neanderthals, they're Nazis, they're they're racist, they're awful.
00:07:20.140It's no one actually stops it to pay attention to what Trump did for these guys in the Rust Belt.
00:07:27.260What's happened to the Rust Belt? Why did he win four years ago, Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin?
00:07:32.840There was, as you point out, a period where people want to take a hard look at that.
00:07:35.860And then and then they didn't. Then they just decided to dismiss everybody as awful, as just bigoted for voting for the guy.
00:07:42.980And I just wonder whether these folks are, you know, in a uniting mood right now, as we're as we're being told we must unite around Biden's agenda.
00:07:51.680No, I don't I don't think they are. I don't think the country is in a uniting mood.
00:07:55.300And, you know, frankly, this idea that we're all just going to come together over the new Biden presidency is a little bit of a joke.
00:08:01.040I think certainly people will, you know, let their political passions subside a little bit.
00:08:05.360Election seasons are always a little bit exhausting for people who are engaged in politics and pay attention.
00:08:11.380But but no, I don't think people are just going to let bygones be bygone.
00:08:15.160Because to your point, you know, the two consistent threads that have come from the mainstream press since Trump's election in 2016 have been, you know, one, the election was stolen in some way.
00:08:27.140You know, Russians hacked the election.
00:08:28.620If you look at public polls, a pretty large share of Democratic voters think that Russia actually like hacked into voting machines and changed the tabulation.
00:08:37.100And so, you know, there's been this sort of the sense of illegitimacy focused around the Russia issue, but it's other issues, too.
00:08:44.440But the second, and I think in some ways, frankly, the more pernicious instinct that's existed in our politics is, to your point, you know, turn the Trump voter into this evil, malignant force in American politics.
00:08:56.780And I, you know, I'm 36 years old now, and I can't think of any period where the winner or the loser in a presidential election has spent the next four years obsessing about the character defects of the other side of the country, right?
00:09:11.420This idea is like, oh, we lost these people.
00:09:14.100We're going to try to appeal to them, maybe even in a fake way.
00:09:18.380We're at least going to try to pretend that we care about their votes.
00:09:20.960That's how it works in a democratic society.
00:09:22.780That just didn't happen at all over the last four years.
00:09:25.640There's just been this idea that these people are Neanderthals or deplorables or racist.
00:09:31.420And I, you know, obviously sort of coming from this community, Megan, sort of, you know, white working class community with a lot of Trump voters.
00:09:42.000And, you know, one of the threads that came out was this idea that Trump voters are animated by an extraordinary amount of racial resentment.
00:09:51.380And to dive into the details just a little bit, the way that's usually measured, you call people up and you ask them, you know, what do you feel about this issue?
00:10:00.660And there are two really interesting things about these academic studies that identify Trump voters as overly racist.
00:10:08.680The first is that they're basically just asking people to discuss race issues in the parlance of modern woke politics, right?
00:10:18.620So if you talk about racial issues as a modern college educated urban millennial, then you get low on the racial resentment score.
00:10:27.740And if you talk about race issues in a way that most non-college educated people are going to talk about them, even if you are not yourself racist, just the fact that you don't have the same sort of verbal rules that you're following, they're going to get you tagged as high on the racial resentment score, which allows people to dismiss you.
00:10:46.600And related to that, you know, one of the things you pretty consistently find is that if you, you know, you look at white voters and you give them or white working class voters, you give them a high score on this racial resentment index.
00:10:57.940You know who else gets really high on the racial resentment index?
00:11:01.320Black voters and Latino voters as well.
00:11:03.560And so there's been this sort of ignorance that there's just like a basic disconnect in how American elites and the rest of the country talk about racial politics questions.
00:11:15.380And Trump voters, I think, have been made out to be the villain because they don't use the sort of modern woke dialogue.
00:11:22.660And I just think that's, you know, one, it's unfair to obviously people are going to feel put upon if you just call them racist because, you know, being called a racist can get you fired.
00:11:33.620It's sort of, you know, one of the marks of not being welcome in polite society.
00:11:38.260And then the third piece of it is just that it's created a society where we're not actually trying to listen to or understand where these folks are coming from.
00:11:48.120There's just, again, no even pretense that we're going to try to understand these voters' concerns, make their lives better, make an appeal to them.
00:11:56.760And I think that's just very dangerous.
00:11:58.220And you can't expect to run an election like that and then just have these folks come back to the table willing to unify with the people who were calling them racist just a few months ago.
00:12:07.160Absolutely. And as you look at sort of how the election has shaken out thus far, Trump improved his margins largely with Hispanic voters, a little with black voters.
00:12:19.800I mean, what do you think those folks are trying to say to the people who are telling everyone you have to speak about race and ethnicity in the way we want?
