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March 22, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:03:03
A CONVERSATION WITH J.D. VANCE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep51
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Coming up, a wide-ranging conversation with J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
We're going to talk illegal immigration, cancel culture, and white privilege.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
In this special episode, we're going to be talking in depth with author J.D. Vance.
Who wrote Hillbilly Elegy, a terrific book, which also became a Netflix movie directed by Ron Howard.
I want to talk about immigration.
I want to talk about cancel culture.
I also want to talk about white privilege, the controversy involving Asian Americans and hate crimes.
A lot of good stuff. But I thought in this opening monologue I would talk about immigration on a practical level because I went through it.
Debbie, my wife, and I are both immigrants.
We've sort of been through a process.
We've grown up in other countries.
And I want to talk about how that works or in some cases doesn't work.
Well, in my case, it did work.
I came to America as an exchange student, but I wasn't planning to stay here.
It's really in college that I fell in love with America and the people of America and the ideas that built America.
And I also saw that I could do things with my life in America, like become a writer.
Earlier, I had approached my father about the idea of becoming a writer in India, and my dad goes, well, yeah, you sort of can do that, but you're probably going to have to become a chartered accountant or sell insurance, and then you can kind of write on the side, because writing was not, at that time anyway, at least a serious or developed profession where you would actually think about making a living that way.
So, I applied for American citizenship.
Now, I began the process in 1983, right after I graduated from Dartmouth.
Interestingly, I didn't become a citizen until 1991.
So, it shows you that it's a time-consuming process.
And in my case, to go from student, student visa, to green card, which is to say permanent resident, to citizen, Well, it took 8 years.
It's not only time consuming, it costs a lot of money.
I had to hire an immigration attorney and go through an elaborate process.
It cost me, if I remember at that time, $2,000 or $3,000.
But it was a great deal of money for me, which I didn't really have.
I had to earn it in order to spend it.
And it was a very arduous process.
In fact, the cost for me wasn't just the cost of the lawyer.
It was the cost of having to take a lower paying job with an employer who was willing to sponsor me.
So I applied for a job that at that time paid something like $18,000 a year.
Seems preposterously low now, I guess.
But my employers, when they realized that I needed them to sponsor me, that they had to go through a process, they're like, okay, well, we'll pay you $14,000 or $14,500.
So I took a big pay cut because I needed someone who would kind of walk me through the process.
And these people had to buy ads in the New York Times advertising the job I was applying for.
They had to prove that there was no willing and employable American who would take that job.
They had to show that I had a range of skills from writing to editing to fundraising, a familiarity with the Ivy League.
This was for a magazine editorship at Princeton.
So the bottom line of it is this is the process and it's not easy.
And it's particularly hard when you don't have a lot of money and you're always at the risk that your time will run out and you'll be basically sent back to your home country.
Now, this is the line that immigrants cut.
The illegals, they jump ahead of this line.
They basically go, here's my starving kid, Biden, let me in!
So the idea here is that just because you can show up at the border and produce, you may say, a hard luck story, you're basically claiming priority over all of us.
Many of us from distant countries, we don't have a border, we don't have a fence to jump through, but we stand in a very long line, and the line is even longer now than it was when I applied to get in.
Now, the other point is that immigrants are a walking refutation of the idea that all cultures are equal.
That was one of the silly doctrines that I was taught at Dartmouth.
All cultures, Dinesh, are basically equal.
No, no culture is better or worse, superior or inferior to any other.
And this was taught to me by the sort of anti-racist.
They say this because they think that to say that any culture is better is to give fuel to the idea of racism.
But every immigrant knows that they're lying through their teeth.
Why? Because we are walking.
We are voluntarily leaving one culture and coming to another.
So in that very act, the immigrant is affirming the superiority of some culture, the cultures that they're moving to, and the relative inferiority of their own culture, which they are walking away from.
Bottom line of it is cultures that attract people are better.
Cultures that people are trying to leave or walk away from are worse.
Now, the irony of all this is that we now have this ideology that's being propagandized through the media and through schools.
Critical race theory. And of course the premise of critical race theory is that America is horrible.
America is deeply racist and it's not just episodic.
It's not just here or there. It's structurally racist.
It's built into our institutions.
It has been since 1619.
And here's my question. If America is so horrible...
If it's particularly discriminatory and evil toward blacks and other minorities, black and brown people, why are the black and brown people trying to come to America?
Haven't they been able to read all these critical race studies analyses that tell them, don't come to America, you're probably better off in your own country, less racism, less structural discrimination, more people who look exactly like you?
Evidently, the immigrants know that this is all massive BS. They obviously pay no attention to it at all.
And the critical theory people also know it's P.S. Why?
Because if they really believe their own nonsense, then they would say, we should not allow immigrants into this country.
It's very inhuman to take people, particularly brown and black people, and allow them to come to this horrible country.
Do Jews try to break into Nazi Germany?
No! Why would you?
And if Nazi Germany is anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, the Jews are going to stay away.
Well, if America is so racist, then presumably the minorities would want to stay away, but they don't want to stay away.
And even the critical race theory people are dead silent on this topic, I think because they know deep down...
That their own ideology is a massive fiction.
It's a massive fiction with a political purpose to gain more power, to gain more institutional control, to sort of play a fast one on the American people.
