August 14, 2024 • 42 mins
Robert sits down with Garrison to trace the ideological development of JD Vance and how Peter Thiel helped enthrall him to a branch of neo-monarchist right-wing ideology.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
What's JD My vances? This is it could happen here
a podcast that's not behind the Bastards. But today we're
doing a little mini episode on our future possible vice president, JD.
Vance Garrison. How are you feeling today? Welcome back to
(00:27):
the program.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Thank you. I'm feeling pretty good.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Yeah, I got a great five hours of sleep. I'm
good to go.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Oh, I slept eleven good for you.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
No, I've also been in the researching bad people whole
which keeps me up late at night.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah. I have to do the Walls episodes tonight so
we can go back to back on the vps. But
I decided to start with JD. Vance, And you know,
I had debated with myself, is this guy worth a
full bTB episode? And I decided ultimately like no, you know,
I just don't think there's enough to him yet that
he deserves that. Perhaps that will change in the future.
(01:02):
But what I wanted to do was give the listener,
who I'm guessing has mostly just heard a few disjointed
things about JD.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
A few a few things, one or two things, maybe
one specific thing.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
One specific They probably they're probably aware of Hillbilly elogy
that was like a pretty pretty big book in the day,
and the movie was panned, and that was kind of news.
They've probably heard the couch fucking stuff, and then they've
heard allegations that he's like a straight up fascist, and
you know, he thinks that single women should be dragged
out into the street and shot or something like that.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
If you have a cat and you're a single woman,
you are onto logically evil.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a socia path. And so I wanted
to provide some context for how he went from if
you can remember back to twenty sixteen, he was a
liberal darling for having written hillbilly elegy. Right, he was
this guy, this like never trump conservative who was explaining
to everyone how the evil of trump Ism had infested
and you know, latched onto the minds of small town Americans. Right,
(02:00):
That's kind of how he was framed today, where he's
like this hard right maga guy, literally Trump's future right
hand man, with what sounds like explicitly dictatorial ambitions. And
the mystery of this story, all of it comes down
to Peterteel. Right, many such cases, Yeah, as is often
the case, he's a major part of life. Why things
(02:22):
wind up where they are. The bones of JD's background
story are kind of important, so I'm just going to
give them rapidly. He was born in August nineteen eighty
four in Middletown, Ohio, born under the name James Donald Bowman,
but his parents divorced when he was a toddler. His dad,
his biodad, is pretty much out of the picture right away.
He is eventually adopted by his mother's third husband, whose
(02:43):
last name is Hamil, and that's the name he's going
to serve in the Marines under His mother was not
very together. There's a lot of neglect and poverty and
some drug abuse in his early life before his grandparents
move him from Kentucky to Ohio. Now, a lot of
ink has been spilled on the subject of Vance's supposedly
auto biographical book Hillbilly Elegy, which paints him as a
member of the aggrieved and abused white underclass, the forgotten
(03:06):
men of American politics. I'm not interested in relitigating this
stupid book, except to say that I had a kind
of similar background. My dad was in the picture, but
socioeconomically it was kind of similar. We grew up in
a very poor and troubled small town. Eventually, my caretakers
got me out of there into a more functional part
of the country. And I can see I see JD's
(03:27):
book as kind of cynically positioned to take advantage of
the liberal outpouring of sympathy for rural whites that followed
Trump's twenty sixteen victory, an attempt to position himself as someone
who can explain why this part of the country swept
Trump into power. Now, the reality is that this part
of the country did not sweep Trump into power. The
core of Trump support in twenty sixteen were aggrieved, but
financially comfortable, suburban white people. Vance did not write about
(03:50):
poor folks addicted to oxy in the hollers with any
real empathy. He painted them as helpless fools and mental children,
in himself as better for getting out. And that's really
all I have to say on the matter. To me,
his early life suggests a young man who wanted to
set himself up for a career in public life and
took the most expedient actions to do so. And that
is the context under which I see his service in
(04:12):
the US Marine Corps. He joined the Marines and got
himself the job that would get him as close to
action as possible without requiring that he actually do anything.
His specific gig was public affairs for a marine aircraft wing,
so he is writing about the shit that this aircraft
wing is doing, which is about the least job that
you can actually have in the military. He wrote that
(04:32):
he was quote lucky to escape any real fighting. After
finishing his term, he got a BA in polysci And
I'm not saying that you have to fight, for most
of what the military does is not literally fighting. I'm
just saying I see his specific positioning himself with this
job as him wanting to have marine on his CV
(04:53):
when he goes into politics. Right, that's my allegation, right,
Not that there's anything wrong with not fighting.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Sure, I mean, and it's also just good to point
out considering most of the rights attacks against Walls right
now are also about him not actually like seeing combat,
and Vance has gone after him for that specifically.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, trying to like.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Allude to like Vance having more combat experience. Yeah, both
men did not like fire bullets at enemy combatants.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
No, and most people don't. But what I see with
Vance's service is I did this because it was a
line in my resume, whereas you don't do twenty four
years in the National Guard like just to set up
your political career. Now you do that because you want
to be in the National Guard.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yes, Walts was definitely more like a career man in
that sense.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. After finishing his term, he got a
BA in polysci and philosophy from Ohio State and during
his first year in college he worked for a Republican
States senator. He's going to work for a couple of Republicans.
And his college in grad school, you know, law school
years then he attended Yale Law School. He made friends
with Jamil Giovanni, who would go on to be a
(06:02):
Conservative parliamentarian in Canada. He was mentored by professor Amy Chua,
who wrote a book about being a Tiger mom that
made a lot of people angry and was beloved by
the chunk of the country who thinks the children have
it too easy. Chua helped to convince him to write
Hillbilly Elegy, which might be her worst sin, almost definitely
is her worst sin. I can forgive some terrible acts
(06:23):
towards children if you don't write the book Hillbilly Elogy.
It was when Vance graduated from Yale that he first
made contact with the man who would come to define
his adult political journey. Peter Teel, the PayPal co founder
and serial entrepreneur investor, had taken a rapid turn from
his earlier libertarian politics thanks to a growing interest in
a line of political philosophy known mostly as neo reactionary
(06:46):
or NRX thought, although today you'll more often hear it
described as the new right. I'm not in love with
either of those terms for this particular chunk of the right.
But I think neo reactionary is better than new right.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Not as bad as dark and life.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
It's not as bad as dark and we'll talk the
worst of these three terms, by far the worst of
the three terms. So I tend to stick with neo reactionary.
Although if you hear new right being used, that's that's
also what this refers to.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
That's a term I've used sometimes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
What time period is is just like twenty seventeen, like
where are we at here?
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Twenty eleven is when he sees Peter Teal speak at Yale,
which he describes as like the moment around which his
life pivots.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
So this is pre the publishing of his book.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yes, yes, yes, he publishes He'll BILLI Elogy in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Okay, so he kind of got in on the ground
floor of some of this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yes, he is very early in teal world. He's one
of the first, he's going to be one of We're
getting to that. But I want to talk about what
neo reactionaries are because the rest of this isn't going
to make sense unless we go into that.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So sure.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Vanity Fair writer James Pogue rather ably described the New
Right as a worldview in direct competition to the liberal
idea that economic growth and technological innovation would lead us
to a better future. Instead, the growth of big tech surveillance,
nanny state governance, and social justice culture war dominance has
created a system of oppression that will destroy everything good
(08:06):
in the world if not stopped. The primary high priest
of this school of thought is Curtis Yarvin, who in
the early aughts from about two thousand and seven to
twenty fourteen blogged prolifically as Mincius Moldbug. Now, Jarvin is
a computer programmer. He is this guy who has had
for most of his career this desire to create a
new computer operating system that would like fix the way
(08:29):
in which knowledge is disseminated in a way that sounds
kind of magical to me. He never quite gets it working,
and he blogs about political philosophy the same way he
talks about programming, which he has this dream for a
way to reorient society after a soft, kind of peaceful coup.
He always emphasizes how peaceful it needs to be, that
(08:49):
will be, you know. Again, it's his way if he
wants to program society to make it work perfectly, you know,
based on his sort of set of values. And he
writes a series of essays how he wants to reorient society,
and these essays become kind of the central underpinning ethos
of the messy assortment of philosophies that we call neo
(09:09):
reactionaries or the new right. Now. The basic idea is
that this liberal nightmare healscape can only be stopped and
turned back by replacing democracy with an essentially monarchic system.
Pogue describes Jarvin as arguing for quote a Caesar like
figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy and
replace it with a monarchical regime run like a startup
As early as twenty twelve, he proposed the acronym rage
(09:32):
retire all government employees as a shorthand for a first
step and the overthrow of the American regime. What we needed,
Yarvin thought was a national CEO or what's called a dictator. Now,
a lot of guys in the aughts become enraptured by
Jarvin's ideas because the way Jarvin writes, he spends most
of his free time because he gets bought out of
(09:53):
a company he's in, and he doesn't wind up like
super rich, but he winds up comfortable enough that he's
for a while just spending like five hundred bucks a
month on books and reading like old reactionary tracts, like
books from the eighteen hundreds of like monarchists arguing against
you know, the Enlightenment and socialism and the like. And
so he peppers his essays with a lot of different
(10:14):
kind of archaic flourishes, a lot of Latin, a lot
of like references to Greek and Roman philosophical figures. And
that is fucking catnip for a certain kind of guy.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Now, it makes it makes it seem like esoteric. It's
like it's kind of like, yes, like hidden knowledge, it's
being like rediscovered that like holds the key to fix
all of our problems.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yes, he is. If you've read Enders Game, he's doing
what Ender's brother does at Enders Game, where he's writing
his little essays for the Internet, trying to like overthrow
the government using them. And there's a certain certain kind
of guy who is just deeply attracted to that idea.