00:12:28.560Otherwise, you're bad. And you have to hate Trump. Otherwise, you're bad.
00:12:32.180You know, the narrative got turned on its head when we actually saw voting results.
00:12:36.320Yeah, I think this this is a really important question. And, you know, so much is represented in the language and the rhetoric.
00:12:45.100I just think that there's this obsession among professional class Americans to talk about these issues in a particular way.
00:12:51.840And if you don't, you're a bad person. And the perfect representation of this is this this phrase Latinx or Latinx,
00:12:59.740which is supposed to be a a non gendered way of talking instead of saying Latino, it's a non gendered way of talking about that ethnic group.
00:13:09.520And one of the things you find with public polling is that the people who never use that word are actual Latinos.
00:13:18.140And the people who use that word all the time are white Americans with professional degrees.
00:13:23.960And so, again, there's just this weird class diversions and how you discuss these issues.
00:13:28.740And I just think of it as like this ultimate example of elitism, because you're basically telling Latinos, you know, I know a number of Latinos.
00:13:40.100A lot of them are very proud of the language, whether it's their first language or their second language, Spanish, you're telling them that the language of their home,
00:13:48.420the language of their families is somehow discriminatory and that you, the white person with a law degree from Harvard or Yale,
00:13:56.300you know how to modify their language in a way that's going to make them more politically correct and more acceptable and polite society.
00:14:02.840And I don't think it's surprising at all that a lot of folks looked at that.
00:14:06.720A lot of Latinos looked at that and said, not for me.
00:14:09.400No, thank you. And they went for Trump in pretty surprising numbers.
00:14:13.220And it's you know, I think that people who have looked at the exit polls on this stuff have actually underappreciated how powerful the Latino shift to Donald Trump was.
00:14:23.400You know, exit polls are always very unpredictable.
00:14:27.060But there are counties along the Rio Grande River Valley that are like 95 percent Hispanic, where Trump didn't just win more than he won in what he didn't just win more than he won in 2016.
00:14:39.480He actually won a majority of the overall vote.
00:14:42.220So we're talking about a pretty dramatic shift to the president and to the Republican Party, which I think if Republicans can hold on to it would be great.
00:14:50.060But I think Democrats really should wake up to the fact that the way in which the professionally educated leadership class, the Democratic Party, just discusses these issues, comes across as condescending and frankly, just a little bit weird.
00:15:05.540Like, I mean, how many times have you listened to these people talk, whether it's about racial politics or economic issues or gender and sexuality, and just thought to yourself, like, who are these weirdos and where do they learn how to talk about that?
00:15:19.060Totally. Well, I can relate to the Latinx thing as a woman, because I was told by TED Talks that we need to say women, like, I don't even know how you pronounce it, but it's W-O-M-X-N, W-O-M-X-N.
00:15:33.780If I don't say that when speaking about my gender, I'm a bigot.
00:15:43.420There, I said it, and I'm going to continue.
00:15:44.600I said, I don't need TED Talks to tell me how to spell my gender in some new way to be inclusive.
00:15:51.300And it is annoying, and it's actually motivational.
00:15:54.120I can see it turning a Latina or Latino into a Trump voter because they don't want to be whitesplained, too, right, by my neighbors here on the Upper West Side.
00:16:04.940And then, you know, what we get is a situation where four years ago we had Hillary Clinton calling them all deplorable, and then Trump won, and people said, oh, we better not do that.
00:16:18.300And instead of actually taking their own advice, we got four years of Democrats and media amping it up.
00:16:25.780They've gone from deplorables to Nazis.
00:16:28.820And we have a little soundbite, J.D., that we put together, including, I think it kicks off with Christiane Amampur, who just two weeks ago, 10 days ago, doubled down on this.
00:16:40.000She was ultimately forced to apologize, though her remarks sat out there uncorrected for a week.
00:16:46.280This week, 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened.
00:16:49.640It was the Nazis' warning shot across the bow of our human civilization after four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump.
00:17:01.360So many stunning parallels to what Hitler was doing.
00:17:05.320In describing Hitler's psychological profile, and this only pertains to Adolf Hitler, there is so much that is resonant of the Third Reich in this administration.
00:17:46.180As they're telling us that we're healed and we're unified, there's been no accounting for any of that.
00:17:51.100In fact, there won't be because that is what they think.
00:17:53.800That's what they think of Trump's voters, 74 million people, and especially the white working class who will never be forgiven for putting him in office to begin with.
00:18:07.980I mean, first of all, you owe me for having forced me to listen to that.
00:18:11.240It really drives home that there is a core component of the leadership of the country, the leadership of the Democratic Party that really isn't interested in unity and fraternity.
