The Rise of JD Vance: Big Tech, Rightwing Politics, and Liberal Support

[Music] we eat Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for breakfast Taco Bell for lunch and McDonald's for dinner we rarely cook even though it's cheaper and better for the body and soul people talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown you can walk through a town where 30% of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and not find a single person aware of his own laziness we talk to our children about responsibility but we never walk the walk JD Vance is the Republican Vice Presidential nominee he is conservative religious a tech millionaire and he's branded himself as a populist he hit the national scene as an author with his bestseller hillbilly elgy he told the story of his rough upbringing in Ohio and Kentucky with a drug addicted mother stepdads in and out of his life and a set of grandparents who had kind of aged in to Reliable caretakers the story Illustrated how poor and working-class people from the region live and it was celebrated by liberals in particular I've read books like hillbilly ele several positive reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere and claimed movie only a couple years later directed by Ron Howard one convenient feature of the movie is that it depicts the trappings of poverty without giving priority to the social mechanisms that allow for it in fact the book assures the reader that people often share a lot of the blame for their own crappy situations with subtle and vague anti-intellectual Jabs and Judgment of who he sees as lazy this is the faux populism of JD Dan so I opened with passages from hillbilly elery Vance's philosophy is one that highlights personal responsibility people should know better than to eat this food they should know to work hard so they aren't forced to game the welfare system they should know not to yell at their kids or have volatile relationships or do drugs and what is deemphasized is the fact that people respond to the environments in which they exist example probably very few people actually see this as an ideal breakfast people buy this and other ultr processed food because it makes up 70% of the US food supply and we're trained to Crave these foods and recognize their Brands during every commercial break the book isn't just about poverty it's about white poverty the disaffected working class whose jobs have been shift overseas and now they're Trump voters the Holy Grail of voting blocks what do you tell people about the folks you grew up with and specifically how the Democrats lost support in that specific community and people at it up David Brooks writes we all have a sense of what the workingclass honor code was but if you want a refresher I recommend JD Vance's new book hillbilly elery or from Buck hillbilly elery is such an important book vces is a unique voice he offers a tough but sympathetic glimpse into a pocket of White America that is too easily lampooned in popular culture and he does it as only someone who's lived in that world can in 2016 2017 Vance made 31 appearances on CNN and MSNBC and only two on Fox because he was the perfect conservative for 2016 essentially a never Trumper who could be a medium through which to learn about the country's widest and least economically mobile strata he wrote for the New York Times about a better version of conservatism that has passed he wrote an article titled a republican healthc care fix now he doesn't actually offer a solution in it but he does explain that the gop's plan to gut the ACA would leave the most vulnerable without coverage he doesn't quite believe in let people die in the street but he hasn't fully invested himself in really keeping that from happening now by 2013 he had gone from a poor kid in Ohio to finishing Yale law school and being a contributor to the National Review soon after he got a job working for Senator John cornin and then a job at the Law Firm sidley Austin where the starting salary for first year associates is currently close to a qu million after a couple years of that he was off to be a principal at Peter Teal's firm mithil capital so by the time he got his book on the New York Times bestseller list he was making serious money working in Silicon Valley in fact I would guess that his status inventure capital and connections with Silicon Valley probably played a role in how he was able to get media appearances and promote his book so effectively as a firsttime author which would be very ironic because that would mean that he parlayed his Elite Venture Capital status into nationally recognized workingclass credibility so last year he went down to a UAW picket line and marched with the workers striking against the big three auto manufacturers he's also had some tough rhetoric about standing up to W Street Wall Street Barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business but Wall Street isn't the only Hub of finance and Industry in June Vance sat down to a $300,000 a seat fundraiser for Donald Trump in Silicon Valley at the table was David Sachs Peter teal obviously and other wealthy Tech mobils and when someone pulled the room as to who Trump should pick as his VP they all said Vance and there it was right after Vance was announced as the VP Tech money started pouring in from people like Crypt billionaire winkl Vos twins the co-founder of data analytics firm paler Joe Lonsdale Doug Leon of powerful VC Sequoia Capital Elon Musk said he would be donating $45 million a month to a prot trump pack and given that if and when as Harold Myerson points out the UAW throws picket lines around Elon musk's Tesla factories it's hard to believe he'll Walk the Line because musk is totally against unions Peter teal is totally against unions Advance is at best unreliable do you think your party needs to take a different approach to organize labor but I think it's going to be Case by case right I mean the the the the way that I've approached organized labor and I have good relationships with some unions and very not good relationships with others but if if you're let's say a um the Starbucks Barista Union and you're getting involved in the Israel hom fight and you're taking the side of Hamas then my reaction is going to be well one what does it have to do with higher wages for Baristas and two why are you injecting yourself into a leftwing political argument that you have no business addressing so does that mean that Vance doesn't support the UAW after all because since December the UAW has been calling for a ceasefire he was also opposed to the proa Apparently in part because he thought it was dumb to just hand power over to union leaders who were anti-republican Vance and his funders are generally hostile to iions and thus hostile to expanding the self-determination of workers and