One of those kinds of guys is a philosopher called
Nick Land. Land is an interesting character. We talk about
(10:57):
him a little during our AI Cult episodes. He's a
dude who comes out of academia and kind of has
now moved around to essentially like fascist political philosophy would
be kind of the quickest way to describe Land today.
Although he's a complicated fellow. But he is the guy
who who comes up with the term dark enlightenment for
Curtis's writing. And this is the way in which a
(11:19):
lot of these guys, a lot of the guys especially
who are going to come into Jarvin's work around the
mid aughts, are going to think about it right where
it's this, he has pulled the wool from my eyes, right.
He has made it clear how doomed democracy is that
it's fundamentally evil. And now that I've had this dark revelation,
I can never look at the world the same way again.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Right, And like Land was trying to do the same
thing for like the previous like fifteen years, and he
attracted a small batch of like kind of like academic followers.
A whole bunch of his colleagues kind of got more
popular than him because they were slightly more reasonable in
many ways.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Because Land's writing is never going to be like the
most viral thing on earth, right, Like, yeah, and mold
Bugs is a little better written for that, although both
of them are too dense. The guys who are going to,
like like Vance is going to be the guys who
are going to take his theories into like mainstream politics,
are going to need to trim the fat off. You know.
(12:16):
It's also worth noting Jarvin is the guy who introduces
the term the red pill to right wing politics.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Right, Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yes, as far as I've ever seen, Jarvin is the
guy who like starts using the red pill in like
a really concerted way to describe like coming to these
understandings about you know, race science has a decent amount
to do with it earlier in Yarvin's writing career. But
like all of these ideas that we now call neo reactionary,
like that's that's a Jarvin original. He thinks the matrix
(12:44):
is a work of genius, of course, which it is,
but maybe not in the way that he thinks slightly. Yeah,
So anyway, Peter Teel falls in love because Teal is
by by two thousand and nine, Teal's writing stuff about
how he thinks democracy is incompatible with liberty. Right, And
when Peter Teel refers to liberty, he's not talking about
like your freedom to like to love the people that
(13:06):
you want to love, or do with your body what
you want to do with your body. He's talking about
his freedom as a guy with a lot of money
to not have to pay taxes. Right, That's primarily what
all of these guys mean by freedom. So Teal by
two thousand and nine is already enraptured with these anti
democratic ideas and he finds Jarvin. It's kind of unclear
to me, does Jarvin actually start him on that road
(13:27):
or I think it's more that he has started down
that road, and he thinks Jarvin is doing a really
good job of setting up what he's been thinking. So
he starts pumping money into Jarvin, he funds some of
his like software ambitions. He's just kind of generally supporting him,
and he begins pumping money increasingly over the early to
mid aughts into an array of influencers and thinkers who
(13:49):
are in alignment with what we might call mold buggy
in thought right, and he's doing that up to this
present day, Pog writes. Teal has also funded things like
The Edge Lordy and Post Left Infected New peaceople Sinema
film Festival, which ended its week long run of parties
and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before nat
Con began. He's long been a big donor to Republican
political candidates, but in recent years Teal has grown increasingly
(14:11):
involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world,
becoming something like an afarious godfather or genial rich uncle,
depending on your perspective. Podcasters and art world figures now
joke about their hope to get so called Teal bucks.
And if you're familiar with like the Red Scare podcast,
and those ladies you're familiar with, like the Dime square set.
A lot of them are into neo reactionary thought and
(14:34):
are the people that that paragraph is referring to right now.
While podcasters and cultural influencers have long been useful to Teal,
he's also tried to collect up and coming politicians with
uneven success. In twenty eleven, he gave a talk at
Yale while Vance was still a student, and discussed the
stagnation of technological progress in the United States. Vance wrote
that Teal was then quote possibly the smartest person I'd
(14:56):
ever met, and this moment is the moment that his
whole life pivots around meeting Peter Teal at Yale in
twenty eleven. We're gonna talk about what comes after, But Garrison,
you know what isn't receiving any money from Peter Teal.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
We also cannot say that there's no way to.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible that we are funded
one hundred percent by Peter Teal. And if so, thank you.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Got to get those Teal bucks.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
And we're back. I've just uncovered that Peter Teal is
the mind behind Chumba Casino. Garrison, this goes so much
deeper than I thought, what.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
If Petertield instead just got really into sports betting, you know,
instead of dealing with all this weird like esoteric traditionalist,
like like eighteen eighties racism philosophy. What what if instead
he just got really into I don't know, the Bucks.
That's probably a sports team, right.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
He put eight billion dollars on the Raiders. He took
a bath. He's fucked.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
He got addicted to it too. God, he could save
so many lives sports, but I really couldn't save lives.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I've always said that Vance decided to abandon his planned
career in law, although I'm not sure I believe that
was ever his intended path.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
No, he does a couple of years in law, and
he claims that Teal also is who made him decide
to convert to Christianity by defying the social template I
had constructed that Christians were dumb and atheists were smart.
I don't know how much to believe that he's actually
a Catholic. Maybe I don't.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Know, but like there's this whole new batch of like, yes,
people who are like a philosophically Catholic or like they're
Catholic in like a quote unquote Hegelian sense when when
they instruct these like larger models of like human evolution
and they view like Christianity as this like thing that
will drive the human species towards its like perfected form.
And definitely the dark Enlightenment people are a significant chunk
(16:58):
of kind of what caused you to who develop And
we're seeing that now with like these fake movements like
the Hegelian egirles, which are kind of like the weird
step child of some of these like Dimes Square like
influencer philosophy stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, and I would say he's definitely not a Catholic
in the sense that your aunt is right.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
No, no, no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
He is a Catholic in the sense that, like he
believes there are things about social order and the roles
that people should have in society that Catholicism gets right.
And exactly that's that's the sense in which he's a Catholic. Right.
So in twenty sixteen, the same year that Vance publishes
Hillbilly Elogy and becomes a liberal darling, he joins Mythral Capital,
(17:40):
a venture capital firm founded by Teal Peter Teel. Advance,
all of these guys pretty much every time they create
a company, it's named after something in the Lord of
the Rings.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Fucking A J. R. R. Tolkien bullshit.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
He would be so unhappy with this.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Because Tolkien was also a Catholic monarchist, but in a
very different.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Way, in a super different way. Yes. So, the two
young men that Teal adopts that he makes what are
called generational bets in is Blake Masters and JD. Vance.
And his bet is that if I really bankroll and
back these guys, they are going to be major figures
in US politics right for decades to come. And his
(18:19):
first step is he makes them rich. He helps them
get jobs and stuff that they get wealthy in. You know,
Masters is recruited in the same way as Vance. He's
given a cushy job in venture capital. He's handed a
shitload of Teal books to see what he can make
of them. And Vance is, you know, both of them
are decent enough at this. Vance is okay at it.
And within two years he gets hired for one hundred
and fifty million dollar fund out of Washington that focuses
(18:40):
on finding young companies and overlooked US cities, places that
weren't seen as traditionally tech Hubs. Soon after this, he
goes into business on his own, if we can call
it on your own, when Peter Teal is the guy
who backs your new company entirely right.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Sure, I do love that that Peter Teel somehow picked
the two most uncharismatic up and.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Come dudes, I mean, look at Peter, what does he
know about charisma?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yeah, but like it is fun that he made these
two bets and Mark Kelly just destroyed one of them. Yeah,
criticize the man for what you will, but.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
One of these weirdos go up against an astronaut on
a public debate.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Jesus Christ, you know, say what you will about electoralism.
I'm excited to see the Walls Vance debate because I
think it'll be funny.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah. Well, because Vance has big daddy issues and Walls
has strong daddy energy, so we could be in for
a very interesting night. So Vance forms his own venture
capital form Narya Capital. This is another Lord of the
Rings reference. Narya is one of the rings of power,
which the rings of power are bad. Very famously, you're
(19:51):
part of a con. An evil monster creates them to
enslave you. If you are wearing one of the rings
of power. You have enslaved by Saarron. That's the point.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
They're very famously bad.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah yeah. And of course one of the major investments
Naria Capital makes is into Palentier, which is also named.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Also famously used by the Evil Wizard.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yes, famously used by the Evil Wizard. Now, in twenty sixteen,
Vance portrayed himself as a never Trumper, calling the future
president want to be dictator? Well, yeah, how many people
in America didn't he Rape is one of the things
Vance says about Trump. So he is like not holding
his punches against the man broken clock. But behind the scenes,
he is in the process of being anointed by the
(20:38):
Teal crowd, who again see him as a bet in
the future of American politics. Now, this is not something
I can claim to know with confidence, but it seems
to me from the extant information that Vance's anti Trumpism
was performative, calculated to sell books when he thought he
might have a future with a new more conservative Democratic Party,
triangulating to battle populus trump Ism. The fact that he
remained close to Teal during this whole curiot, and that
(21:00):
Teale spoke at the twenty sixteen RNC strikes me as
evidence of a lack of any core political beliefs beyond
a personal desire for power. Now, it is worth noting
that as a younger man, he displayed none of the
signs of social conservatism. He is always an economic conservative.
He's willing to work with Republicans, right. He's one of
these guys who you could definitely see economically being in
line with their Republicans. But he does not evince any
(21:22):
kind of bigotry in his early life, particularly towards LGBT people.