But of course, the immigrants are listening and laughing and paying no attention to it and trying really hard to come across the border.
And at the very least, what that shows is that America, even for people of color, is still a pretty darn good place to live.
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I'm really happy to invite author J.D. Vance to this episode of the podcast for kind of a wide-ranging conversation.
But we're going to begin by talking in some depth about the crisis at the border.
J.D., thanks for joining the show.
It's great to have you.
And if I could begin, we seem to be facing an unprecedented situation at the border.
And what makes it so unprecedented is that this is not your ordinary, you may say home invasion, but it's a home invasion at the behest, at the almost you could say invitation of the Biden administration.
During the campaign, Biden was almost blunt in saying, Hey, I'm gonna do the exact opposite of what Trump did.
And I want to play a short clip of an interview with some migrants talking about why they decided to come.
Listen. You have tried to do this when Donald Trump was president?
Definitely not. Definitely.
We had the chance, you know.
We used to watch the news and I definitely won't do this.
So did you come here because Joe Biden was elected president?
Basically. Basically.
So that's Martha Raddatz talking to migrants on the border, and they're basically saying, yeah, Biden told us to come, that's why we're here.
So is this a home invitation, kind of invasion at the invitation of the man of the house, you might say?
Yeah, I think unfortunately it is, Denation.
You've seen clips like that from a number of different mainstream outlets, which is interesting because It's a border crisis and to really cover it in the way that it needs to be covered.
What you're seeing now is the problem is so out of control that they just can't hide it anymore.
I think that you're so finally seeing the press really open its eyes and cover what's going on at the southern border.
And unfortunately, you know, it's a pretty simple incentive versus discipline.
When you invite people to come in and you tell them that there won't be enforcement at the border, the natural conclusion is people say, all right, now is the time to go.
Let's pick up and pack our bags.
We know that now we can get across.
And that's the implicit invitation, in some ways an explicit invitation, that Biden personally or folks in his administration have offered is, yeah, if you come across the border now, maybe if you send your kid across the border unaccompanied, We're going to have a totally indifferent enforcement mechanism.
It's going to be easier to make it across.
Once you're across, it's going to be easier to stay.
And it's almost ridiculous that we wouldn't have assumed that this would cause a more crisis in the first place.
It's like when people think that it's easier to come, that if they get across, they're gonna be rewarded for it, then of course they're gonna come.
That's basic human nature.
Somebody extends you an invitation, and if you're a desperate person, you're going to accept it.
Unfortunately, them accepting that invitation comes at great personal costs, of course, to them as Central Americans making a very treacherous journey.
It also comes at really negative costs to a lot of people in the United States who are gonna suffer the consequences of this border crisis.
Now, there's been some press reporting about the, how all of this has turned into a smuggling operation.
The New York Times, for example, talks about the fact that you've got these smugglers' operations and there are all these different rates that you have to pay.
If you're a Mexican, you pay $4,000.
And if you're further in South America, you pay more.
If you're Chinese or you're Iranian, you pay a different rate.
And then they have a system of wristbands that they use to identify you.
So what's going on is essentially it seems like Biden has licensed a massive criminal operation.
And then if you go further back and you follow these caravans, now this reporting has been mainly in conservative media, but...
A caravan of thousands of people can't move hundreds of miles on its own.
No one's even going to get the idea to do that.
So there has to be a kind of elaborate network of medical facilities.
Somebody's giving you maps.
Somebody's giving you phone cards so you can call home.
So there's an international left that is working in conjunction with the American left.
To move all these people toward the border, and it seems to be an operation that is, in some senses, quite deliberate.
This is not a spontaneous response to famine, but rather it is an organized operation to sort of breach the fence of the United States, a fence that apparently was holding up pretty well under Trump, but now all bets are off.
Yeah, it's a very interesting way to put it.
They've licensed this massive criminal organization.
And to your point, it really is a massive organization.
You need logistics support.
You need a lot of intelligence to move that large number of people.
You obviously need to feed them.
You need to provide them water. And doing that over a long and treacherous journey, when you have so many people, it really is a sophisticated criminal operation.
And unfortunately, if you ask yourself who's been empowered by this, It really is.
You have these incredibly large, complex Mexican and other gangs who are dealing drugs.
They're doing human smuggling.
And all of them have become empowered by this.
You've given them a massive new line of business by creating this incentive for people to come illegally across the border.
So these organizations, of course, already were very powerful before the current border crisis.
But now they have thousands of new customers.
They're able to earn millions and tens of millions of new dollars.
And of course, that will have negative consequences for both the people that they're transporting and And the people who are going to have more criminal gangs and more drugs in their community here on our side of the border in America.
Now, this is often justified in terms of humanitarian motives.
Even under Trump, there was a lot of imagery of kids in cages.
So you get the idea that the people, at least on this side of the fence, who are encouraging this, are motivated by the most noble sentiments of the world.
But isn't it a fact that if these immigrants did not provide A, cheap labor, and B, potential votes for the Democrats, That the very same people who are saying, let him come, would be running down to the border to erect a wall taller than any Donald Trump could have imagined.
In other words, what I'm getting at is, while the rhetoric is humanitarian, isn't it true that this is a very cynical, self-interested operation being mounted by people in America for their own benefit?
