It Could Happen Here - JD Vance & Peter Thiel, An Ideological Love Story

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 on our future possible vice president, J.D. Vance. Garrison, how are you feeling today? Welcome back to the program. Thank you. I'm feeling pretty good. Yeah? Yeah, I got a great five hours of sleep.

I'm good to go. Oh, I slept 11. Good for you. No, I've also been in the researching bad people hole, which keeps me up late at night. 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 J.D. Vance. And, you know, I 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 but what i wanted to do was give the listener who i'm guessing has mostly just heard a few disjointed things about jd a few a few things what are two things maybe one specific thing one specific they probably they're probably aware of hillbilly elegy 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. If you have a cat and you're a single woman, you are ontologically evil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A sociopath. And so I wanted to provide some context for how he went from, if you can remember back to 2016, 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 Trumpism had infested and, you know, latched onto the minds of small town Americans, right? That's kind of how he was framed to 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 Peter Thiel, right? Many such cases. Yeah, as is often the case. He's a major part of like why things wind up where they are. The bones of J.D.'s background story are kind of important, so I'm just going to give them rapidly. He was born in August 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, born under the name James Donald Bowman. But his parents divorced when he was a toddler. His dad, his bio dad, is pretty much out of the picture right away.

He is eventually adopted by his mother's third husband, whose last name is Hamill, 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 autobiographical book, Hillbilly Elegy, which paints him as a member of the aggrieved and abused white underclass, the forgotten 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 J.D.'s book as kind of cynically positioned to take advantage of the liberal outpouring of sympathy for rural whites that followed Trump's 2016 victory and 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's support in 2016 were aggrieved but financially comfortable suburban white people. Vance did not write about poor folks addicted to oxy and the hollers with any real empathy. He painted them as helpless fools and mental children and 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 the U.S. 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, like, 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 he was, quote, lucky to escape any real fighting. After finishing his term, he got a B.A. in poli sci.

And I'm not saying that you have to fight for, you know, 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 when he goes into politics. Right. That's yeah, that's my allegation. Right. Not that there's anything wrong with not fighting. with not fighting 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 yeah in combat and vance has gone after him for that specifically yeah trying to like allude to like vance having more combat experience yeah both men did not like fire bullets at enemy combatants. 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. Sure.

Whereas you don't do 24 years in the National Guard, like, just to set up your political career. No. You do that because you want to be in the National Guard. Yes. Waltz was definitely more like a career man in that sense. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. After finishing his term, he got a B.A. in Poli Sci and Philosophy from Ohio State. And during his first year in college, he worked for a Republican state senator. He's going to

work for a couple of Republicans in his college and grad school, you know, law school years. Then he attended Yale Law School, where he made friends with Jamil Jivani, who would go on to be a 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 that 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 towards children

if you don't write the book Hillbilly Elegy. 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 Thiel. 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 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. Not as bad as dark enlightenment. It's not as bad as dark, and we not as bad as dark and we'll talk about 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 that's a term i've

used sometimes yeah yeah what time period is this is this like 2017 like where are we at here 2011 is when he sees peter teal speak at y, which he describes as like the moment around which his life pivots. So this is pre the publishing of his book? Yes, yes, yes. He publishes Hillbilly Elegy in 2016. Okay, so he kind of got in on like the ground floor of some of this kind of stuff. Yes, he is very early in Thiel 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 so sure 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 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 2007 to 2014 blogged prolifically as Mincius Moldbug. Now, Yarvin is a computer programmer. mold bug. Now, Yarvin 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 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 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 about how he wants to reorient society.

writes a series of essays about 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 neoreactionaries, the new right now. The basic idea is that this liberal nightmare hellscape can only be stopped and turned back by replacing democracy with an essentially monarchic system. Pogue describes Yarvin 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 2012, he proposed the acronym RAGE, Retire All Government Employees,

as a shorthand for a first step in 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 Yarvin's ideas because the way Yarvin writes, he spends most of his free time because he gets bought out of 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 500 bucks a month on books and reading like old reactionary tracts, like books from the 1800s 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 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. No, it makes it, it makes it seem like esoteric. It's like, there's some kind of like hidden, hidden knowledge. It's being like rediscovered that like holds the key to fix all of our

problems. Yes. He is. If you've read Ender's game, he's doing what Ender's brother does in Ender's game where he's writing his little essays for the internet, trying to like overthrow the government using them. And there's a 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 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 comes up with the term dark enlightenment for Curtis's writing. And this is the way in which a lot of these guys, a lot of the guys especially who are going to come into Yarvin's work around, you know, 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, right? And like Land was trying to do the same thing for like the previous, like 15 years. And he, 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.