One of his best friends from law school is a
transgender woman, Sophia and Nelson. He describes her in Hillbilly
Elogy as an extremely progressive lesbian, and wrote in an
email to her, I recognize now that this may not
accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that,
I am really sorry. I hope you're not offended, but
(21:43):
if you are, I'm sorry. Love you, JD. Sophia responded
the next day, saying, if you had written gender queer,
radical pragmatist, nobody would know what you mean.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Many such cases right.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
The text of their emails has been shared with The
New York Times by Nelson. After Vance took a hard
turn to lean into the right's anti trans bigotry. This
was a move that pleased Teal himself, who has a
very law He has been anti trans and pushing anti
trans rhetoric for years before this was a mainstream thing
on the right, before the Matt Walsh types really started
pivoting Republican messaging around it. Right, Yeah, and I'm going
(22:17):
to quote from the Times here. Nelson, now a public
defender in Detroit, said they visited each other's homes, talked
on Zoom during the pandemic, and exchanged long emails discussing
a range of subjects, from minutia of daily life to
weighty discussions of current events and public policy issues. Nelson
attended mister Vance's wedding in Kentucky in twenty fourteen. They
pondered doing a podcast together. He suggested they call it
(22:37):
The Lunatic Fringe, but Nelson and mister Vance had a
falling out in twenty twenty one when Vance said he
publicly supported an Arkansas ban on gender affirming care from miners,
leading to a bitter exchange that deeply hurt Nelson. He
had achieved great success and became very rich by being
a never trumper, who explained the white working class to
the liberal elite. Nelson said, now he's amassing even more
power by expressing the exact opposite. And I think that's interesting.
(23:01):
It does kind of point to the whole There's no
core to this guy. There's nothing that he has ever
really cared about other than positioning himself most advantageously. And
I really do think that that gets at what actually
is inside JD. Vance.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
I mean, I mean, ap proximity to political power is
the driving force for a lot of yeah, a lot
of like people who get into politics.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Yes, frankly, yes, yes, yeah, that's that's it. Now, it's
relevant that twenty twenty one was the year Vance chose
to pivot away from never Trump rhetoric and lean into
the right wing culture war bullshit. Narya had been founded
in twenty nineteen and had been backed by one hundred
million dollars from Peter Teal, as well as funding by
Eric Schmidt and Mark Andresen. Their investments included Strive asset
(23:45):
management and investment funds started by vivek Rama Shwami, who
was Teal's classmate at Yale.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Oh I did not know they were classmates.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Uh huh, oh, yeah, it's the class the shit fell on.
For two years, he'd been allowed to keep up the
fiction of a principled ex economic conservative who was horrified
by the bigotry and corruption of Trump World. But by
twenty twenty one, with Trump out of office and Biden's presidency underway,
Teel made it clear that he needed something else from Vance.
We got our best texture of what Vance believed by
late twenty twenty one from Pogue's Vanity Fair piece, which
(24:15):
was written about a neo reactionary summit in October of
twenty twenty one. Quote. Vance believes that a well educated
and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization,
the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of
big tech. This has led an ivy League intellectual and
management class a quasi aristocracy. He calls the regime to
adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly
(24:36):
opposed those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where
he grew up in the vancy. In view, this class
has no stake in what people on the New right
call the real economy, the farm and factory jobs that
months disdained class life in Middle America. This is a
fundamental difference between new right figures like Vance and the
Reaganite right wingers of their parents' generation. To Vance, and
he said, this culture war is class warfare. Vance recently
(24:59):
told an interviewer, I got to be honest with you,
I don't really care about what happens to Ukraine, a
flick at the fact that he thinks that the American
led global order is as much about enriching defense contractors
and think tank types as it is about defending America's interest.
I do care about the fact that in my community
right now, the leading cause of death among eighteen to
forty five year olds is Mexican fentanyl. His criticisms of
big tech as enemies of Western civilization often get lost
(25:21):
in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked
off Twitter and Facebook, although they go much deeper than this.
Vance believes that the regime has sold an elusive story
that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our
lives better, even his wages stagnate and technology feeds an
epidemic of depression. Now he is backed entirely by social
media money. Sure Teel is one of the major backers
(25:41):
of Facebook. Right of course, he is supported entirely by
the money of the people he claims to hate, who
he claims are destroying America.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
I do find this to be really interesting because it's
like a more conservative right reaction to like right wing neoliberalism. Right,
this is so different. Even though all these guys like
kind of talk about how they're like Reagan right, they're
really not. Now they're going back to a much more
nineteen like twenties style of conservatism. Almost. Yes, before like
the Southern split before like like a new Deal, and
(26:11):
we solidified more of like the Democrats being this liberal party,
this this more fiscally conservative party on the right, and
then that kind of gave way to like Thatcher right
England and the neoliberal takeover of the entire world. It's
like they're looking at how like neoliberalism has been totally
subsumed even by like the Democrats and like you know,
centrist left liberals, and they're reacting to it with this
(26:33):
much more socially conservative backlash. Yes, and that is really
the entirety of what's happened to the Republican Party the
last the last four years. And Trump's only a small
part of that. Because even Trump doesn't really care about
some of these types of like culture war issues now
that these guys care about, Like these guys are even
like further to the right of Trump on like most
things in this kind of social vein, and like where
(26:53):
you're viewing like you said, like a like culture war
is class war in terms of like this culture war
is like beating down like the poor white working class. Yeah, absolutely,
these small town farms aren't the real economy. They simply aren't.
The real economy is California and Texas.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
These beliefs, there's an element to which they sound compelling
because parts of this are the stuff that everyone on
the left has complained about neoliberalism. But like his solutions
are fantasies. Like, for one thing, the people who are
backing him are the same kinds of people and often
the same people who were very much gung ho behind
getting rid of American factory jobs in order to maximize
their profits and the consolidation of farmland into these giant
(27:35):
agricultural conglomerates.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Right, Like he abandoned this part of the country because yes,
because he knows it sucks, Like, yes, it's not like
a pleasant place to live, like a decent life. It's
very hard. It's very difficult.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah, and it's in part because these kind of people
who came out of the Reagan era like have no
use for factory workers or farmers in the United States.
All of that can be consolidated into these vast enterprise
is that when there are human workers necessary, we can
just grab undocumented people from across the border. Right anyway,
speaking of grabbing people, these ads will grab you. Dah,
(28:20):
We're back. So by late twenty twenty one, Curtis Jarvin
is still a major figure in the neo reactionary movement.
VANCE has started quoting him kind of obliquely, and in fact,
during this twenty twenty one National Conservative Conference that Pogue
pivots on, Vance makes direct reference to something that Jarvin
(28:42):
has written his ideas about, like we need this red
Caesar when he says during an interview, we are in
a late Republican period. If we're going to push back
against it, we're going to have to get pretty wild
and pretty far out there and go in directions that
a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. And
you know what that means is this late Republican he's
talking about Republican Rome before Caesar, you know, makes his
(29:04):
play for power, like that's explicitly what he is comparing
it to. And it's because Yarvin's big thing is we
don't want a left or a right wing dictator. We
want a king for the whole country right that's going
to represent everybody, which is just not what kings do.
It's not what dictators do.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
This is so clearly there's also just like a fascist
line of argument, like an actual like actual like ideologically fascist,
and no people call like, you know, Reagan a fascist,
but like he's not, He's a neoliberal. Neoliberals suck. Yes,
these guys are going back like actual like fascist political theory.
That's what Mullbug is reading, that's what he's writing about.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
And in twenty twenty one, Vance is saying this, I
think Trump is going to run again in twenty twenty four.
I think that what Trump should do, if I was
giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid
level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace
them with our people. And when the courts stop, you
stand before the country and say the Chief Justice has
made his ruling, now let him enforce it, which he's
quoting Andrew Jackson there, but he's describing like the end
(30:02):
of democracy.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
A dictatorial takeover, right, and laying out with a plan
that is very similar to Project twenty twenty five. Yeah,
I know Vance does have something personal connections to because
a lot of his friends were involved in the planning
of that.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
But you can see Project twenty twenty five and what
Vance is saying here, these are all downstream of what
Yarvin's saying in twenty twelve of this rage acronym, replace
all government employees, right or retire all government employees. You know,
by the way, you will be glad to know that
by twenty twenty one, Yarvin has stopped openly using the
term dictator. So that's good. He just he just calls
it a monarchy a lot.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Now, Oh okay, that's good. Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Now. JD's pivot, which he often credits with his conversion
to Catholicism, although you can see he's been on this
road for much longer than that, was perfectly timed for
his Senate run in twenty twenty two. Peter Teel was
his biggest donor, providing fifteen million to the super Pack
that backed him, which at the time at least was
the largest amount ever given to boost a Senate candidate.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Yeah, as fifty million for a Senate run is crazy,
It's nuts.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
D been a long shot candidate at first because he's
very unlikable, but the Teal money allowed for a major
ad blitz and the kind of media prep work that
only a well funded pack can provide. His pack published
the data on an open Medium page with a username
at protect Ohio values forms, which allowed the pack to
send info and advice to Vance without violating federal campaign
(31:20):
finance loss. Vance had been hit early for comments made
a few years back negative to Trump, but he clawed
his way back into the MAGA good graces by appearing
on Breitbart News, Tucker Carlson's Fox Show, Steve Bannon's War
Room podcast, and most of all, by positioning to himself
as a violent opponent of immigration from a write up
in Politico. In February, Thompson, who's the guy running the pack,
(31:41):
posted a memo to the Medium site arguing that Vance
had an opening to zero win on immigration and border security,
noting that he had a personal connection to the issue
given his mother's struggles with drug addiction. The issue was
near and dear to the primary voters, the memo argued,
and crucially could help in nabbing Trump's support. To win
a Trump endorsement, a candidate has to show a growing
ballot share to get that account, and it has to
own a critical issue, the memo read. JD can do that,
(32:03):
and that's exactly what JD does. When he takes the
stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida later
that month, he focuses his speech entirely on immigration, and
when his campaign goes up with its first TV ad,
it shows a direct to camera Vance telling viewers that
he nearly lost his mother to poison coming across our border.