00:18:32.580They're interested in submission, right?
00:18:34.580When you talk about people like that, when you call them Nazis, when you compare them to people who murdered 6 million innocent people, you're not making a play for them to come to the table, meet as equals, hash out our differences and move forward as a country together.
00:18:49.920You're basically asking them to submit, and I don't think people should be surprised that a very proud group of people who feel rightfully so, like they had a huge part of helping to build this country, are going to submit.
00:19:01.920They're just not going to do it, and so I think we're going to have a pretty chaotic politics from this point forward.
00:19:06.920The other thing I just want to say reacting to that video is, you know, I'm not a history expert, but I understand that Kristallnacht was pretty violent.
00:19:14.660Obviously, the Holocaust was like the most violent thing imaginable.
00:19:17.740A hundred thousand front voters gathered in D.C. a couple of weeks ago to protest, and the violence was primarily from, like, left-wing paramilitary groups against them.
00:19:29.300They maintained an incredibly peaceful presence despite a very heated topic and a very heated time in our country.
00:19:36.940So I just – the comparison and the treatment of these guys is like these violent criminals, violent thugs.
00:19:42.700It's just bizarre because they're actually just not, right?
00:19:47.120Like, they're angry, they're frustrated, and there are a lot of people who are expressing their views, but they're not doing it violently, and that's just often completely missed when people compare these folks to, you know, violent extremists of the past.
00:20:00.880You know, I go back to the end of Obama's second term, and I was talking with folks close to the White House about sitting down with him because even then, this is before Trump had even secured the nomination on the Republican side, Obama was regretting not having paid more attention to this group of voters.
00:20:20.980He, he's smart, and he understood they were unhappy, and his policies had not helped them, and this could be a growing force in American politics, and I think he had genuine regret over not considering them and their needs more, and certainly they had the final say in the election of Donald Trump.
00:20:40.300But I wonder what's going to happen now, because there's a reason, of course, these folks voted for Trump, and a lot of the white working class still voted for Trump, most of them still voted for Trump this time around.
00:20:53.400His share of white men went down a little, but they still were on team Trump, even though he lost those states more because of suburban voters and seniors, and it could, it looks like it was largely related to the pandemic and the way Trump talks for those voters.
00:21:11.300But looking back at what Trump did, you know, one of the reasons he was elected was he promised he was going to roll back a lot of these regulations Obama had put in place, that he was going to be for the working class.
00:21:24.300And, you know, Obama wanted environmental regulations over, over any sort of industrial revival.
00:21:32.240You know, he, he tried to reduce, well, he did reduce corporate taxes.
00:21:37.060He, he tried to encourage the return of production to the United States, where he would try to shame any company that was going to take its plant overseas.
00:21:43.920He, he went after China and their unfair trade practices.
00:21:47.540He, he did reach new trade agreements with Canada, with, with Mexico, with South Korea, all trying to favor more domestic production, not to mention tariffs he put in place to help industry here.
00:21:58.900And we had a boom in oil and gas production.
00:22:01.160This is like, this is all stuff that this group of voters loved.
00:22:04.680But now you've got not just any Democrat, but Obama's number two, Joe Biden in there.
00:22:10.300And I just wonder what, what you think the sense is right now amongst those voters in terms of what's about to come their way.
00:22:16.680I mean, just as a preliminary point, I do think that one of the lessons for Republicans, there are obviously a lot of, a lot of lessons for Democrats.
00:22:24.600One of the lessons for Republicans from 2020 is that they maybe took the white working class for, for advantage a little bit.
00:22:34.040I think that, you know, you should have expected that group, frankly, to go even more stronger for Trump, more strongly for Trump than they did in 2016.
00:22:41.240There was a little bit to your point of a stagnation, not really reversal, but certainly a stagnation.
00:22:46.900And I think that, you know, my read on this is that where Trump, you know, governed as a populist, where he really hammered China, the trade issue, the immigration issue is where he was most popular.
00:22:59.980And, you know, when, when he governed as a traditional Republican, I do think that he probably, you know, led to some stagnation in that voting bloc.
00:23:09.840And so I think that's, that's one of the lessons to take away from this.
00:23:13.220Because he did ultimately cut a deal, a deal with China.
00:23:15.560I mean, he did ultimately cut a deal, which they may not be happy about.
00:23:19.100Yeah, he cut, he cut a deal with, with China.
00:23:21.520And it was funny that the, the, the, the tax plan, which there were a lot of things I liked about and some things I didn't like about it.
00:23:27.460I think to the extent that that was really focused on bringing capital investment back to the country and cutting middle-class taxes, it was really good for him.