That's exactly right. I think it's always important to ask who benefits from what's going on and who really suffers from what's going on.
We know who suffers. It's American citizens.
It's the Central Americans who are being trafficked across the border.
It's the children who are being used sometimes as sex slaves for Mexican drug cartels.
We know who suffers from this.
Of course, it's people in my community who are going to have more meth, more heroin into their communities, more overdose deaths because of it.
It's pretty clear who suffers from it, who benefits from it.
Well, we just talked about these massive Mexican drug cartels and criminal gangs who benefit.
Who also benefits, of course, is massive American multinational corporations.
They're kind of American. They're kind of multinational.
But one of the things that unifies them as a philosophy is they love cheap labor.
And if you look at our immigration policy, if you look at who's supporting our immigration policy, who's donating to the political candidates that enact that policy, it's very often big corporations who don't care about their own country.
They just want cheap labor.
They want cheap labor because it benefits their share price.
They want cheap labor because it makes their lavish lifestyle Much cheaper to actually live.
And again, it's kind of deranged that in the name of compassion, we've allowed this incredible crisis that's harming little people, that's harming working people on both sides of the border, and it's benefiting these massive criminal gangs and massive corporations.
It's really sick if you think about what's going on.
We're coming right back with J.D. Vance to talk more about why the corporations, which used to lean Republican, now like the Democrats because they love cheap labor.
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Back with author J.D. Vanson, we're talking a little in depth about the immigration issue.
Now, recently, Nancy Pelosi made a very interesting statement about how the illegals and the dreamers are sort of the true embodiments of the American dream.
Listen. This legislation is protecting DREAMers and TPS and DED recipients, honors the truth that immigrants are the constant reinvigoration of our country.
When they come here with their hopes and dreams and aspirations, these parents bringing their children their hopes and dreams and aspirations for a better future for their children, that courage, that determination, those aspirations are American traits, and they all make America more American with all of that.
Indeed, they are true and legitimate heirs, these dreamers are, of our founders.
Now, when Nancy Pelosi uses this rhetoric, and you know, you can imagine, J.D., it resonates with me because, of course, I came to America for this American dream.
I was, in a sense, dreaming the dream before I even got here.
But she's not referring to me.
She's referring to a different type of immigrant.
That's the underlying message that is not part of what she's saying.
I want to talk about a very eye-opening op-ed that you just wrote.
This was in Newsweek about illegal immigration.
You started it by talking about you and your wife...
Who I believe is Indian American by background.
But anyway, you were talking about the two of you were at what you call a Master of the Universe event.
An event with all these social elites and business elites.
Tell us a little bit about this event and what you heard there that caused your ears and your wife's ears to perk up.
Sure. Well, as you know, Dinesh, these events are pretty common.
You know, we call them cocktail parties, their dinners, their resort functions, where everybody goes to the same fancy hotel and really sort of celebrate how in control and how wealthy they are in our entire society.
It's a pretty fascinating dynamic.
But at this one in particular, this was in 2018, I believe, I was seated next to my wife, of course, and also to a large hotel multinational CEO. And he was talking about how he had to raise wages because of Donald Trump's immigration policies.
And I was sort of like, oh, that's an interesting comment.
Let's talk a little bit more about that.
He said, look, in the past, if I needed more laborers in my hotel, then I could just go to the illegal immigrant population.
There were always people coming in.
I could always continue to fill the labor pool with those people.
But now that we don't have those people to replace and to fill Our hotel labor force.
Now I just have to actually recruit Americans to do those jobs and I have to pay them more money.
And it occurred to me, first of all, there were two really sort of fundamental insights that I had about this moment.
The first is this guy was really frustrated.
One of the wealthiest people in the world, of course, that he had to pay his people more money, working in middle class people, a better wage so that they could live their lives.
I just thought, you know, this is such a ridiculous way to think about your own workers and your own people.
The second thing is that it made it clear how sometimes what's framed as compassion for illegal immigration is just raw, cynical economic self-interest from our economic elites.
That what he saw is that a tight border was bad for his bottom line.
If he couldn't import low-wage immigration or low-wage immigrants into his hotel workforce, then he was going to have to pay more people money, and he didn't like that.
And my wife, who always asks me, you seem to, the more you go to these events, the more you get frustrated with these people.
I'm always curious why.
And she sat at that dinner with me and sort of listened to this with her jaw on the floor, and then afterwards said, yeah, I can understand why you don't like these people very much.
Well, it's such a contrast it flashes my mind back to Henry Ford When Henry Ford was first making the automobile, he realized very few of my workers could afford an automobile.
So he said, you know what, if I'm going to create a mass-market automobile for America, I've got to pay these guys more.
I've got to pay them more and I've got to make a cheaper car because the combination of me paying better wages and making a cheaper car is going to allow my type of worker to go buy my type of car.
And in the end, so that's an enlightened concept of self-interest, whereas it appears that the dude you're talking about is sort of the bad CEO because this guy, first of all, cares nothing about him.
He cares nothing about being in America, having all the opportunities America provides.
He's perfectly willing to screw over his fellow American if he can get an elite.
So he's willing to break the law and he's also willing to undercut American wages, all because he wants to be, as you say, even richer than he already is.
Yeah, that's a really smart point.