Now by mid April, Trump has become convinced that Vance's
(32:25):
past mean remarks were water under the bridge, and he
calls an associate of Peter Teal to say, Hey, I'm
moving closer to endorsing Vance. Teal by this point has
also introduced Vance to David Sachs, who adds another million
dollars to his super PACs war chest. On April fifteenth,
Convinced by Vance's rising poll numbers and impressive fundraising, Trump
makes an official endorsement this helps pull Vance over the top,
(32:47):
and he ekes out a narrow win in the election
that followed. The next year, Vance repaid the favor, writing
a January Wall Street Journal op at where he endorses
Trump as a candidate. In twenty twenty four, this was
back and this is the start of tour three. The
Republican primary is just gearing up, and the end of
it is in enough doubt. You can remember back then.
It sounds silly now, but people really thought Desant has
(33:07):
had a shot, right, And so is Vance's kind of
in before any of the other major Republican figures and
backing Trump for his reducts round right.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, He's like one of the first to fall in
line here.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Yeah. And there's a few people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders
had been seen as a potential Trump VP pick, but
she waits months to actually like endorse Trump officially. So
Vance gets in on the ground floor, and this impresses
Trump that he is someone who he can count on
to be loyal. Vance wins more praise the next month,
when a train carrying hazardous materials to rails in East
Palestine in Ohio, Trump makes a visit to the town
(33:41):
as one of the first stops on his campaign, and
Vance organizes the visit, and he does apparently a good
job of this. Trump says to his entourage, this guy
is turning out to be fucking incredible.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
Now.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
By this point, Vance has befriended Trump's oldest son, Donald
Trump Junior, and set himself to the task of well
and truly kissing ass to get on that twenty twenty
four ticket. By late January of this year, Vance and
his team had received enough friendly feedback from Trump World
that they decided to invest in a full court press.
Vance began showing up on TV networks that Trump considered enemies,
doing a reverse Buddhage edge and throwing himself into the
(34:14):
enemy camp to take shots on behalf of the boss.
He also devoted himself to raising money for Trump from
the Silicon Valley VC set. Most of these guys were teals, friends,
dudes like David Sachs. What finally put him over the top, though,
was an article Donald Trump Junior gave his dad from
bright Bart News about the man then seen as Trump's
most likely VP pick, Doug Bergham, governor of North Dakota.
(34:37):
The article's title was Carl Rove endorses Doug Burgham for
Vice president, and I do love that. Carl Rove's endorsement
is the fucking kiss of death right now for a
fucking VP candidate. Very funny place for his story to
have wound up. Not a bad call by Trump, though,
I gotta say, actually it is a bad call for Trump.
But also I get it. I read one Politico article
(34:58):
that argues this was the final straw for Trump. It
was this Carl Rove article. I can't actually speak to that.
It is worth noting that in the months leading up
to the RNC, Trump is also being subjected to a
charm campaign by all of Peter Teal's friends, this huge
pile of wealthy Silicon Valley investors from the Washington Post quote.
In the weeks before former President Donald Trump announced his
(35:20):
vice presidential pick, some of tech's biggest names launched a
quiet campaign to push for one of their own. Ohio
Senator JD. Vance. The former president, fielded repeated calls from
tech entrepreneur David Sachs, pallanteer advisor Jacob Helberg, and billionaire
venture capitalist Peter Teal, Vance's former employer and mentor employing
him to add the one time Silicon Valley investor to
the ticket. According to three people familiar with the entreaties,
(35:43):
all caps, we have a former tech VC in the
White House. Greatest country on Earth, Baby Deli and Ashparov,
of a partner at Teal's founder's fund, wrote on X
after the announcement of Vance's nomination, Dellian s Parova s
Parov something.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Like that, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I know it's it's fucking exhausting, but that is, you know,
the JD. Vance story more or less, that's where he
comes from. That's who wants him to be the VP.
It's all of these fucking ghouls who want to own
the world and become It's these people who have achieved
the highest level of financial success you can achieve in
any society on the earth right now, and they found
(36:22):
that it's kind of empty. And it's kind of empty
in part because people can still be mean to you
and they don't have to care what you believe just
because you have a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
They don't like neoliberal capitalism because it fundamentally still has
a shred of like a democratic value. Yeah, and that
makes them too mad. Yeah, So instead they are going
back to like a much a much more like archaic
system where they can still maintain their personal wealth while
being like very influential through like a dictatorial means. They're
(36:53):
still like fundamentally capitalists, but almost in like a more
like fascistic feudal sense. Yes, like they want to be lord. Well,
that's exactly its what that's what they really want.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
They are terrified of death. And what they're terrified of
more than anything. What scares the mostly about death is
the idea that like all the success they've seen goes.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Away, it's meaningless, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Fundamentally, all of this passes. No one is on top forever,
nobody is like matters.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
No one's going to care about PayPal in twenty years.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
That's the price of time, right, And they want to
stop the clock. That's fundamentally what near reactionaries are. There
are people who think I am special, I am super special.
The world should be oriented around recognizing how special I
am forever, and anything I can do to turn back
the clock is necessary justified like that, That's what these
(37:45):
people are, That's what they believe fundamentally.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
Like imagine being so mad that no one will remember
PayPal in two hundred years, that you try to install
a fascist takeover.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yes, Yes, of the United States of America, so that
PayPal always matters. It's the guys anyway, Garrison. That's the
James Donald Vance story. Not his name.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Is that his name?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
No, of course not. Maybe I forget. I forget. I
always forget what JD stands for, who cares? Who gives
a shit? Hopefully he's not gonna matter much longer.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
This is this is This is my biggest thing going
going into November, is that you know, if the Democrats
win on on like on their ticket, that still means
plenty of bad things around the world. Yeah, but I
also really don't want these freaks in there, Like I
really don't want them. They're they're like they're like spooky.
They're trying to do like this like like esoteric larp
(38:35):
in like the White House, like come on.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
And most of the things that need to happen for
the world to get better can't happen while these people
are in power right like or close to power like
they There needs to be damage done to them, and
I'm I'm hopeful about that if nothing else in this election, and.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Like electoral damages is only like one type. They have
to be like culturally humiliated, Like they have to be
like culturally like rejected, being like no, like you you
you are not actually the wizards of culture that you
kind of wanted to be, Like, no one likes what
you do, no one likes what you believe like that
that it has to be like this this larger this
larger like cultural battle. That's why they have like the
culture wars. This is like super important thing. That's why
(39:15):
they're so scared of like queer and trans people, especially
the queer and trans people like that are like influential,
whether they be like you know, like teachers, whether they
be working like in media, making movies, television, writing books.
That's why they're so freaked out with that kind of stuff.
That's why they're trying to get out of schools. That's
why they're trying to stop Woke Disney. It's because they
know that no one's gonna want to listen to these
freaks when like gay people can make a good art
(39:36):
or like give a good history lesson. Yeah, that's like
there's that's like the strongest like anecdote to these like
just really really bizarre like esoteric ramblings about wanting to
go back to like nineteen ten, like racist science and
just weird, weird shit.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Yeah, you know, I think that these guys delved too
deep and too greedily if we're going to continue the
Lord of the Rings rap diferences, which by god, they're
not going to let us stop doing so. And I
think that there was this thing we used to I
used to talk about a lot when I tried to
explain like far right terminology to people back in twenty nineteen,
twenty eighteen, five decades ago, a thousand years ago. That's
(40:16):
my Elron moment. I was there Garrison a thousand years ago.
We talked about like the term hide your power level, right,
which these Nazis used to use, and they've just completely
given up on that. No, and the thing that they
are seeing there was like all this. I was reading
that twenty twenty two article by Poe, which I think
is a really important snapshot because it's these people about
to head into twenty twenty four, and they they know
(40:38):
before the dims do how badly down Biden is. Right,
the Democrats have not really taking seriously what a dangerous
position Joe Biden was going to be in for reelection yet.
But they also think that like, wow, all these young
people are showing up at our lame parties. That means
there's a broader sweep. All young people are becoming like
closer to reactionaryas.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Becoming like all weird treadcats.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah, we're capturing the culture. And that's just absolutely not
what was happening. And it would have been obvious if
like they had been capable of actually like listening to people.
But what we're seeing now is they did the most
dangerous thing you could do. Is they predicted and understood
one thing about the future, but nothing else right. And
(41:21):
so they understood the weakness that Joe Biden represented and
kind of the weakness of his control over the Democratic Party,
but they did not understand that, like other things are possible, right,
and including the fact that like Joe Biden and largely
the other people who were running the Democratic Party might
come to understand that weakness too. And after a disastrous
(41:42):
debate and a shooting, go you know what, let's change course.
And I really think that that, above all else might
be What fucks them is they they completely came out
of the woodwork. They were tired of having to pretend
they didn't want a king. They thought their time had come,
and perhaps it has not. We'll still, we'll all see,
(42:02):
we'll all see.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
Well, I'm super excited to hear what kind of just
unhinged and bizarre things Tim Walls has done. Yeah, in
the next tale.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Yeah, I'm just going to accuse him of having been
the Zodiac killer. You know, that's worked on a couple
of guys.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
It seems to work.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Actually, yeah, so we're just going to do that. Call
it a night. Anyway, this has been jd vance. We've
been It could happen here, Go to hell, I.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Love you, Clean your couch.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Clean your couch. Shit, I need to do that.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
What's JD My vances? This is it could happen here
a podcast that's not behind the Bastards. But today we're
doing a little mini episode on our future possible vice president, JD.