00:23:37.860And to the extent that it looked like something that Mitt Romney would have done, it frankly wasn't that, that popular.
00:23:42.700And so there was this really, you know, interesting push and pull between the Trump instinct within the White House and, you know, the more establishment instinct within the White House, which is, of course, you know, something that a lot of other folks can talk to better than I can.
00:23:55.840But, but I think on, on the Biden question, you know, what, what would worry me and, and what I think a lot of folks are, are concerned about is sort of a reversal on the China issue.
00:24:10.300So, so I think the China issue is probably the, the most substantial of Trump's wins as a president.
00:24:19.280I think he totally changed the conversation on China.
00:24:21.900And if, if you think about the environmental issue as related to the China issue.
00:24:26.260So, you know, we think of environmental issues like, okay, fuel standards, reducing emissions here at home.
00:24:31.820But the way in which our environmental policy can be most destructive is actually on industrial power questions.
00:24:38.120Because if the Chinese are allowed to pollute as much as they can, then they can build and make things and manufacture things much more cheaply than we can.
00:24:47.740And so, if you're going soft on China, which I think, frankly, Biden's secretary of state looks like a soft on China guy, while at the same time, putting America under stricter environmental regulations than the Chinese, then what you could have is a real stagnation in American manufacturing output.
00:25:08.640Which, which, of course, is sort of what you need to actually build a thriving, working and middle class in the country.
00:25:14.980You have to have a viable manufacturing sector.
00:25:20.160It's certainly the lesson of the United States in the last 20 or 30 years.
00:25:23.800And so, there is this fear that a lot of the wage growth that you saw over the last four years is going to get reversed in this preoccupation with, instead of building a viable manufacturing sector for the middle class, with this idea that you can just transition the existing middle class to the jobs of the future.
00:25:49.260And I think that's an important piece of the puzzle, but there's just no way, and I think if you actually listen to, for example, Rahm Emanuel talk about the economic prospects of the Midwest, Rahm Emanuel said, I think it was on CNN or some other network a couple of weeks ago, well, these folks just have to learn to code.
00:26:06.800If they lose their manufacturing jobs, they have to learn to code.
00:26:09.160And I'm a very big fan of investing in the future of the economy, but you can't tell tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers.
00:26:18.780They're just going to have to go back to school when they're 52 years old and learn to code.
00:26:24.280A lot of people aren't going to be able to do that.
00:26:26.960And so, if that is your orientation, let's just focus on the technology sector instead of really rebuilding and reinvesting in American manufacturing.
00:26:35.520I think a lot of people are going to get left behind, and a lot of the progress we made over the last few years is going to stagnate.
00:26:43.940Forbes reported that employment grew in manufacturing jobs by almost half a million under Trump after falling by 200,000 under Obama.
00:26:55.820So, I mean, that's a pretty big swing.
00:26:58.060And that's the kind of swing that can turn numbers in an election.
00:27:02.640And so, if Biden gets in there and starts re-implementing these regulations on manufacturing, on trying to protect the environment at the expense of the American worker, it could have real-life consequences in terms of our electoral politics and in terms of lives.
00:27:18.760You know, I mean, you talk about – learn to code is so absurd for most people.
00:27:25.060But Hillbilly Elegy takes a hard look at sort of the malaise happening in these communities and the Rust Belt, almost the lack of agency a lot of these workers have.
00:27:38.120There isn't this, let's go get them kind of attitude.
00:27:50.960It's not all about what the government can do for you.
00:27:55.280A lot of it has to do with attitudes that have been cultivated in these communities that might not lend themselves to brilliant careers as coders.
00:28:05.840Yeah, I think there's a lot of – you know, the way I'd put it is that there's a lot of hopelessness in these communities.
00:28:09.780And they've been battered in a lot of different ways for the past, you know, not 30 or 40 years, but 50 or 60 years.
00:28:16.000And there's something my grandpa used to tell me.
00:28:19.580He was sort of an old union steel worker, voted for a Democrat pretty much every single election of his life.
00:28:25.640I think he voted for Reagan once in 1984, otherwise voted for Democrats his whole life.
00:28:30.440And, you know, he told me that, you know, look, there are people who just aren't doing very well, right?
00:28:39.000In every community, in every place, you know, there are people – and, you know, he's a politically incorrect guy who said deadbeats, right?
00:28:45.760Like, the difference between the 1950s when, you know, Middletown, our hometown, had a really viable manufacturing sector, you know, really robust private sector unions because the jobs that supported private sector unions actually existed and hadn't been all shipped to China and Mexico.
00:29:05.180Yeah, they were deadbeats back then, but they were enveloped in a community that could actually get them back on the right path, right?