And, you know, one of the things that Peter Thiel, the great investor and social commentator, said is that, you know, in the 1950s, you can make a really good argument that what was good for GM is good for America.
It's not totally true that in the 2020s, what's good for Google is good for America, because, you know, so many of our business class, they've divorced their sense of economic self-interest from the broader community and the broader nation state.
Like you said, this enlightened sense of self-interest that recognized that Henry Ford is going to get a lot wealthier if his workers are doing well, if his nation is doing well.
You have a lot of these modern business elites who don't see any difference between their own country and China, who don't really care about their own communities in the same way, who don't care about their workers in the same way.
And I unfortunately think that we're getting to a point where so many of these multinationals care more about other people, care more about people outside of their own borders, care more about foreign governments that don't share our values as Americans, that we're in a really dangerous period where we can't always, as conservatives, count on the business interests of folks anymore.
I think, by the way, this is a big reason why our corporations have become so woke It's because if they were invested in their own workers, invested in their own communities, if they cared more about the American nation, then they would recognize that going off in this hyper-woke, anti-American direction would be bad for their bottom line.
But if they're increasingly more invested in foreign labor and increasingly more invested in foreign governments, that starts to really break the chain between the nation-state on the one hand and the businesses that help build the nation on the other hand.
Now, are we seeing a movement away from this idea that we belong to a country?
I say this because nationalism, the idea that we love our country, is not a phenomenon that goes back thousands of years.
It's a phenomenon that goes back hundreds of years, when suddenly people began to feel, I'm an Italian, I'm a Frenchman, I'm an American, and they saw...
A commonality among your fellow citizens.
I think even today it's true that if Americans see each other on the Champs-Élysées or in some place in Korea, they immediately recognize each other.
So they've got habits and mores in common.
But it could also be that, at least as far as these CEOs are concerned, that they are now identifying more with their racial identity.
I have white privilege.
As you say, they're woke.
They're into all that. But you ask them about the American flag, the American anthem, the kind of insignia of American membership, and it doesn't seem to resonate with them.
Or at least they're perfectly willing to have their employees spurn the flag or take a knee for the anthem.
They're against the country, even though they're in favor of all these other forms of identity, which apparently have come to center stage.
Yeah, I really hope that we're not going down that pathway because I think it's a very dangerous place for us to go.
And I think one of the lessons of the past few hundred years of history is that this multi-ethnic sense of American nationhood that we've had, it really works for us.
You know, you mentioned I'm married to an Indian immigrant.
We've always felt like this country belongs to us and like we belong to the country.
That's a very important and a very unifying thing.
But when you start to organize your identity around other things, it can be a little bit more precarious.
I think a healthy way to organize your identity is around a common faith, a common religion.
But when you start to organize your identity around your racial or ethnic heritage or other things, then it can lead to a dark and dangerous place.
And I think increasingly our corporations are actually I think it's really bad for a sense of common American nationhood in the society that we have in the 21st century.
And an important thing, of course, is I think these businesses, at the end of the day, are being incredibly short-sighted.
Do they really think that the Chinese nation-state, a hyper-ethnic, effectively a fascist society, is going to be better for Amazon, for Google, for Apple, for Facebook over the long term?
It maybe will help them juice their short-term profits.
It maybe will provide them a few million slaves to work in the production of their goods.
But over the long term, I think we all need to recognize that basic American values, self-respect, devotion to our country, respect for one another, respect for people's differences, those things are not, at the end of the day, the sort of thing that you can just kind of fritter away and expect them to exist in another country.
If you want to have freedom of conscience, freedom to operate your business the way you want to, the United States of America is still the best place to do it.
and I hope eventually these corporations realize that.
Right back with JD Vance.
We're going to talk more about minorities and cancel culture.
We're also going to talk about the working class.
And I want to talk about the privilege of being born in America.
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Back with author J.D. Vance.
I want to raise this issue.
We hear a lot these days about privilege.
We hear about white privilege.
And the idea seems to be that if you are born white in this country, you sort of have it made.
And on the other hand, if you are non-white, sort of too bad for you, you're a victim of this structural oppression.
Now, in reality, we see in America all kinds of people who start out at the bottom and make their way up the ladder, you might say.
Now, the interesting thing is that there are certain groups in America I've noticed that do really, really well.
I mean, the Jews have done extremely well in America.
The Mormons do extremely well.
Of course, there are white Episcopalians who have done really well.
There's a book that Joel Kotkin wrote many years ago called Tribes, in which he talked about sort of the successful tribes in America.
But if he were writing this book today, you'd have to add the Nigerians and West Indians, the Asian Indians.
The Asian Indians, I believe, have the highest...
Now, all of this would seem to undercut the idea of white privilege.
And of course, in your work, you've written about how you've got all these hillbillies.
You've got working class whites.
You've got guys who are born in Ohio and in Appalachia.
And if you talk to them about privilege, they would have to laugh out loud because they have many of the difficulties, dysfunctionalities, addictions, cultural problems that people, sociologists have associated with black and Latino communities.
So, can you talk for a moment about the issue of privilege?
And then I think it'd be good for us to zoom into our own lives to see what is it, what privilege, if any, that you have and I have that enabled us, both of us starting kind of from the bottom of life, To actually be able to rise and even penetrate the elite precincts of American life Where is this privilege?