Vance Garrison. How are you feeling today? Welcome back to
(00:27):
the program.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Thank you. I'm feeling pretty good.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Yeah, I got a great five hours of sleep. I'm
good to go.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Oh, I slept eleven good for you.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
No, I've also been in the researching bad people whole
which keeps me up late at night.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah. I have to do the Walls episodes tonight so
we can go back to back on the vps. But
I decided to start with JD. Vance, And you know,
I had debated with myself, is this guy worth a
full bTB episode? And I decided ultimately like no, you know,
I just don't think there's enough to him yet that
he deserves that. Perhaps that will change in the future.
(01:02):
But what I wanted to do was give the listener,
who I'm guessing has mostly just heard a few disjointed
things about JD.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
A few a few things, one or two things, maybe
one specific thing.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
One specific They probably they're probably aware of Hillbilly elogy
that was like a pretty pretty big book in the day,
and the movie was panned, and that was kind of news.
They've probably heard the couch fucking stuff, and then they've
heard allegations that he's like a straight up fascist, and
you know, he thinks that single women should be dragged
out into the street and shot or something like that.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
If you have a cat and you're a single woman,
you are onto logically evil.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a socia path. And so I wanted
to provide some context for how he went from if
you can remember back to twenty sixteen, he was a
liberal darling for having written hillbilly elegy. Right, he was
this guy, this like never trump conservative who was explaining
to everyone how the evil of trump Ism had infested
and you know, latched onto the minds of small town Americans. Right,
(02:00):
That's kind of how he was framed today, where he's
like this hard right maga guy, literally Trump's future right
hand man, with what sounds like explicitly dictatorial ambitions. And
the mystery of this story, all of it comes down
to Peterteel. Right, many such cases, Yeah, as is often
the case, he's a major part of life. Why things
(02:22):
wind up where they are. The bones of JD's background
story are kind of important, so I'm just going to
give them rapidly. He was born in August nineteen eighty
four in Middletown, Ohio, born under the name James Donald Bowman,
but his parents divorced when he was a toddler. His dad,
his biodad, is pretty much out of the picture right away.
He is eventually adopted by his mother's third husband, whose
(02:43):
last name is Hamil, and that's the name he's going
to serve in the Marines under His mother was not
very together. There's a lot of neglect and poverty and
some drug abuse in his early life before his grandparents
move him from Kentucky to Ohio. Now, a lot of
ink has been spilled on the subject of Vance's supposedly
auto biographical book Hillbilly Elegy, which paints him as a
member of the aggrieved and abused white underclass, the forgotten
(03:06):
men of American politics. I'm not interested in relitigating this
stupid book, except to say that I had a kind
of similar background. My dad was in the picture, but
socioeconomically it was kind of similar. We grew up in
a very poor and troubled small town. Eventually, my caretakers
got me out of there into a more functional part
of the country. And I can see I see JD's
(03:27):
book as kind of cynically positioned to take advantage of
the liberal outpouring of sympathy for rural whites that followed
Trump's twenty sixteen victory, an attempt to position himself as someone
who can explain why this part of the country swept
Trump into power. Now, the reality is that this part
of the country did not sweep Trump into power. The
core of Trump support in twenty sixteen were aggrieved, but
financially comfortable, suburban white people. Vance did not write about
(03:50):
poor folks addicted to oxy in the hollers with any
real empathy. He painted them as helpless fools and mental children,
in himself as better for getting out. And that's really
all I have to say on the matter. To me,
his early life suggests a young man who wanted to
set himself up for a career in public life and
took the most expedient actions to do so. And that
is the context under which I see his service in
(04:12):
the US Marine Corps. He joined the Marines and got
himself the job that would get him as close to
action as possible without requiring that he actually do anything.
His specific gig was public affairs for a marine aircraft wing,
so he is writing about the shit that this aircraft
wing is doing, which is about the least job that
you can actually have in the military. He wrote that
(04:32):
he was quote lucky to escape any real fighting. After
finishing his term, he got a BA in polysci And
I'm not saying that you have to fight, for most
of what the military does is not literally fighting. I'm
just saying I see his specific positioning himself with this
job as him wanting to have marine on his CV
(04:53):
when he goes into politics. Right, that's my allegation, right,
Not that there's anything wrong with not fighting.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Sure, I mean, and it's also just good to point
out considering most of the rights attacks against Walls right
now are also about him not actually like seeing combat,
and Vance has gone after him for that specifically.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, trying to like.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Allude to like Vance having more combat experience. Yeah, both
men did not like fire bullets at enemy combatants.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
No, and most people don't. But what I see with
Vance's service is I did this because it was a
line in my resume, whereas you don't do twenty four
years in the National Guard like just to set up
your political career. Now you do that because you want
to be in the National Guard.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yes, Walts was definitely more like a career man in
that sense.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. After finishing his term, he got a
BA in polysci and philosophy from Ohio State and during
his first year in college he worked for a Republican
States senator. He's going to work for a couple of Republicans.
And his college in grad school, you know, law school
years then he attended Yale Law School. He made friends
with Jamil Giovanni, who would go on to be a
(06:02):
Conservative parliamentarian in Canada. He was mentored by professor Amy Chua,
who wrote a book about being a Tiger mom that
made a lot of people angry and was beloved by
the chunk of the country who thinks the children have
it too easy. Chua helped to convince him to write
Hillbilly Elegy, which might be her worst sin, almost definitely
is her worst sin. I can forgive some terrible acts
(06:23):
towards children if you don't write the book Hillbilly Elogy.
It was when Vance graduated from Yale that he first
made contact with the man who would come to define
his adult political journey. Peter Teel, the PayPal co founder
and serial entrepreneur investor, had taken a rapid turn from
his earlier libertarian politics thanks to a growing interest in
a line of political philosophy known mostly as neo reactionary
(06:46):
or NRX thought, although today you'll more often hear it
described as the new right. I'm not in love with
either of those terms for this particular chunk of the right.
But I think neo reactionary is better than new right.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Not as bad as dark and life.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
It's not as bad as dark and we'll talk the
worst of these three terms, by far the worst of
the three terms. So I tend to stick with neo reactionary.
Although if you hear new right being used, that's that's
also what this refers to.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
That's a term I've used sometimes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
What time period is is just like twenty seventeen, like
where are we at here?
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Twenty eleven is when he sees Peter Teal speak at Yale,
which he describes as like the moment around which his
life pivots.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
So this is pre the publishing of his book.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yes, yes, yes, he publishes He'll BILLI Elogy in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Okay, so he kind of got in on the ground
floor of some of this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yes, he is very early in teal world. He's one
of the first, he's going to be one of We're
getting to that. But I want to talk about what
neo reactionaries are because the rest of this isn't going
to make sense unless we go into that.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
So sure.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Vanity Fair writer James Pogue rather ably described the New
Right as a worldview in direct competition to the liberal
idea that economic growth and technological innovation would lead us
to a better future. Instead, the growth of big tech surveillance,
nanny state governance, and social justice culture war dominance has
created a system of oppression that will destroy everything good
(08:06):
in the world if not stopped. The primary high priest
of this school of thought is Curtis Yarvin, who in
the early aughts from about two thousand and seven to
twenty fourteen blogged prolifically as Mincius Moldbug. Now, Jarvin is
a computer programmer. He is this guy who has had
for most of his career this desire to create a
new computer operating system that would like fix the way
(08:29):
in which knowledge is disseminated in a way that sounds
kind of magical to me. He never quite gets it working,
and he blogs about political philosophy the same way he
talks about programming, which he has this dream for a
way to reorient society after a soft, kind of peaceful coup.
He always emphasizes how peaceful it needs to be, that
(08:49):
will be, you know. Again, it's his way if he
wants to program society to make it work perfectly, you know,
based on his sort of set of values. And he
writes a series of essays how he wants to reorient society,
and these essays become kind of the central underpinning ethos
of the messy assortment of philosophies that we call neo
(09:09):
reactionaries or the new right. Now. The basic idea is
that this liberal nightmare healscape can only be stopped and
turned back by replacing democracy with an essentially monarchic system.
Pogue describes Jarvin as arguing for quote a Caesar like
figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy and
replace it with a monarchical regime run like a startup
As early as twenty twelve, he proposed the acronym rage
(09:32):
retire all government employees as a shorthand for a first
step and the overthrow of the American regime. What we needed,
Yarvin thought was a national CEO or what's called a dictator. Now,
a lot of guys in the aughts become enraptured by
Jarvin's ideas because the way Jarvin writes, he spends most
of his free time because he gets bought out of
(09:53):
a company he's in, and he doesn't wind up like
super rich, but he winds up comfortable enough that he's
for a while just spending like five hundred bucks a
month on books and reading like old reactionary tracts, like
books from the eighteen hundreds of like monarchists arguing against
you know, the Enlightenment and socialism and the like. And
so he peppers his essays with a lot of different
(10:14):
kind of archaic flourishes, a lot of Latin, a lot
of like references to Greek and Roman philosophical figures. And
that is fucking catnip for a certain kind of guy.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Now, it makes it makes it seem like esoteric. It's
like it's kind of like, yes, like hidden knowledge, it's
being like rediscovered that like holds the key to fix
all of our problems.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yes, he is. If you've read Enders Game, he's doing
what Ender's brother does at Enders Game, where he's writing
his little essays for the Internet, trying to like overthrow
the government using them. And there's a certain certain kind
of guy who is just deeply attracted to that idea.