actually you can find examples of him choosing corporations over people even in Hill bology he has a passage about payday lending in which he explains that once while in college he submitted a rent check knowing he didn't have enough money in his account so to avoid an overdraft fee from his bank he took out a 3-day loan paid a few dollars in interest but all worked out fine well as it happens he worked at the Ohio State Senate at the time and they were in the process of passing some legislation to rein in Payday lending the senator you worked for Robert Schuler was against the legislation Vance said he didn't know why but he indicated that he was glad the senator was against it because Vance expressed that he and his people belonged to a shadow economy that lawmakers didn't really grasp these high futen lawmakers uninitiated with regard to this parallel economy just see payday lenders as predatory but they didn't even factor in situations like vces where a Payday lender just worked out perfectly the payday lending industry had exploded in Ohio going from 106 stores in 1997 to more than 1,600 in 2008 turns out it's quite profitable to hand out loans at an annual interest rate of 391 per. and the most profitable customers are not people like Vance who pay back their loans on time it's the people who get trapped in debt Cycles now the legislation that his Senator didn't support was called the short term lender law and one thing it did was cap interest rates at 28% not 391 so if you took out $100 you would end up paying back $102 instead of $115 the Bill's primary opponents were obviously payday lenders and politicians like the one Vance worked for who happen to have taken campaign contributions from payday lenders but fortunately it became law anyway and it was later put to a ballot referendum where the people people of Ohio chose to uphold the law so if Vance is correct that opposing payday lenders wholesale is evidence that the political Elites don't understand the regular people of Ohio the regular people of Ohio also don't understand the regular people of Ohio and now to get even further away from anything regular I'd like to read you a very strange story that I swear has a point Emma has completed the formal Catholic process to have a ritual exorcism this as distinct from the Deliverance prayers that the IST had been saying over her to limited effect she has been formally examined by a psychiatrist who has certified that there is no known medical or natural cause for the things that she is suffering and that manifest themselves through her I paid a call on Nathan and Emma at their apartment her face betrayed signs of an internal struggle suddenly her head swung back and to the left and a deep voice said through her she was instantly back to herself and said weakly that's not me that was written by R Dre about his real friend who they really believed was under demonic possession now I certainly hope she got help for whatever she was actually suffering from because it wasn't demonic possession because that's not real what is real is the friendship between Rod Dre and JD Vance Dre is an Orthodox Christian who writes about the world with the kind of moral Panic you would expect from someone who thought The Exorcist was a documentary obviously extremely religious very concerned as advances with the birth rate for Dre the idea that gays can marry and adopt would fall under the category of radical gay rights which he's praised Hungary for not tolerating part of why he thinks rights like that need to be reigned in is that fostering a pro- family culture and privileging traditional marriage is crucial for the birth rate he also believes that to solve this necessitates some kind of religious revival in dr's book live not by lies a manual for Christian dissident he writes that liberalism's admirable care for the weak and marginalized is fast turning into a monstrous ideology that if it is not stopped will transform liberal democracy into a softer therapeutic form of totalitarianism this is a book JD Vance has promoted and part of resisting an increasingly secular society for Dre would be to strengthen one's own religiousness and ties to the religious community which is something JD Vance has been doing over the past few years Dr was actually at Vance's baptism into Catholicism in 2019 so religiously informed fear of societal degradation is you know something on Vance's mind but as far as his actual legislative record goes he's proposed a bill called No Obamacare for illegal aliens a bill to make English the official language of the United States and a bill to keep colleges that employ undocumented immigrants from receiving federal funds okay sure he's a nativist but what about his sweet sweet workers his people well let's take this example Vance opposed EPA rules that would limit cancer-causing chemicals for steel workers part of the steel supply chain is the production of coke which entails heating up coal to 2,000 de the pollutants emitted by this process are so harmful to the surrounding area that when a coal plant in Pittsburgh shuttered in 2016 visits to the emergency room for cardiovascular issues dropped by 42% the following week so the EPA has rules requiring the monitor of emissions so that these plants weren't for example leaking several times the recommended limit of cancer causing Benzene but Vance intervened more concerned with maintaining steel production and now the epa's rules are weaker almost half the coke production plants in the US don't even require Benzene monitoring now which would be another instance in which Vance took the side of big business over workers now one thing I think this really speaks to is the irony of the obsession with never Trump Republicans and how much attention they've gotten from liberals that there is a brand of liberal that is still so excited to talk to any anti-trump conservative that they will take a JD Vance look clear past his resentment for the demographic he purports to speak for look past his politics look past his career and the people he surrounds himself with and actually end up promoting a future Trump running mate and look his Senate campaign was floated by millions of dollars from Peter teal so whether or not he had become famous from Hill Del elogy he probably still would have become Senator but as far as populism goes it might be his brand but a lot of the actual work he's done in the Senate has either been exclusionary attempts to strip services from people or supportive of some kind of industry and that will do it for me my name is Spencer Snider if you found this video helpful make sure you are subscribed to Breaking points you can also find me on Twitter or at my own channel liking and sharing always help thank you to Breaking points thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one