Cause 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 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 it's also worth noting yarvin is the guy who introduces the term the red pill to right-wing politics, right? Oh, I didn't know that. Yes. As far as I've ever seen, Yarvin 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 a Yarvin original. He thinks The Matrix is a work of genius. Of course.

Which it is, but maybe not in the way that he thinks. Slightly different reasons. Yeah. So anyway, Peter Thiel falls in love because Thiel is, by 2009, Thiel's writing stuff about how he thinks democracy is incompatible with liberty, right? And when Peter Thiel refers to liberty, he's not talking about like your freedom to like to love the people that 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 Thiel by 2009 is already enraptured with these anti-democratic ideas. And he finds Yarvin. It's kind of unclear to me, does Yarvin actually start him on that road? I think it's more that he has started down that road. And he thinks Yarvin is doing a really good job of setting up what he's been thinking. So he starts pumping money into Yarvin. 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 are in alignment with what we might call mold buggy and thought. Right. And he he's doing that up to this present day. like the edgelordy and post-left-infected New People's Cinema Film Festival, which ended its week-long run of parties and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before NatCon began. He's long been a big donor to Republican political candidates, but in recent years, Teal has grown increasingly involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world, becoming something like a nefarious 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 are the people that that paragraph is referring to, right? Yeah. 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 2011, 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 Thiel was then, quote, possibly the smartest person I'd ever met. And this moment is the moment that his whole life pivots around, meeting Peter Thiel at Yale in 2011. We're going to talk about what comes after. But Garrison, you know what isn't receiving any money from Peter Thiel? We also cannot say that. There's no way to know what he's doing with this investment. It's entirely possible.

It's entirely possible that we are funded 100% by Peter Thiel. And if so, thank you. Got to get those Thiel bucks. Hey, guys. teal. And if so, thank you. Got to get those teal bucks. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know follow and admire join me every week for post run high it's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted pretty crazy and very fun listen to post run high on the iheartartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground

for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening

in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. or his relatives in Miami. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. I've just uncovered that Peter Thiel is the mind behind Chumba Casino. Garrison, this goes so much deeper than I thought. What if Peter Thiel instead just got really into sports betting, you know? Instead of dealing with all this weird, like, esoteric, traditionalist, like, 1880s racism philosophy. What if instead he just got really into, I don't know, the Bucs?

That's probably a sports team, right? He put $8 billion on the Raiders. That's right. He took a bath he's fucked he got addicted to it too god we could save so many lives sports betting really could save lives 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 absolutely not 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 know. But like, there's this whole new batch of like people who are like philosophically Catholicolic or like they're catholic in like a quote unquote hegelian sense when they cut when they construct these like larger models of like human evolution and they view like christianity as this like yes thing that will drive the human species towards its like perfected form and definitely the dark enlightenment people are a significant chunk of kind of what caused that to to develop and we're seeing that now with

like these fake movements like the hegelian e-girls which are kind of like the like weird stepchild of some of these like dimes square like influencer philosophy stuff yeah and i i would say he's definitely not a catholic in the sense that your aunt is right no no no no no no no no 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 that's that's the sense in which he's a Catholic. Right. So in 2016, the same year that Vance publishes Hillbilly Elegy and becomes a liberal darling, he joins Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm founded by Thiel. Peter Thiel and Vance, all of these guys,

pretty much every time they create a company, it's named after something in the Lord of the Rings. Fucking a J.R.R. Tolkien bullshit. He would be so unhappy with this. Because Tolkien was also a Catholic monarchist, but in a very different way. In a super different way, yes. So the two young men that Thiel adopts that he makes what are called generational bets in

is Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. And his bet is that if I really bankroll and back these guys, they are going to be major figures in U.S. politics, right, for decades to come. And his 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 bucks 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 150 million dollar fund out of washington that focuses on finding young companies in overlooked u.s, 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 Thiel is the guy who backs your new company entirely, right? Sure. I do love that Peter Thiel somehow picked the two most uncharismatic up-and-coming dudes. I mean, look at Peter. what does he know about charisma yeah but like it is fun that he he made these two bets and mark kelly just destroyed one of them yeah oh criticize the man for what you will but what are these weirdos go up against an astronaut on a public debate jesus christ you know say what you will about electoralism i'm excited to see the waltz vance debate because i think it'll be funny yeah well because vance has big daddy issues and waltz 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. They're part of a con. An evil monster creates them

to enslave you. If you are wearing one of the rings of power, you have been enslaved by Sauron. That's the point. They're very famously bad. Yeah. Yeah.