00:29:12.220When you take a community where all of those sort of support structures have been weakened, where, you know, the churches have been weakened, the jobs don't exist anymore, the people who, if you were slacking on the job in the 1950s, would have said, hey, man, you've got to get your head back in the game.
00:29:52.540I don't shy away from that in the book.
00:29:53.920I don't shy away from talking about that in my life.
00:29:57.400But if you're going to actually help those people, I think we should help people, whether they're ambitious or not, whether they want to learn to code or whether they just want to work in a simple manufacturing job and be able to earn a living wage, is you've got to have a viable and robust set of institutions.
00:30:15.760And one of those institutions is good manufacturing-oriented jobs.
00:30:20.860You know, we can talk about this question of cultural versus economics.
00:30:24.680I think it's obviously a pretty controversial thing that the book dives right into.
00:30:29.320You know, I've always thought that the economics and the culture are related, right?
00:30:33.000If the culture starts to go south, it's harder to sort of maintain economic productivity.
00:30:37.620If the economy starts to go south and the jobs disappear, then people become hopeless, and that sort of starts to affect the culture.
00:30:44.720And I think these things are all related.
00:30:46.220And if your solution to this problem, if your solution to these communities is, hey, you guys just need to go to Ohio State or the University of Cincinnati and pick up C++ software programming, then you're not actually going to help people.
00:31:02.100You're making yourself feel better by ignoring them, but you are ignoring them, and I think we should just be honest about that fact.
00:31:07.620The other important point to make here, and it's like the third rail of American politics, is this question of immigration.
00:31:17.120And there's always the, you know, what are we talking about when we're talking about immigration?
00:31:20.500Are we talking about wage competition among the lower class?
00:31:23.840I think that's actually a big driver of why a lot of Latinos in the Southwest went to Donald Trump is because he was a little bit stricter on immigration.
00:31:32.480There's this question about, is it culture or race?
00:31:39.340You know, I really don't think that's part of the story.
00:31:42.400But the third thing that we just don't talk about on the immigration side is the opioid epidemic and the effect that having this really porous border has.
00:31:52.220And we know that probably 80,000 or 90,000 pretty young Americans are going to die of an opioid overdose that has been pretty consistent for a long time.
00:32:04.580But one of the ways that those drugs are getting in, especially fentanyl, which is a very powerful opioid that pretty much instantly gives you an overdose if you take a sufficient dose of it, fentanyl is being manufactured in China and primarily coming across the southern border.
00:32:21.500And so when we, you know, I think we're going to have a big reversal of Trump era immigration policies for the Biden administration.
00:32:29.780But if they're listening to me and they probably aren't, I would say whatever you do on the southern border, make it as hard as possible to bring fentanyl into American streets.
00:32:39.240Because if you want to talk about hopelessness in towns like mine, talk about the meth and the fentanyl that are coming into these communities, where even if you have people who are working a good job, they get snared up in this stuff and it's just over.
00:33:47.600You talk about culture versus economics and the effect on a community and, you know, the absurdity of the learn to code message to these coal miners, let's say.
00:33:56.640Think about if they turned around, if, you know, Trump's administration turned around to black America in Chicago and, you know, where you talk about blight, right?
00:35:10.360You've got to take people who are sitting on the couch doing nothing, and you've got to get them off the couch.
00:35:13.700You've got to get them into good jobs, you know, hopefully able to support families, able to raise those families in stability and comfort.
00:35:19.580And then, you know, you create a virtuous cycle from generation to generation instead of, you know, the vicious cycle that we sometimes have in families that are struggling with joblessness and addiction and so forth.
00:35:30.220But, you know, one of the things that's going to motivate people to get off the couch, of course, is the existence of a good job, right?
00:35:37.080That's an important piece of it, but it's not the only piece.
00:35:39.740Another thing that's going to motivate people to get off the couch is when their neighbors and friends are also getting off the couch, right?
00:35:46.020When you're in a community where there just isn't a lot going on, where a lot of people are doing drugs, a lot of people aren't finding good jobs, even the guys who want to go and work and find good jobs.
00:35:57.960It creates this sort of mentality where, why try, right?
00:36:03.120I call it, you know, learned helplessness.
00:36:06.520You know, hopelessness is a good way to think about it.
00:36:08.980But if you want to actually improve people's lives, you can't just say, well, here's some money, right?
00:36:17.020Here's a check from the government, spend it well, or here's a good job, go and apply.
00:36:21.280But you've got to create the community infrastructure that makes people feel like it's possible, that if they try, something good is actually going to come from it.
00:36:31.060And they've got to feel pressure, too.