One of those kinds of guys is a philosopher called
Nick Land. Land is an interesting character. We talk about
(10:57):
him a little during our AI Cult episodes. He's a
dude who comes out of academia and kind of has
now moved around to essentially like fascist political philosophy would
be kind of the quickest way to describe Land today.
Although he's a complicated fellow. But he is the guy
who who comes up with the term dark enlightenment for
Curtis's writing. And this is the way in which a
(11:19):
lot of these guys, a lot of the guys especially
who are going to come into Jarvin's work around the
mid aughts, are going to think about it right where
it's this, he has pulled the wool from my eyes, right.
He has made it clear how doomed democracy is that
it's fundamentally evil. And now that I've had this dark revelation,
I can never look at the world the same way again.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Right, And like Land was trying to do the same
thing for like the previous like fifteen years, and he
attracted a small batch of like kind of like academic followers.
A whole bunch of his colleagues kind of got more
popular than him because they were slightly more reasonable in
many ways.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Because Land's writing is never going to be like the
most viral thing on earth, right, Like, yeah, and mold
Bugs is a little better written for that, although both
of them are too dense. The guys who are going to,
like like Vance is going to be the guys who
are going to take his theories into like mainstream politics,
are going to need to trim the fat off. You know.
(12:16):
It's also worth noting Jarvin is the guy who introduces
the term the red pill to right wing politics.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Right, Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yes, as far as I've ever seen, Jarvin is the
guy who like starts using the red pill in like
a really concerted way to describe like coming to these
understandings about you know, race science has a decent amount
to do with it earlier in Yarvin's writing career. But
like all of these ideas that we now call neo reactionary,
like that's that's a Jarvin original. He thinks the matrix
(12:44):
is a work of genius, of course, which it is,
but maybe not in the way that he thinks slightly. Yeah,
So anyway, Peter Teel falls in love because Teal is
by by two thousand and nine, Teal's writing stuff about
how he thinks democracy is incompatible with liberty. Right, And
when Peter Teel refers to liberty, he's not talking about
like your freedom to like to love the people that
(13:06):
you want to love, or do with your body what
you want to do with your body. He's talking about
his freedom as a guy with a lot of money
to not have to pay taxes. Right, That's primarily what
all of these guys mean by freedom. So Teal by
two thousand and nine is already enraptured with these anti
democratic ideas and he finds Jarvin. It's kind of unclear
to me, does Jarvin actually start him on that road
(13:27):
or I think it's more that he has started down
that road, and he thinks Jarvin is doing a really
good job of setting up what he's been thinking. So
he starts pumping money into Jarvin, he funds some of
his like software ambitions. He's just kind of generally supporting him,
and he begins pumping money increasingly over the early to
mid aughts into an array of influencers and thinkers who
(13:49):
are in alignment with what we might call mold buggy
in thought right, and he's doing that up to this
present day, Pog writes. Teal has also funded things like
The Edge Lordy and Post Left Infected New peaceople Sinema
film Festival, which ended its week long run of parties
and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before nat
Con began. He's long been a big donor to Republican
political candidates, but in recent years Teal has grown increasingly
(14:11):
involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world,
becoming something like an afarious godfather or genial rich uncle,
depending on your perspective. Podcasters and art world figures now
joke about their hope to get so called Teal bucks.
And if you're familiar with like the Red Scare podcast,
and those ladies you're familiar with, like the Dime square set.
A lot of them are into neo reactionary thought and
(14:34):
are the people that that paragraph is referring to right now.
While podcasters and cultural influencers have long been useful to Teal,
he's also tried to collect up and coming politicians with
uneven success. In twenty eleven, he gave a talk at
Yale while Vance was still a student, and discussed the
stagnation of technological progress in the United States. Vance wrote
that Teal was then quote possibly the smartest person I'd
(14:56):
ever met, and this moment is the moment that his
whole life pivots around meeting Peter Teal at Yale in
twenty eleven. We're gonna talk about what comes after, But Garrison,
you know what isn't receiving any money from Peter Teal.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
We also cannot say that there's no way to.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible that we are funded
one hundred percent by Peter Teal. And if so, thank you.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Got to get those Teal bucks.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
And we're back. I've just uncovered that Peter Teal is
the mind behind Chumba Casino. Garrison, this goes so much
deeper than I thought, what.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
If Petertield instead just got really into sports betting, you know,
instead of dealing with all this weird like esoteric traditionalist,
like like eighteen eighties racism philosophy. What what if instead
he just got really into I don't know, the Bucks.
That's probably a sports team, right.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
He put eight billion dollars on the Raiders. He took
a bath. He's fucked.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
He got addicted to it too. God, he could save
so many lives sports, but I really couldn't save lives.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I've always said that Vance decided to abandon his planned
career in law, although I'm not sure I believe that
was ever his intended path.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
No, he does a couple of years in law, and
he claims that Teal also is who made him decide
to convert to Christianity by defying the social template I
had constructed that Christians were dumb and atheists were smart.
I don't know how much to believe that he's actually
a Catholic. Maybe I don't.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Know, but like there's this whole new batch of like, yes,
people who are like a philosophically Catholic or like they're
Catholic in like a quote unquote Hegelian sense when when
they instruct these like larger models of like human evolution
and they view like Christianity as this like thing that
will drive the human species towards its like perfected form.
And definitely the dark Enlightenment people are a significant chunk
(16:58):
of kind of what caused you to who develop And
we're seeing that now with like these fake movements like
the Hegelian egirles, which are kind of like the weird
step child of some of these like Dimes Square like
influencer philosophy stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, and I would say he's definitely not a Catholic
in the sense that your aunt is right.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
No, no, no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
He is a Catholic in the sense that, like he
believes there are things about social order and the roles
that people should have in society that Catholicism gets right.
And exactly that's that's the sense in which he's a Catholic. Right.
So in twenty sixteen, the same year that Vance publishes
Hillbilly Elogy and becomes a liberal darling, he joins Mythral Capital,
(17:40):
a venture capital firm founded by Teal Peter Teel. Advance,
all of these guys pretty much every time they create
a company, it's named after something in the Lord of
the Rings.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Fucking A J. R. R. Tolkien bullshit.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
He would be so unhappy with this.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Because Tolkien was also a Catholic monarchist, but in a
very different.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Way, in a super different way. Yes. So, the two
young men that Teal adopts that he makes what are
called generational bets in is Blake Masters and JD. Vance.
And his bet is that if I really bankroll and
back these guys, they are going to be major figures
in US politics right for decades to come. And his
(18:19):
first step is he makes them rich. He helps them
get jobs and stuff that they get wealthy in. You know,
Masters is recruited in the same way as Vance. He's
given a cushy job in venture capital. He's handed a
shitload of Teal books to see what he can make
of them. And Vance is, you know, both of them
are decent enough at this. Vance is okay at it.
And within two years he gets hired for one hundred
and fifty million dollar fund out of Washington that focuses
(18:40):
on finding young companies and overlooked US cities, places that
weren't seen as traditionally tech Hubs. Soon after this, he
goes into business on his own, if we can call
it on your own, when Peter Teal is the guy
who backs your new company entirely right.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Sure, I do love that that Peter Teel somehow picked
the two most uncharismatic up and.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Come dudes, I mean, look at Peter, what does he
know about charisma?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yeah, but like it is fun that he made these
two bets and Mark Kelly just destroyed one of them. Yeah,
criticize the man for what you will, but.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
One of these weirdos go up against an astronaut on
a public debate.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Jesus Christ, you know, say what you will about electoralism.
I'm excited to see the Walls Vance debate because I
think it'll be funny.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah. Well, because Vance has big daddy issues and Walls
has strong daddy energy, so we could be in for
a very interesting night. So Vance forms his own venture
capital form Narya Capital. This is another Lord of the
Rings reference. Narya is one of the rings of power,
which the rings of power are bad. Very famously, you're
(19:51):
part of a con. An evil monster creates them to
enslave you. If you are wearing one of the rings
of power. You have enslaved by Saarron. That's the point.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
They're very famously bad.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah yeah. And of course one of the major investments
Naria Capital makes is into Palentier, which is also named.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Also famously used by the Evil Wizard.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yes, famously used by the Evil Wizard. Now, in twenty sixteen,
Vance portrayed himself as a never Trumper, calling the future
president want to be dictator? Well, yeah, how many people
in America didn't he Rape is one of the things
Vance says about Trump. So he is like not holding
his punches against the man broken clock. But behind the scenes,
he is in the process of being anointed by the
(20:38):
Teal crowd, who again see him as a bet in
the future of American politics. Now, this is not something
I can claim to know with confidence, but it seems
to me from the extant information that Vance's anti Trumpism
was performative, calculated to sell books when he thought he
might have a future with a new more conservative Democratic Party,
triangulating to battle populus trump Ism. The fact that he
remained close to Teal during this whole curiot, and that
(21:00):
Teale spoke at the twenty sixteen RNC strikes me as
evidence of a lack of any core political beliefs beyond
a personal desire for power. Now, it is worth noting
that as a younger man, he displayed none of the
signs of social conservatism. He is always an economic conservative.
He's willing to work with Republicans, right. He's one of
these guys who you could definitely see economically being in
line with their Republicans. But he does not evince any
(21:22):
kind of bigotry in his early life, particularly towards LGBT people.