And of course, one of the major investments Narya Capital makes is into Palantir, which is also named after the Lord of the Rings. Also famously used by the evil wizard. Yes, famously used by the evil wizard. Now, in 2016, Vance portrayed himself as a never-Trumper, calling the future president a wannabe dictator. Wow. 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 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 populist Trumpism. The fact that he remained close to Teal during this whole period and that Teal spoke at the 2016 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 the Republicans. But he does not evince any kind of bigotry in his early life, particularly towards LGBT people. One of his best friends from law school is a transgender woman, Sophia Nelson. He describes her in Hillbilly Elegy 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 if you are, I'm sorry. Love you, JD. Sophia responded the next day saying, if you had written genderqueer radical pragmatist, nobody would know what you mean. Many such cases. Right. 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 Thiel himself, who has a very long, he has been

anti-trans and pushing anti-trans rhetoric for years before this was a mainstream thing on the right, you know, before the Matt Walsh types really started pivoting Republican messaging around it, right? Yeah. And I'm going 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 minutiae of daily life to weighty discussions of current events and public policy issues. Nelson attended Mr. Vance's wedding in Kentucky in 2014. They pondered doing a podcast together. He suggested they call it the Lunatic Fringe. But Nelson and Mr. Vance had a falling out in 2021 when Vance said he publicly supported an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for

minors, leading to a bitter exchange that deeply hurt Nelson. He 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. 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 J.D.

Vance. I mean, I mean, a proximity to political power is the driving force for a lot of a lot of like people who get into politics.D. Vance. I mean, I mean, a proximity to political power is the driving force for a lot of, a lot of like people who get into politics. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that's, that's it. Now it's relevant to 2021

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 2019. It had been backed by $100 million from Peter Thiel,

as well as funding by Eric Schmidt and Mark Andreessen. Their investments included Strive Asset Management, an investment fund started by Vivek Ramaswamy, who was Thiel's classmate at Yale. Oh, I did not know they were classmates. 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 economic conservative who was horrified by the bigotry and corruption of Trump world. But by 2021, with Trump out of office and Biden's presidency underway, Thiel made it clear that he needed something else from Vance. We get our best texture of what Vance believed by late 2021 from Pogue's Vanity Fair piece, which was written about a neo-reactionary summit in October of 2021. 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 oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancean view, this class has no stake in what people on the new right call the real economy, the farm and factory jobs that once disdained middle 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 told an interviewer, I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care about what happens to Ukraine. A flick at the fact that he thinks 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 18 to 45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl. His criticisms of big tech as enemies of Western civilization often get lost 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 as wages stagnate and technology feeds an epidemic of depression. Now, he is backed entirely by social media money. Teal is one of the major backers of facebook right of course um he is supported entirely by the money of the people he claims to hate who he claims are destroying america i do find this to be really interesting because it's like a more conservative right reaction to like right-wing neoliberalism right yes this is so different even though all these guys like kind of talk about how they're like they're like reaganites right they're really not no they're going back to a much more 1920s style of conservatism almost yes before like the southern split before like like new deal and we solidified more of like

the democrats being this liberal party this more fiscally conservative party on the right and then that kind of gave way to like that's 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 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. No. 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 you're viewing, like, you said, 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 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 agricultural

conglomerates, right? Like he abandoned this part of the country because he knows it sucks. Like, it's not like a pleasant place to live like a decent life. It's very hard. It's very difficult. 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 enterprises 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. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes,

entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the

people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run run high it's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted pretty crazy and very fun listen to post run high on the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that

actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So by late 2021, Curtis Yarvin is still a major figure in the neo-reactionary movement. Vance has started quoting him kind of obliquely. And in fact, during this 2021 National Conservative Conference that Pogue pivots on. Vance makes direct reference to something that Yarvin 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 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. This is so clearly there's also just like a fascist line of argument like an actual like actual like like ideologically fascist i know people call like you know reagan a fascist but like he's not he's he's a neoliberal new neoliberals suck yes these guys are going back like actual like fascist political

theory that's what moldbug is reading that's what he's writing about. And in 2021, Vance is saying this. I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. 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 of democracy. A dictatorial takeover. Right. And laying out with a plan that is very similar to Project 2025, which I know Vance does have some personal connections to because a lot of his friends were involved in the planning of that. But you can see Project 2025 and what Vance is saying here, these are all downstream of what