00:36:32.580I mean, you know, I've certainly been, I'm sure all of us have, been in moments in our lives where we're feeling a little bit lazy, a little bit shiftless, unsure what we want to do.
00:36:41.180You know, one of the things that helps break you out of that pattern is somebody in your life saying, hey, you know, do something else here, right?
00:36:48.040But, you know, maybe it's your wife who says you need to do the dishes or help out a little bit more.
00:36:54.880Maybe it's somebody in your family who said you need to go and apply to that job.
00:37:00.560But, like, I think about my own life and all of these little influences that helped get me on the right path.
00:37:07.600You take those influences away, and it's just me trying to figure this stuff out on my own.
00:37:12.560And I think things just don't go as well for me, right?
00:37:14.800If Mamaw wasn't telling me, you need to go get off your ass and apply for that job and work hard.
00:37:20.600If I didn't have, you know, my sister and my aunt and my mom saying, you know, if you want to have a good job, you may need to go get an education.
00:37:30.060If I didn't have people in the Marine Corps saying, you know, here's what you need to do.
00:37:33.680Here's how you need to apply for financial aid.
00:37:35.820Here's how you need to sort of structure your life so you can actually succeed in school.
00:37:39.420You know, all of these weird little community influences are what I think the building blocks of success ultimately are.
00:37:47.420And those, you know, that's sort of as I see it, the interplay between culture and economics is it's not just the good job.
00:37:54.800It's also the full spade of community actors that make it seem both possible and available to you to actually get off that couch and go do something.
00:38:04.860And that's what's ultimately missing when you're when you've got people who who who are really, really left behind and really don't see a path forward.
00:38:18.280I also think that's the thing that's missing the most is people in their lives who can actually help them.
00:38:23.240Right. It's it's back to the old. If you can see it, you can be it.
00:38:25.860You know, it's very helpful to see role models around you who have done it.
00:38:29.440But I also think this is one of the problems with identity politics, because the messaging from people who are obsessed with their gender, their skin color, their sexuality is you.
00:38:41.280The reason you can't do it is because of these immutable characteristics like you can't.
00:38:46.280The American dream is not possible for you because the system won't allow it.
00:38:51.340And it completely takes away a person's agency.
00:38:54.180And they do openly crap on the American dream.
00:39:00.160America itself is not what people say it is.
00:39:03.460And this anti-American sentiment cropping up, I think, is another thing that motivates a lot of voters.
00:39:09.260But it's they're basically challenging the notion that anyone, no matter their circumstances, can achieve success in this country.
00:39:17.300What one of the things that I think so beautiful about your book, your story and the reason why many on the left hate it is that you're you you're an example of it being possible, even under really tough circumstances, even for a kid who has almost no advantages other than a grandma and and grandpa who really loved him and decided to give him a little tough love.
00:39:45.860Yeah, I mean, the thing I always ask people when they talk about the structural and systemic factors that make it hard or impossible for people to achieve is, let's say you're absolutely right.
00:40:02.260Let's just say for the sake of argument that you're absolutely right.
00:40:06.160What good is that message when directed at a kid who's struggling and trying to figure out how to make their way?
00:40:12.660Right. So I'm not one of these people who says the people, you know, says that sort of poor folks don't have any disadvantages.
00:40:20.840Like I can't possibly look at my grandma's life and my grandma's upbringing and say, you know, she had the same set of opportunities as someone who was born in an upper class background in the 1940s in New York City.
00:40:34.400I think, frankly, she also had a lot of advantages.
00:40:36.300Right. She had, I think, a lot of important cultural training that she wouldn't have gotten.
00:40:43.040I don't know if you would look at my life and say, you know, J.D. had it easy relative to a kid born of privilege.
00:40:50.120But so what, in some ways, is the takeaway from that to tell a kid like me when I was 12 years old, your life is unfair.
00:40:58.760The deck is stacked against you. There's nothing you can ultimately do.
00:41:02.340So, you know, why isn't the message that I take from that ultimately, well, I should just give off it.
00:41:07.440Right. If the deck is stacked against me, if there is no hope that I shouldn't even try.
00:41:11.240Right. And there's there's just this weird strain of thought in American life right now where you can't hold two thoughts in your head at the same time.
00:41:18.700And in this particular moment, I think the two thoughts in this particular question, the two thoughts that we have to hold in our head at the same time are, one, yes, life can be hard for people who are born poor in tough circumstances.
00:41:33.340But, two, it's still important for them to see that they have agency and that they need to try anyway.
00:41:40.420Right. It might not always work out. And we've got to be honest about that fact.
00:41:44.000But the worst of all possible worlds is where people are just told there's no hope, there's no reason to try, there's no reason to make anything of yourself.