One of his best friends from law school is a
transgender woman, Sophia and Nelson. He describes her in Hillbilly
Elogy as an extremely progressive lesbian, and wrote in an
email to her, I recognize now that this may not
accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that,
I am really sorry. I hope you're not offended, but
(21:43):
if you are, I'm sorry. Love you, JD. Sophia responded
the next day, saying, if you had written gender queer,
radical pragmatist, nobody would know what you mean.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Many such cases right.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
The text of their emails has been shared with The
New York Times by Nelson. After Vance took a hard
turn to lean into the right's anti trans bigotry. This
was a move that pleased Teal himself, who has a
very law He has been anti trans and pushing anti
trans rhetoric for years before this was a mainstream thing
on the right, before the Matt Walsh types really started
pivoting Republican messaging around it. Right, Yeah, and I'm going
(22:17):
to quote from the Times here. Nelson, now a public
defender in Detroit, said they visited each other's homes, talked
on Zoom during the pandemic, and exchanged long emails discussing
a range of subjects, from minutia of daily life to
weighty discussions of current events and public policy issues. Nelson
attended mister Vance's wedding in Kentucky in twenty fourteen. They
pondered doing a podcast together. He suggested they call it
(22:37):
The Lunatic Fringe, but Nelson and mister Vance had a
falling out in twenty twenty one when Vance said he
publicly supported an Arkansas ban on gender affirming care from miners,
leading to a bitter exchange that deeply hurt Nelson. He
had achieved great success and became very rich by being
a never trumper, who explained the white working class to
the liberal elite. Nelson said, now he's amassing even more
power by expressing the exact opposite. And I think that's interesting.
(23:01):
It does kind of point to the whole There's no
core to this guy. There's nothing that he has ever
really cared about other than positioning himself most advantageously. And
I really do think that that gets at what actually
is inside JD. Vance.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
I mean, I mean, ap proximity to political power is
the driving force for a lot of yeah, a lot
of like people who get into politics.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Yes, frankly, yes, yes, yeah, that's that's it. Now, it's
relevant that twenty twenty one was the year Vance chose
to pivot away from never Trump rhetoric and lean into
the right wing culture war bullshit. Narya had been founded
in twenty nineteen and had been backed by one hundred
million dollars from Peter Teal, as well as funding by
Eric Schmidt and Mark Andresen. Their investments included Strive asset
(23:45):
management and investment funds started by vivek Rama Shwami, who
was Teal's classmate at Yale.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Oh I did not know they were classmates.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Uh huh, oh, yeah, it's the class the shit fell on.
For two years, he'd been allowed to keep up the
fiction of a principled ex economic conservative who was horrified
by the bigotry and corruption of Trump World. But by
twenty twenty one, with Trump out of office and Biden's presidency underway,
Teel made it clear that he needed something else from Vance.
We got our best texture of what Vance believed by
late twenty twenty one from Pogue's Vanity Fair piece, which
(24:15):
was written about a neo reactionary summit in October of
twenty twenty one. Quote. Vance believes that a well educated
and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization,
the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of
big tech. This has led an ivy League intellectual and
management class a quasi aristocracy. He calls the regime to
adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly
(24:36):
opposed those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where
he grew up in the vancy. In view, this class
has no stake in what people on the New right
call the real economy, the farm and factory jobs that
months disdained class life in Middle America. This is a
fundamental difference between new right figures like Vance and the
Reaganite right wingers of their parents' generation. To Vance, and
he said, this culture war is class warfare. Vance recently
(24:59):
told an interviewer, I got to be honest with you,
I don't really care about what happens to Ukraine, a
flick at the fact that he thinks that the American
led global order is as much about enriching defense contractors
and think tank types as it is about defending America's interest.
I do care about the fact that in my community
right now, the leading cause of death among eighteen to
forty five year olds is Mexican fentanyl. His criticisms of
big tech as enemies of Western civilization often get lost
(25:21):
in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked
off Twitter and Facebook, although they go much deeper than this.
Vance believes that the regime has sold an elusive story
that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our
lives better, even his wages stagnate and technology feeds an
epidemic of depression. Now he is backed entirely by social
media money. Sure Teel is one of the major backers
(25:41):
of Facebook. Right of course, he is supported entirely by
the money of the people he claims to hate, who
he claims are destroying America.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
I do find this to be really interesting because it's
like a more conservative right reaction to like right wing neoliberalism. Right,
this is so different. Even though all these guys like
kind of talk about how they're like Reagan right, they're
really not. Now they're going back to a much more
nineteen like twenties style of conservatism. Almost. Yes, before like
the Southern split before like like a new Deal, and
(26:11):
we solidified more of like the Democrats being this liberal party,
this this more fiscally conservative party on the right, and
then that kind of gave way to like Thatcher right
England and the neoliberal takeover of the entire world. It's
like they're looking at how like neoliberalism has been totally
subsumed even by like the Democrats and like you know,
centrist left liberals, and they're reacting to it with this
(26:33):
much more socially conservative backlash. Yes, and that is really
the entirety of what's happened to the Republican Party the
last the last four years. And Trump's only a small
part of that. Because even Trump doesn't really care about
some of these types of like culture war issues now
that these guys care about, Like these guys are even
like further to the right of Trump on like most
things in this kind of social vein, and like where
(26:53):
you're viewing like you said, like a like culture war
is class war in terms of like this culture war
is like beating down like the poor white working class. Yeah, absolutely,
these small town farms aren't the real economy. They simply aren't.
The real economy is California and Texas.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
These beliefs, there's an element to which they sound compelling
because parts of this are the stuff that everyone on
the left has complained about neoliberalism. But like his solutions
are fantasies. Like, for one thing, the people who are
backing him are the same kinds of people and often
the same people who were very much gung ho behind
getting rid of American factory jobs in order to maximize
their profits and the consolidation of farmland into these giant
(27:35):
agricultural conglomerates.
Speaker 3 (27:36):
Right, Like he abandoned this part of the country because yes,
because he knows it sucks, Like, yes, it's not like
a pleasant place to live, like a decent life. It's
very hard. It's very difficult.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah, and it's in part because these kind of people
who came out of the Reagan era like have no
use for factory workers or farmers in the United States.
All of that can be consolidated into these vast enterprise
is that when there are human workers necessary, we can
just grab undocumented people from across the border. Right anyway,
speaking of grabbing people, these ads will grab you. Dah,
(28:20):
We're back. So by late twenty twenty one, Curtis Jarvin
is still a major figure in the neo reactionary movement.
VANCE has started quoting him kind of obliquely, and in fact,
during this twenty twenty one National Conservative Conference that Pogue
pivots on, Vance makes direct reference to something that Jarvin
(28:42):
has written his ideas about, like we need this red
Caesar when he says during an interview, we are in
a late Republican period. If we're going to push back
against it, we're going to have to get pretty wild
and pretty far out there and go in directions that
a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. And
you know what that means is this late Republican he's
talking about Republican Rome before Caesar, you know, makes his
(29:04):
play for power, like that's explicitly what he is comparing
it to. And it's because Yarvin's big thing is we
don't want a left or a right wing dictator. We
want a king for the whole country right that's going
to represent everybody, which is just not what kings do.
It's not what dictators do.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
This is so clearly there's also just like a fascist
line of argument, like an actual like actual like ideologically fascist,
and no people call like, you know, Reagan a fascist,
but like he's not, He's a neoliberal. Neoliberals suck. Yes,
these guys are going back like actual like fascist political theory.
That's what Mullbug is reading, that's what he's writing about.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
And in twenty twenty one, Vance is saying this, I
think Trump is going to run again in twenty twenty four.
I think that what Trump should do, if I was
giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid
level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace
them with our people. And when the courts stop, you
stand before the country and say the Chief Justice has
made his ruling, now let him enforce it, which he's
quoting Andrew Jackson there, but he's describing like the end
(30:02):
of democracy.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
A dictatorial takeover, right, and laying out with a plan
that is very similar to Project twenty twenty five. Yeah,
I know Vance does have something personal connections to because
a lot of his friends were involved in the planning
of that.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
But you can see Project twenty twenty five and what
Vance is saying here, these are all downstream of what
Yarvin's saying in twenty twelve of this rage acronym, replace
all government employees, right or retire all government employees. You know,
by the way, you will be glad to know that
by twenty twenty one, Yarvin has stopped openly using the
term dictator. So that's good. He just he just calls
it a monarchy a lot.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Now, Oh okay, that's good. Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Now. JD's pivot, which he often credits with his conversion
to Catholicism, although you can see he's been on this
road for much longer than that, was perfectly timed for
his Senate run in twenty twenty two. Peter Teel was
his biggest donor, providing fifteen million to the super Pack
that backed him, which at the time at least was
the largest amount ever given to boost a Senate candidate.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Yeah, as fifty million for a Senate run is crazy,
It's nuts.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
D been a long shot candidate at first because he's
very unlikable, but the Teal money allowed for a major
ad blitz and the kind of media prep work that
only a well funded pack can provide. His pack published
the data on an open Medium page with a username
at protect Ohio values forms, which allowed the pack to
send info and advice to Vance without violating federal campaign
(31:20):
finance loss. Vance had been hit early for comments made
a few years back negative to Trump, but he clawed
his way back into the MAGA good graces by appearing
on Breitbart News, Tucker Carlson's Fox Show, Steve Bannon's War
Room podcast, and most of all, by positioning to himself
as a violent opponent of immigration from a write up
in Politico. In February, Thompson, who's the guy running the pack,
(31:41):
posted a memo to the Medium site arguing that Vance
had an opening to zero win on immigration and border security,
noting that he had a personal connection to the issue
given his mother's struggles with drug addiction. The issue was
near and dear to the primary voters, the memo argued,
and crucially could help in nabbing Trump's support. To win
a Trump endorsement, a candidate has to show a growing
ballot share to get that account, and it has to
own a critical issue, the memo read. JD can do that,
(32:03):
and that's exactly what JD does. When he takes the
stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida later
that month, he focuses his speech entirely on immigration, and
when his campaign goes up with its first TV ad,
it shows a direct to camera Vance telling viewers that
he nearly lost his mother to poison coming across our border.