Yarvin's saying in 2012 of this RAGE acronym, Replace All Government Employees, right, or Retire All Government Employees, you know? Yep. By the way, you will be glad to know that by 2021, Yarvin has stopped openly using the term dictator, so that's good. He just calls it a monarchy a lot now. Oh, okay, that's good. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Now, J.D.'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 2022. Peter Thiel was his biggest donor, providing $15 million to the super PAC that backed him, which at the time, at least, was the largest amount ever given to boost a Senate candidate. Yeah, $15 million for a Senate run is crazy. It's nuts. J.D. had been a long-shot candidate at first because he's very unlikable, but the teal money allowed for major ad blitz and the kind of media prep work that only a well-funded PAC can provide. His PAC published

the data on an open Medium page with a username at ProtectOhioValuesForms, which allowed the PAC to send info and advice to Vance without violating federal campaign finance laws. 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 PAC, posted a memo toup in Politico. In February, Thompson, who's the guy running the PAC, posted a memo to the Medium site arguing that Vance had an opening to zero in 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, a candidate has to own a critical issue, the memo read. J.D. can do that. And that's exactly what J.D. 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 past mean remarks were water under the bridge, and he calls an associate of Peter Thiel to say, hey,

I'm moving closer to endorsing Vance. Thiel, by this point, has also introduced Vance to David Sachs, who adds another million dollars to his super PACs war chest. On April 15th, convinced by Vance's rising poll numbers and impressive fundraising, Trump makes an official endorsement. This helps pull Vance over the top, 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-ed where he endorses Trump as a candidate in 2024. This was back, and this is the start of 2023. 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 DeSantis had a shot, right? And so he is, Vance is kind of in before any of the other major Republican figures in backing Trump for his redux round, right? Yeah, he's like one of the first to fall in line here. 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 derails in East Palestine, Ohio. Trump makes a visit to the town 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. Now, by this point, Vance has befriended Trump's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and set himself to the task of well and truly kissing ass to get on that 2024 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 Buttigieg and throwing himself into the 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 Teal's friends, dudes like David Sachs. What finally put him over the top, though, was an article Donald Trump Jr. gave his dad from Breitbart News about the man then seen as Trump's most likely VP pick, Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota. The article's title was, Carl Rove Endorses Doug Burgum 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 that argues this was the final straw for Trump. It was this Karl 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 Thiel'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 vice presidential pick, some of tech's biggest names launched a quiet campaign to push for one of their own, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. The former president fielded repeated calls from tech entrepreneur David Sachs, Palantir advisor Jacob Helberg, and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Vance's former employer and mentor, imploring him to add the one-time Silicon Valley investor to the ticket, according to three people familiar with the entreaties.

All caps. We have a former tech VC in the White House. Greatest country on Earth, baby. Delian Ashparov, a partner at Teal's Founders Fund, wrote on X after the announcement of Vance's nomination. Delian Ashparov? Ashparov? Something like that. Jesus Christ.

I know. It's fucking exhausting. But that is, you know, the J.D. 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 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 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 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 dictatorial means they're still like fundamentally capitalists but almost in like a more like fascistic feudal sense yes we're like they want to be lords well that's exactly it that's what that's what they really want they are terrified

of death and what they're terrified of more than anything what scares them mostly about death is the idea that like all the success they've seen goes away right it's meaningless it doesn't matter fundamentally all of this passes no one no one is on top forever. Nobody is like matters. No one's going to care about PayPal in 20 years. That's the price of time, right? And they want to stop the clock. That's fundamentally what near reactionaries are. They 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's what these people are. That's what they believe fundamentally. Like imagine being so mad that no one will remember PayPal in 200 years that you try to install a fascist takeover.

Yes, yes. Of the United States of America. So that PayPal always matters. It's these fucking guys. Anyway, Garrison, that's the James Donald Vance story. Not his name. Is that his name? 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 going to matter much longer. This is my biggest thing going into November is that, you know, if the 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 in like the white house like come on 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 like electoral damage 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 are not actually the wizards of culture that you kind of want to be like no one likes what you do no one likes what you believe like 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 they're so scared of like queer and trans people especially 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 about 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 going to want to listen to these freaks when like gay people can make a good art or like give a good history lesson yeah that 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 1910 like race science and just weird weird shit yeah you know i i think that these guys delved too deep and too greedily if we're going to continue the lord of the rings references which by god they're not gonna let us stop doing so and i 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 2019 2018 five decades ago a thousand years ago that's my elrond 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 2022 article by Pogue, which I think is a really important snapshot because it's these people about to head into 2024. And they know before the dims do how badly down Biden is, right? The Democrats have not really taken 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 reactionaries. They're becoming like all weird trad cats 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 they predicted

and understood one thing about the future but but nothing else, right? And 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 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 uh we'll still we'll all see we'll all see well i'm super excited to hear what kind of just unhinged and bizarre things tim walls has done yeah in the next tale yeah i'm just going to accuse him of having been the zodiac killer you know that that's worked on a couple of guys it seems to work, 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 love you. Clean your couch. Clean your couch.

Shit, I need to do that. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.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 coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished

and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found

off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.