00:41:53.160And I do, unfortunately, think that's the message that a lot of people on the left are ultimately giving to communities like mine.
00:41:59.800And I am, you know, my, you know, my grandparents were classic blue dog Democrats.
00:42:07.140And I'm actually sympathetic to a lot of the arguments that folks on the left make about, you know, certain unfairnesses, you know, especially when it comes to people who don't, who don't have a lot of money, who grew up in traumatic homes, who grew up in abused and neglected environments.
00:42:22.880I don't think that they're wrong, that that creates special disadvantages.
00:42:28.240But you can't just encourage people to wallow in everything that's gone wrong in their lives.
00:42:33.500You have to be able to say, on the one hand, you know, we as community leaders, as policymakers, as media folks are going to try to make it a little bit easier for those who are disadvantaged to have a shot at the American dream.
00:42:44.440And while at the same time, telling people who are struggling to achieve the American dream, it's possible, it is out there for you, if you're, if you're willing to work for it.
00:42:53.800Well, I think the other piece of it, too, is once, whence, is once one achieves the American dream, the response, the collective response from the left in particular should not be, fuck off.
00:43:06.520Like, that's, one of the problems we're seeing is, success has been so demonized in the country now.
00:43:12.480Even if you are self-made, just having it is a problem.
00:43:15.560You know, they'll hold it against you.
00:43:17.800You've, you've, you must now see the rest of the country as less than.
00:43:22.140You must not be paying your fair share.
00:43:24.880You have to give more of it back, you know, and the less you give, the more of a miser and awful person.
00:43:29.900It's like, I don't know, I just think we've changed the messaging from, good for you, maybe I could do it, too.
00:43:36.520So, help me understand how to screw you.
00:43:40.800Yeah, there's definitely a way in which I think our country is really, I shouldn't say our country.
00:43:46.740I think that our leadership class is really uncomfortable with success and with people who have achieved success.
00:43:52.220So, I saw this interesting poll just a couple of days ago, and it was looking, you know, just at Trump voters, college-educated Trump voters versus non-college-educated Trump voters.
00:44:00.480And it was, the question was, you know, do you think that it's possible for a person to achieve the American dream?
00:44:07.480And I think it was 71% of non-college-educated Trump voters said yes.
00:44:11.800And I think it was, you know, 40% or something of the college-educated Trump voters said yes.
00:44:16.620And it was true for the Biden voters as well.
00:44:19.340I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was basically the people who didn't have college degrees were actually more optimistic about their future and more optimistic about the chances for the American dream than people who had gone to college.
00:44:30.120And I think that's because they haven't thankfully absorbed the message that their lives are hopeless just because they don't have all the advantages in the world.
00:44:42.080And I worry about our country's inability to, you know, try to uplift those who are struggling without treating those people as hopeless children who have no agency and no responsibility.
00:44:56.520Wait, but can I ask you something about that?
00:45:00.120Because I wonder, is the other piece of that, the people who are college-educated saying, eh, I don't know, is that, do you think, born of, I made it, it's not that great.
00:45:15.020Like, I have to work my ass off, I never see my family, the government takes 50% of my dough, you know, I kind of made it to the promised land and meh.
00:45:27.800You know, I think there's part of that going on, but the biggest, when I looked at that poll, what I took away from it is that if you're a working class American versus a professionally educated American, a person with post-bachelor's education, then you're fundamentally living in two different media and information environments.
00:45:50.600And I do think that, you know, our universities, our elite media institutions have just grown pretty pessimistic about the American experience, the American experiment.
00:46:01.860And consequently, people who have spent their lives in those academies, in those media environments, I think they've just absorbed that things are more pessimistic and more, you know, more negative than a lot of working class Americans believe.
00:46:19.400I also, you know, I really do think that a lot of this is like ideology ends up trumping people's ability to think.
00:46:29.120Because one of the more interesting dynamics is in response to the book is that people who were, you know, really well educated, who are sort of the winners in American society, both in terms of their income and their prestige.
00:46:45.760They really wanted to project their own political narrative onto the book, and they wanted to sort of fit me into this box, right?
00:46:52.980So if like JD said this thing that I agree with, I'm going to ignore that.
00:46:56.560I'm going to only, you know, attach myself to the things that I disagree with, or vice versa, right?
00:47:01.540People would sort of, you know, had either very strongly positive or negative views.
00:47:05.780And what I found, you know, is that working class Americans were actually better able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time.
00:47:13.360And they sort of got that I was, I was making both an argument about the fact that, yeah, sometimes life is unfair, but you still got to try to work against that unfairness and make something of yourself anyway.
00:47:26.120And, you know, I think that's just because people who don't grow up in a particular media environment are not constantly looking for alarm bells that a particular idea or concept violates one of their, the sort of sacred tenets of their faith or ideology.