Yeah, you know, I think this concept of white privilege is ultimately very dangerous.
And let me illustrate this with a couple of points.
So I was actually just on the phone earlier this morning with a friend of mine who's black, and I said something just sort of innocuous.
I said, you know, it's one of these things where you just have a lot of fatherlessness in my community, meaning, you know, poor whites in the neighborhood that I grew up in, there just weren't a whole lot of dads around.
That's obviously a big privilege in life is having a father in the moment, of course.
And this black man said, you know, I've never heard anybody said that.
I said, what do you mean you've never heard anybody said that?
He said, when I hear about fatherlessness, it's always meant to describe the black community and the black family.
And it kind of hit me that constantly talking about the privileges that whites have, you know, it means that we think about black people in a certain way that sometimes black people don't like is always disadvantaged, as never, you know, possessing agency or self control in their communities.
It also means that we ignore families like mine who have had real struggles in the society, of course, have persevered, but still haven't been given everything to us on a silver platter.
I don't think anybody would say that about our family and constantly talking about white privilege, I think ignores the real complicated nature of each individual American story.
The other thing that I think it does is it leads us to ignore the things that really We know some kids have easier lives than other kids, but what are the real drivers of privilege?
Well, having a dad in the home is a big driver, right?
Having a stable family, not having a lot of drug addiction, not having a lot of family abuse in your home.
These things are all much bigger drivers of whether you're going to have a successful life.
And if we're trying to give every kid an equal chance in this society, which is, Back with author J.D. Vance in a moment, we're going to talk more in depth about this idea of privilege.
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Back with author JD Vance.
JD, when I think about my life and the issue of privilege, I do think about two types of privilege that I really had.
The first was that I had a loving family.
And not only a loving family, but a family that through my dad cultivated in me a certain ambition.
My dad would say things like, look at that guy.
He's coming out first in class, and you're coming out somewhere around sixth or seventh.
He goes, do you realize how much harder that guy works than you do?
And I'd be like, well, Dad, I put in an hour a day after school.
And he goes, yeah, but that guy puts in four hours a day.
And then one day my dad handed me a book and he goes, son, you should read this book.
And I remember looking at it and it was Jean-Paul Sartre's The Stranger.
And I looked at the book and I, of course, never heard of existentialism or any of it.
I was probably 13 years old.
And I said to my dad, I go, have you read the book?
And he goes, no! He hadn't read it.
My dad was not a reader, but he wanted me to be one.
So he was inculcating in me not just qualities that he had, but a love of learning that as a technical man, he himself didn't participate in directly.
So that was the first type of privilege.
And I thought to myself, when I was a kid, I would study the dictionary.
I'd try to improve my vocabulary.
Now, if I stayed in India, these skills that I developed and this ambition could very well have gone nowhere.
Now, people in India tell me that today there's more room for that in India, but when I was in the 70s, there was no scope in India for someone like me.
So my point is, by being transplanted into America, land of opportunity, I suddenly find that these qualities that were cultivated far away in the outskirts of Bombay, Mumbai, suddenly become qualities that can be converted into success.
They helped me to do well on the SAT. They helped me to get into Dartmouth.
They're going to help me be a good student against American students who went to very good and very expensive prep schools.
So when I think about privilege, yeah, I was privileged, not financially.
In fact, I came to America with no money at all and worried about how I would get by.
But I had the background of family education.
And I also had the fact that I had now won the lottery, and by winning the lottery I mean I found myself in the United States of America, a place where my talents and ambitions could find fertile ground.
Isn't it true that being an American, and this interestingly would apply to all minorities here, they're beneficiaries of American privilege even as they go on and on about white privilege?
Yeah, I think that's a really important point.
And there are a few reactions I have to what you just said.
I mean, the first is absolutely.
There is a benefit and a privilege to being born here in the United States of America and having the opportunities to pursue your dreams.
And, you know, one thing about this whole privilege conversation is...
It's one thing to respect people's differences.
It's one thing to look at a person who isn't like you and be respectful.
But it's another thing to constantly heighten the tension, heighten the differences.
If you want to share a country with somebody, you know, you and I obviously don't look like each other, but I think we have a lot of similar values.
But one of the things that works about America is it's not just constantly talking about the differences.
It's also talking about what's sane.
It's common values. It's common purpose.
It's a common view of where we want our country to go.
And that sense of commonality gets evaporated in the privilege conversation because you're just focusing all the time on people's differences.
And the second point I'd make about that is you may have seen some of this research, Tanish, but it's pretty powerful.
The constant finger wagging and saying you're privileged because you're white, it doesn't help anyone.
It doesn't make the people who send that message or receive it, it doesn't make them more sympathetic to blacks, it doesn't make them more sympathetic to Latinos, it doesn't make them more willing to help disadvantaged groups, it just makes them hate white people more.
That's a pretty consistent finding of the literature.
And so you're not uplifting anybody.
You're not making it easier for one type of American to lend a hand to another type of American.
You're just making them hate another group more than they already hate them.
You're giving them an excuse to dismiss families like mine, to look down upon them, to ignore the real problems that exist in their lives.
That instead of trying to find ways of enhancing our commonness as Americans, enhancing our common values, we're just constantly tearing each other apart with this discussion around privilege.