Now by mid April, Trump has become convinced that Vance's
(32:25):
past mean remarks were water under the bridge, and he
calls an associate of Peter Teal to say, Hey, I'm
moving closer to endorsing Vance. Teal by this point has
also introduced Vance to David Sachs, who adds another million
dollars to his super PACs war chest. On April fifteenth,
Convinced by Vance's rising poll numbers and impressive fundraising, Trump
makes an official endorsement this helps pull Vance over the top,
(32:47):
and he ekes out a narrow win in the election
that followed. The next year, Vance repaid the favor, writing
a January Wall Street Journal op at where he endorses
Trump as a candidate. In twenty twenty four, this was
back and this is the start of tour three. The
Republican primary is just gearing up, and the end of
it is in enough doubt. You can remember back then.
It sounds silly now, but people really thought Desant has
(33:07):
had a shot, right, And so is Vance's kind of
in before any of the other major Republican figures and
backing Trump for his reducts round right.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, He's like one of the first to fall in
line here.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Yeah. And there's a few people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders
had been seen as a potential Trump VP pick, but
she waits months to actually like endorse Trump officially. So
Vance gets in on the ground floor, and this impresses
Trump that he is someone who he can count on
to be loyal. Vance wins more praise the next month,
when a train carrying hazardous materials to rails in East
Palestine in Ohio, Trump makes a visit to the town
(33:41):
as one of the first stops on his campaign, and
Vance organizes the visit, and he does apparently a good
job of this. Trump says to his entourage, this guy
is turning out to be fucking incredible.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
Now.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
By this point, Vance has befriended Trump's oldest son, Donald
Trump Junior, and set himself to the task of well
and truly kissing ass to get on that twenty twenty
four ticket. By late January of this year, Vance and
his team had received enough friendly feedback from Trump World
that they decided to invest in a full court press.
Vance began showing up on TV networks that Trump considered enemies,
doing a reverse Buddhage edge and throwing himself into the
(34:14):
enemy camp to take shots on behalf of the boss.
He also devoted himself to raising money for Trump from
the Silicon Valley VC set. Most of these guys were teals, friends,
dudes like David Sachs. What finally put him over the top, though,
was an article Donald Trump Junior gave his dad from
bright Bart News about the man then seen as Trump's
most likely VP pick, Doug Bergham, governor of North Dakota.
(34:37):
The article's title was Carl Rove endorses Doug Burgham for
Vice president, and I do love that. Carl Rove's endorsement
is the fucking kiss of death right now for a
fucking VP candidate. Very funny place for his story to
have wound up. Not a bad call by Trump, though,
I gotta say, actually it is a bad call for Trump.
But also I get it. I read one Politico article
(34:58):
that argues this was the final straw for Trump. It
was this Carl Rove article. I can't actually speak to that.
It is worth noting that in the months leading up
to the RNC, Trump is also being subjected to a
charm campaign by all of Peter Teal's friends, this huge
pile of wealthy Silicon Valley investors from the Washington Post quote.
In the weeks before former President Donald Trump announced his
(35:20):
vice presidential pick, some of tech's biggest names launched a
quiet campaign to push for one of their own. Ohio
Senator JD. Vance. The former president, fielded repeated calls from
tech entrepreneur David Sachs, pallanteer advisor Jacob Helberg, and billionaire
venture capitalist Peter Teal, Vance's former employer and mentor employing
him to add the one time Silicon Valley investor to
the ticket. According to three people familiar with the entreaties,
(35:43):
all caps, we have a former tech VC in the
White House. Greatest country on Earth, Baby Deli and Ashparov,
of a partner at Teal's founder's fund, wrote on X
after the announcement of Vance's nomination, Dellian s Parova s
Parov something.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Like that, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I know it's it's fucking exhausting, but that is, you know,
the JD. Vance story more or less, that's where he
comes from. That's who wants him to be the VP.
It's all of these fucking ghouls who want to own
the world and become It's these people who have achieved
the highest level of financial success you can achieve in
any society on the earth right now, and they found
(36:22):
that it's kind of empty. And it's kind of empty
in part because people can still be mean to you
and they don't have to care what you believe just
because you have a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
They don't like neoliberal capitalism because it fundamentally still has
a shred of like a democratic value. Yeah, and that
makes them too mad. Yeah, So instead they are going
back to like a much a much more like archaic
system where they can still maintain their personal wealth while
being like very influential through like a dictatorial means. They're
(36:53):
still like fundamentally capitalists, but almost in like a more
like fascistic feudal sense. Yes, like they want to be lord. Well,
that's exactly its what that's what they really want.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
They are terrified of death. And what they're terrified of
more than anything. What scares the mostly about death is
the idea that like all the success they've seen goes.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Away, it's meaningless, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Fundamentally, all of this passes. No one is on top forever,
nobody is like matters.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
No one's going to care about PayPal in twenty years.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
That's the price of time, right, And they want to
stop the clock. That's fundamentally what near reactionaries are. There
are people who think I am special, I am super special.
The world should be oriented around recognizing how special I
am forever, and anything I can do to turn back
the clock is necessary justified like that, That's what these
(37:45):
people are, That's what they believe fundamentally.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
Like imagine being so mad that no one will remember
PayPal in two hundred years, that you try to install
a fascist takeover.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yes, Yes, of the United States of America, so that
PayPal always matters. It's the guys anyway, Garrison. That's the
James Donald Vance story. Not his name.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Is that his name?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
No, of course not. Maybe I forget. I forget. I
always forget what JD stands for, who cares? Who gives
a shit? Hopefully he's not gonna matter much longer.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
This is this is This is my biggest thing going
going into November, is that you know, if the Democrats
win on on like on their ticket, that still means
plenty of bad things around the world. Yeah, but I
also really don't want these freaks in there, Like I
really don't want them. They're they're like they're like spooky.
They're trying to do like this like like esoteric larp
(38:35):
in like the White House, like come on.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
And most of the things that need to happen for
the world to get better can't happen while these people
are in power right like or close to power like
they There needs to be damage done to them, and
I'm I'm hopeful about that if nothing else in this election, and.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Like electoral damages is only like one type. They have
to be like culturally humiliated, Like they have to be
like culturally like rejected, being like no, like you you
you are not actually the wizards of culture that you
kind of wanted to be, Like, no one likes what
you do, no one likes what you believe like that
that it has to be like this this larger this
larger like cultural battle. That's why they have like the
culture wars. This is like super important thing. That's why
(39:15):
they're so scared of like queer and trans people, especially
the queer and trans people like that are like influential,
whether they be like you know, like teachers, whether they
be working like in media, making movies, television, writing books.
That's why they're so freaked out with that kind of stuff.
That's why they're trying to get out of schools. That's
why they're trying to stop Woke Disney. It's because they
know that no one's gonna want to listen to these
freaks when like gay people can make a good art
(39:36):
or like give a good history lesson. Yeah, that's like
there's that's like the strongest like anecdote to these like
just really really bizarre like esoteric ramblings about wanting to
go back to like nineteen ten, like racist science and
just weird, weird shit.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Yeah, you know, I think that these guys delved too
deep and too greedily if we're going to continue the
Lord of the Rings rap diferences, which by god, they're
not going to let us stop doing so. And I
think that there was this thing we used to I
used to talk about a lot when I tried to
explain like far right terminology to people back in twenty nineteen,
twenty eighteen, five decades ago, a thousand years ago. That's
(40:16):
my Elron moment. I was there Garrison a thousand years ago.
We talked about like the term hide your power level, right,
which these Nazis used to use, and they've just completely
given up on that. No, and the thing that they
are seeing there was like all this. I was reading
that twenty twenty two article by Poe, which I think
is a really important snapshot because it's these people about
to head into twenty twenty four, and they they know
(40:38):
before the dims do how badly down Biden is. Right,
the Democrats have not really taking seriously what a dangerous
position Joe Biden was going to be in for reelection yet.
But they also think that like, wow, all these young
people are showing up at our lame parties. That means
there's a broader sweep. All young people are becoming like
closer to reactionaryas.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Becoming like all weird treadcats.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah, we're capturing the culture. And that's just absolutely not
what was happening. And it would have been obvious if
like they had been capable of actually like listening to people.
But what we're seeing now is they did the most
dangerous thing you could do. Is they predicted and understood
one thing about the future, but nothing else right. And
(41:21):
so they understood the weakness that Joe Biden represented and
kind of the weakness of his control over the Democratic Party,
but they did not understand that, like other things are possible, right,
and including the fact that like Joe Biden and largely
the other people who were running the Democratic Party might
come to understand that weakness too. And after a disastrous
(41:42):
debate and a shooting, go you know what, let's change course.
And I really think that that, above all else might
be What fucks them is they they completely came out
of the woodwork. They were tired of having to pretend
they didn't want a king. They thought their time had come,
and perhaps it has not. We'll still, we'll all see,
(42:02):
we'll all see.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
Well, I'm super excited to hear what kind of just
unhinged and bizarre things Tim Walls has done. Yeah, in
the next tale.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Yeah, I'm just going to accuse him of having been
the Zodiac killer. You know, that's worked on a couple
of guys.
Speaker 3 (42:18):
It seems to work.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Actually, yeah, so we're just going to do that. Call
it a night. Anyway, this has been jd vance. We've
been It could happen here, Go to hell, I.
Speaker 3 (42:28):
Love you, Clean your couch.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Clean your couch. Shit, I need to do that.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Host
Robert Evans
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