00:47:43.780I think I predict with your movie, because the movie is now out about, you know, based on your book, you're going to get slaughtered by the reviewers and you're going to get completely loved by the actual viewers.
00:48:08.980It may not be pretty, but it does still exist.
00:48:10.940And that even shines a spotlight on this group of people, you know, people in Appalachia, people struggling with the opioid crisis in a way that isn't entirely about woke culture or victimization and how the country's bad.
00:48:25.720You know, it's one of the reasons why Roseanne, the reboot, was so successful, right?
00:48:29.500Like they talked about these issues in a way that really resonated with real America, even though the people who wrote about that, the reboot, were like horrified.
00:48:37.080Even before her scandal, they were like, this is horrifying.
00:49:24.560Like, can you imagine what a movie like that would look like?
00:49:27.120You know, where you're trying to tell the story of a family, but you have to you have to actually talk about every other conceivable group.
00:49:35.120Majority, minority, what have you, and present them on the screen so that it satisfies this sort of woke obsession.
00:49:42.420With a little no justice, no peace sign in the background.
00:50:03.560You know, my mom voted for Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary in 1984.
00:50:09.180And then she's voted for Republicans and she's voted for Democrats since.
00:50:12.560I just think that there's this way in which elite Americans want working class Americans to be more ideological and more woke than they actually are.
00:50:23.880You know, one of my favorite responses to the book or to the movie, I can't even remember which at this point.
00:50:29.280But is that, you know, J.D. Vance doesn't talk enough about BIPOC, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA Americans in his sort of experience of Appalachia.
00:50:44.520It's like, okay, so BIPOC is Black Indigenous People of Color.
00:50:50.020LGBTQIA is lesbian, gender non-conforming, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual.
00:50:55.940And I read this and I'm like, you people are crazy.
00:51:01.380Like, truly, the authentic, real Appalachians use these, like, 14-character pronouns every time they talk about themselves.
00:51:10.580And, you know, I just listen to this and I think, who are you kidding that you think this is the way that Appalachians or, frankly, anybody else, Black, White, Brown, whatever, talks about themselves and their communities?
00:51:22.480This is a particular obsession of a particular upper class of Americans.
00:54:22.560I mean, you can see that they put the virus in these homes and then thousands of people died.
00:54:26.940And the number is actually much greater than 6,000 because many had to be moved out of the nursing homes,
00:54:31.540sent to hospitals, and they died there.
00:54:33.340And as Janice has been pointing out, they're not counting the hospital deaths when they tally up the number of seniors from nursing homes who died.
00:55:05.320He's been so callous and crass about it.
00:55:07.360So for him to be given an award is pretty outrageous.
00:55:10.840And it just speaks to how silent the press has been on his failures that a group like this would even think it would be okay to honor him in this way.
00:55:20.300So we're going to play for you first Governor Cuomo and then Janice on Fox & Friends reacting.
00:55:25.300What an honor and pleasant surprise during these hard times.
00:55:29.100I thank the International Academy and Bruce Paisner for this incredible award.
00:55:33.800Thank you to all the members of the Academy.
00:55:36.520Your work has brought smiles and hope and relief for so many people during these difficult days.
00:55:42.520I wish I could say that my daily COVID presentations were well choreographed, scripted, rehearsed, or reflected any of the talents that you advance.
00:56:00.700Every time we see this governor celebrating himself on television, it's just a reminder of the people that we lost, partly because of his leadership.
00:56:11.100So, Janice, this was a statement from the Academy.
00:56:14.840They said the governor's 101 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure.
00:56:27.640I heard that to get an Emmy Award, you have to send videotape of yourself to the board members.
00:56:37.840And so to think that the governor was going through some of his TV appearances talking about deaths in New York and submitting those videos to the Emmy folks really makes me physically sick.
00:56:52.900He could start his award-winning speech by saying, I'm really sorry for your loss.
00:56:58.120That's something we have never heard from this governor at any of his meetings or his PowerPoint presentations.
00:57:08.040She made the point, well, while this guy's going to be taking home his Emmy, Janice and these other 6,000 families are taking home urns and caskets.
00:57:19.240And this is no time for his victory lap with his book talking about leadership lessons during the COVID crisis.
00:57:26.800And it's certainly not the time for awards.
00:57:32.700How callous and cold toward the families who are still suffering from these losses.
00:57:38.600I mean, you can say Cuomo isn't entirely to blame for these deaths, but you certainly can't say he did the right thing by issuing that order and by not showing any empathy for these families.
00:57:50.180And so to reward it with this kind of an award is just wrong.