I think it's one of the most worrying trends that exists in our society today.
One thing that I hadn't anticipated is how it even fortifies our adversaries.
There's a meeting going on pretty much right now between the top Biden people and the top Chinese diplomats.
The Secretary of State is there, for example.
And the Chinese are sort of, they've wisened up to this and they've realized that they can block American criticism of Chinese human rights.
And the way they do it is they go, listen...
You're oppressing blacks.
And in fact, we're not accusing you of it.
You're admitting to it. The Biden administration is saying that, yeah, we've got all this structural racism.
We're a racist country and we always have been.
So the Chinese go, well, get off your moral high horse then.
Stop yelling at us for what we do to the Uyghurs in China.
So there's an attempt to create now a moral equivalent.
So even worse, the Chinese are saying, you're worse than we are because you're admitting to all these crimes of human rights.
And that, of course, weakens America's ability to be a voice and an example for human rights in the world because we're confessing our sins maybe to each other.
But, of course, the rest of the world is listening and taking advantage.
Yep. No, it weakens our moral position on the world stage.
It also weakens some of the institutions that make us a great country to begin with.
You know, I served in the Marine Corps.
I was enlisted from 2003 to 2007.
One of the most powerful things about the Marine Corps is it took Americans from all walks of life.
It made us feel like we were on the same team.
You know, our drill instructors, our leaders would always say, you know, there isn't a black Marine, a white Marine.
You know, we all believe the same Marine Corps red.
We all wear the same Marine Corps green.
And that sense of an institution that can do something together, that has a common purpose and a common vision, those things require solidarity.
You have to believe like you come from the same country and that country is worth protecting.
If you're constantly again enhancing these group differences and constantly tearing down America's moral legitimacy, you're weakening the institutions that protect this country and keep us going.
When we come back with JD Vance, we're going to talk a little bit more about identity politics and patriotism.
Thank you.
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We've been talking about assimilation and patriotism and identity politics with author J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
J.D., recently the press secretary Jen Psaki was talking about the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans, something that concerns you.
Your wife is Asian American.
I'm Asian American. And she puts the blame squarely on Trump.
Listen. I think there's no question that some of the damaging rhetoric that we saw during the prior administration, blaming, calling COVID the Wuhan virus or other things,
led to perceptions of the Asian American community that are inaccurate, unfair, have raised You know, threatening, has elevated threats against Asian Americans, and we're seeing that around the country.
J.D., what do you make of this?
I mean, to me, it's so convoluted.
I mean, it's one thing if Trump had said the virus came from Chinatown.
But no, he said it came from China, right?
And obviously, the Chinese Americans have left China.
They're here. In fact, they've been here since the 1840s, building the railroads and so on.
So they've fled China.
The idea that somehow calling this a Chinese virus...
Is driving anti-Asian American sentiment.
Now when I look at the Justice Department and FBI data, I actually see a very different picture.
I see that there has been a rise of incidents, assaults and so on against Asian Americans, but they're occurring by and large in places like New York City, San Francisco.
They're not really occurring in sort of Red America.
The majority of these incidents, in fact, even numerically, are involving African Americans.
So black crimes perpetrated on Asian Americans.
And since there are seven times as many whites than blacks, the rate of crimes against Asian Americans by whites is much lower than by African Americans.
So are we basically seeing here a kind of attempt to create a bogus narrative?
And if so, what is the political purpose of it?
Oh, it's 100% an effort to create a bogus narrative.
And it shows just how far the media has gotten away from presenting facts.
Instead, they're trying to tell the story and create a narrative where none exists.
You know, the idea that primarily black perpetrators in New York City are listening to Trump clips from six months ago and going and creating anti-Asian American violence and beating up or even Even worse, Asian Americans.
It's so ridiculous, right?
Nobody actually believes that.
And the related and ridiculous claim is that these attacks are motivated by white supremacy.
Somehow these primarily non-white perpetrators of crimes against Asian Americans are somehow absorbing white supremacy from the ether and going off and attacking Asian Americans.
It's just so preposterous that I don't even think the people who say it actually believe it.
It's just become a slogan that they repeat every time we have a national crisis.
Well, it must be white supremacy because that's sort of the excuse that they blame for everything.
I think the goal here ultimately Is to continue to fit everything into that particular box.
That the only thing the left is really comfortable with is the idea that white supremacy is the root of all of America's evils.
And of course, I don't like white supremacy, but the idea that it causes everything is sort of ridiculous, especially in 2020, but the left just can't get away from it.
And so they see this new problem.
It's clearly not caused by white supremacy, but they're going to say it is anyways because they don't have any other thing to go on.
Well, it seems to me like the problem that you have is that the Asian Americans as a group don't seem to behave in a manner that fits the left narrative.
If you look at schools, for example, Asian Americans are doing better than whites.
Now, if this was a country ruled by white supremacy, that would not happen.
So clearly, the very success of the Asians, not just, by the way, in the academic sector, but in the economic sector, undercuts the white supremacy narrative.
I notice in places like Lowell High School, where they've gotten away from merit admissions, and they're now switching to kind of a lottery system.
You know, Lowell High School in San Francisco was 75% minority.
The group that was most overrepresented was not whites.
Whites were like 25%.
The Asian Americans were over-represented.
So the real point here, the real target, it seems to me, is merit itself.
And that Asian Americans are a problem because they deliver on merit.
And the reason that they're successful is not because they're discriminating against anybody, but because they're outperforming everybody.
So this would seem to point to a solution in a very different direction from the left because it suggests that the things that Asian American families are doing, things like making your kids just do a lot of homework, are actually the true recipe of success.
Rather than this whole idea that the way you raise African Americans up is you fight these structures of white racism.
In fact, if you improved savings rates, rates of family formation, homework habits, cultural ingredients of success, it would seem to me that is the obvious way that individuals and groups can move ahead in America.
Why is the left so resistant to this obvious message?
I think there's definitely something to what you just said.
There is a desire to paint every problem in America as a consequence of white supremacy.
But to your point, if some minority groups are able to get ahead very successfully in America, then it definitely cuts against that narrative pretty powerfully.
And you see this in a lot of the rhetoric directed at Asian Americans by a lot of people on the left.
They actually don't like that Asian Americans are succeeding in American society because it suggests Oh, sorry.
No problem. They don't like that Asian Americans are succeeding in American society because it suggests that their entire narrative about American society is ultimately false.
We'll come right back with author J.D. Vance to probe the issue of Asian success further.
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We're talking with author J.D. Vance.
J.D., when you were at Yale, one of your professors and perhaps one of your mentors was Amy Chua, the renowned Yale legal scholar.
I think she actually wrote a very nice blurb on your book as well.
Now, Amy Chua generated a bit of controversy several years ago with her book and articles.
The one in the New York Times is called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
And I just want to read a couple of things because it I think it's the key to why the Asian Americans as a group have been so successful.
She talks about the fact that she's a tiger mom and she goes, Here are some of the things my daughters Sophia and Louisa were never allowed to do.
Number one, attend a sleepover.
Number two, have a play date.
Number three, be in a school play.
Number four, complain about not being in a school play.
Number five, watch TV or play computer games.
Number six, choose their own extracurricular activities.
Number seven, get any grade less than an A. Number eight, not be the number one student in every subject except gym and drama.
And number nine, play any instrument other than the piano or violin.
So it looks like what she's basically talking about, well, I don't want to call it the Hitler parenting syndrome.
But I think my dad and mom would agree.
The idea here is that the parent knows better.
The idea is that the parent charts out a recipe or a formula for success.
And these Asian American parents, they're not...
I mean, a lot of white parents, even parents of very successful kids, say things like, you know, in order to learn, you have to have a fun environment.
The child has to have an interest in the...
It seems like the Asian-Americans ridicule all this, they ignore it all, they basically go, there's a prescribed formula for success, it is choosing certain things, doing certain things, and then working, whether you have a natural aptitude or not.
Now this may seem a little bit, you know, I think there were people who said this is a very authoritarian model of child rearing, but, you know, I bet you Sofia and Luisa are doing pretty well in America today.
They are, yeah. I talk to Amy regularly, and both her daughters are doing quite well.
And when I hear that list, one of the things that crosses my mind is I sort of think of that as a classically American attitude, right?
It's about hard work. It's about achievement.
It's about devotion to certain subjects.
And yet, it's certainly the case that Asian Americans seem to have those things in spades.
But what I always loved about Amy...
Is that she always saw that as a fundamentally American thing, that she thought these were values that she had taken from her home country that were American values that fit really well in America.
And she felt in some ways that the country had moved beyond her.
And it started to focus on, you know, these things like having a fun learning environment instead of a productive learning environment and all these things.
So, you know, it's one of the things I always loved about Amy is that she really loves her new home country.
And she feels indebted to it.
And she feels like the values that made America great in the first place are things that should be perpetuated and should endure instead of crapped upon and criticized by the country's new elites.
I mean, the irony is that we're using somewhat loosely the term Asian American values.
I mean, I'm sure that if Debbie's right here, my producer and my wife...
She would tell you these are Venezuelan values.
The Venezuelans who come to America have the same ethic.
They realize that they have to work hard.
And if you come to America and you used to be an engineer in Venezuela, you may have to drive a cab in America for a couple of years, save some money.
But then what you do is you try to buy a small business, start a restaurant, do what you know how to do.
So this can do spirit.
And I think you're quite right. It I mean, you see it in Tocqueville's description of America.
The only question is, what has happened to it in America?
Now, when you describe in Hillbilly Elegy, you talk about dysfunctional families.
You talk about pathologies.
You talk about people who take on debt for no good reason.
And they do stupid stuff that they know is going to hold them behind.
And the question you raise is sort of...
Not only why did they do it, but how do you get out of it?
How do you break these patterns?
Talk a little bit about how you think we got to these dysfunctional communities and what might be the way out of it.
I think a big part of it is that our leadership stopped trying to practice what they preach and preach what they practice.
You know, when my grandparents grew up in the United States of America, there were very discreet things that they were told.
These are the things that you have to do to get ahead.
You've got to work hard. You've got to be loyal to your family.
You've got to take care of each other.
Those are classic American values.
And I think, unfortunately... We've gotten to ourselves in a situation where, to go back to the conversation about privilege, where our elites tend to talk about success as something that just happens.
Maybe you're lucky, maybe you were born into it, but it's just the sort of thing that's bestowed on people as opposed to something that's earned.
And I think, unfortunately, the message that a lot of people are getting from cultural leadership is hard work doesn't matter, achievement doesn't matter, doing well at school doesn't matter.
And of course, those messages start to filter down to communities like mine, which are picking up the messages from the broader cultural.
Culture. I think another thing that's happened and has been really important is that you see the decline of the traditional family in a lot of these places.
We talk about hard work.
We talk about industriousness, about taking care of your family.
Those are values that are incubated in an American family, right?
Those are things that come in some ways from seeing mom and dad behave a certain way.
Well, if you don't have moms or dads in the homes in the same way, And I think that's happened for complex economic and cultural reasons.
Then it starts to have this pathologizing effect on the broad culture.
It's one thing to talk about hard work and American values.
It's another thing to have a dad in the home who goes to work every day who's committed to their craft and committed to their family.
That's something that a lot of American kids are missing these days.
And unless we start to recreate, I think, and rebuild that traditional American family, I think, unfortunately, a lot of American values are going to continue to fall by the wayside.
I agree. But you know what I find so strange, JD, is if you look at the environments of both Yale and Dartmouth that we're both familiar with, we met a lot of people who are on the left who are purveyors of this narrative that it's all circumstantial, it's all a matter of luck.
But we know that these people actually worked really hard.
They worked hard on their papers.
They worked hard to develop skills.
So what would cause someone to, in a sense, lie about their own experience?
They know the ingredients that make them successful.
But then they put out a public narrative that it's all based upon inherited privileges and structures that benefited me and so on.
When the truth of it is, you put in five hours a day and the other kid in your high school didn't.
And that's why you're at Yale and he's not.
Yeah. Well, and they also very often almost always come from very intact families, right?
You very rarely meet someone in these environments that came from a truly broken home.
And of course, all of them poo-poo the value of a stable family, the value of having fathers in the homes.
And it's like, well, look at you.
You had your dad. He was active in your life.
Don't you think that had something to do with your success?
That hypocrisy is very real.
I totally agree with that.
The why it's happening is a really complicated question.
I wonder if some of it is a little bit of guilt that people don't want to admit that these things are necessary to success because then they feel like they're congratulating themselves.
I wonder if maybe it's that they've picked up some messaging from You know, mainstream culture in some ways that suggests that homes or traditional families don't matter, that these ethics don't matter.
But it is a really interesting question.
You have an American nation that was built by hard work, by an entrepreneurial spirit, and the people who are at the top of it don't feel any real commitment to preserving that same spirit and that same value set.
It's really terrible.
I'm not totally sure why it's happening.
It's a good question. It seems to be a fact where the elites are perpetrating a known untruth on the rest of the population.
The rest of the people are suffering from it while the elites don't themselves.
J.D. Vance, thank you so much for joining the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
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It's time to close out with the mailbox and I have a question about immigration, which I thought would be very appropriate for this episode.
And the question is, it relates to my earlier conversation with the Indian American writer, Suketu Mehta.
Can you elaborate on your statement to Suketu Mehta that the descendants of colonialism are better off because of it and if true, would this refute his claim that illegal immigrants are owed entry as a form of reparations? Now, the thing about colonialism to remember is that, and this is a point Suketu stressed, that the colonialists come not intending to confer benefits on the people they colonize.
They come to rule. That's accepted.
But the point is, in the process of ruling, they have to put into place a lot of things.
The Romans did. The British did.
That did benefit not only the people that were living there, but their descendants.
So that after colonialism ends, after Roman rule is over, British rule is over, the Indians can now take over not just the infrastructure that the British left there, but also the ideas of separation of powers, checks and balances, human dignity, courts of law. I mean, you have Indian courts today where you have brown-skinned guys in white wigs issuing verdicts.
They decided to continue doing a lot of things the British started, even after the British were long gone.
I'm reminded in this context of the funny episode in the Monty Python movie, where you've got the sort of the rebel who's organizing a campaign against the Roman rule, and he goes, you know, stands up in front of the crowd and he shouts, What have the Romans ever done for us?
There's a long silence, and then one guy goes, Rhodes?
Another guy goes, Rhodes?
Yes, Rhodes, that's true.
Well, apart from Rhodes, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Another guy shouts out, Aqueducts?
Aqueducts? Well, apart from Rhodes and Aqueducts, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Someone shouts, education.
Education, well, yeah, I had one myself.
Apart from roads and aqueducts and education, what have the Romans ever done for us?
One guy shouts, laws.
Laws, well, yeah, I suppose that's right.
Well, apart from roads and aqueducts and education and laws, what have the Romans ever done for us?
And so it goes on. Ports.
Apart from aqueducts and roads and education and port, what have the Romans ever done for us?
And of course, you're chuckling because you realize the Romans did an awful lot.
In order to create, to bring civilization to people who didn't have it before.
And that's the simple truth. If the British had never come to India, Sukitu Manta and I would be in a completely different place.
We'd be doing completely different things.
We might not even be speaking English.
We might be adjudicators of some tribal disputes that go on in a local tribe, but we certainly wouldn't be in America writing books in Sukhidu's case about immigration, or in my case, having a podcast.
The simple truth is colonialism was harsh for many of the people who lived under it, but it's done an awful lot of good for their descendants.
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