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July 18, 2024 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
48:43
The Teflon Don and the Hillbilly Shapeshifter

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThe attempt on Donald Trump’s life has left his upper ear scarred and… mildly inconvenienced. But I assure you, his resolve to defend our greatest ally has NEVER been stronger!History was made in Butler, PA as the Secret Service spectacularly failed at their job, more psycho incel shooters with nothing to lose will continue to …

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Before Trump came down the escalator in 2015, there was a model of what an American politician would look like.
A lot of people talk about identity politics.
I think there is something about personal identity politics.
That Obama represented in the sense that one of the secondary taglines of that campaign was, be the change you want to see in the world.
And you could take that phrase in multiple ways.
One of the ways you could take that is just simply voting for Obama was the change you wanted to see.
And so let's go back to Obama.
Obama was and is.
A thoughtful man.
He's sometimes too nuanced in his responses to things.
He doesn't go for the jugular.
He can sometimes be a little gray on gray or talk around things and so on.
But he's clearly an intelligent person.
He's clearly a thoughtful, a deeper person than, say, Donald Trump or George W. Bush.
When he started running against Hillary, there was a very strong dynamic of, first off, he gives great speeches, but I can get the job done.
That was kind of Hillary's case, along with the white people love me, which was what she was saying in 2008, believe it or not.
Also, Hillary Clinton voted for the war, and she's tainted by the Bush era, and we're moving off the war on terror.
Barack Obama became a senator in 2004, so he couldn't have voted for the war.
He did engage in some protests.
He spoke at protests in Chicago against the war in Iraq.
Now, it should be noted that in those speeches...
He actually endorsed the war on terror and endorsed the Afghanistan campaign.
I actually learned about this reading Spencer Ackerman's book, Reign of Terror, which is pretty good.
And he is one of these leftists who is highly skeptical of Barack Obama.
And as he should be, Barack Obama created a sustainable war on terror.
He increased drone strikes.
He never really moved off Gitmo or torture.
Et cetera, et cetera.
He never fundamentally questioned the war on terror, and thus he was kind of stuck in this, you voted for me because you hated George W. Bush, and you want the war to be over, but I kind of can't fully end it.
It was this liminal kind of purgatory state that never really worked.
And in that way, his whole movement was a failure.
But I think what Obama represented, along with actual policy, like stop the war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney are evil, which is fair enough.
It was this personal story where you vote.
It doesn't matter what Barack Obama is going to do.
Just the fact that he is the president is what is remarkable.
The fact that he's...
Cast in this role.
Isn't it amazing that the new James Bond is black?
Or the Little Mermaid is black?
Or Super Mario Brothers is gay?
That didn't happen.
I'm just saying.
They're vampirically leeching off something that's old and they're replacing the front man.
And I think that's what he represented.
And there was a kind of model of a new politician in the 2000s that would represent that.
Someone like Pete Buttigieg, who comes from, highly educated, comes from this consultant world, and he's kind of like the gay Obama.
You know, I'm this nice, non-Elton John-like homosexual.
From the Midwest, I was a mayor of a small town, and only in America could I rise to become your president, blah, blah, blah.
This personal identity politics, it's personal politics more than anything.
Wouldn't it be amazing if we vault Mayo Pete into the presidency?
We're so proud of ourselves.
It's a kind of virtue signal that you're voting for Barack Obama.
J.D. Vance has always struck me as kind of like, why is J.D. Vance?
So when I first heard of J.D. Vance and the fact that he was involved in venture capital, etc., I assumed that he was some sort of savant from the trailer park or some quant kid who...
Was able to offer all of this insight into investing and was one of the...
You find them.
It's like his parents were terrible drug addicts, but this kid is so damn smart and he just gets taken up.
And that's not the case.
There's a line from one of these Steve Jobs biopics where Woz asks him, what exactly is it that you do?
And I don't know what J.D. Vance does.
He's obviously articulate, and he can answer a question to reporters.
But so what?
He went to Yale Law School.
So what?
I've met people who went to Yale Law School.
When my graduate career, I met highly intelligent people at I met people who I found to be sub-mediocrities at both places.
I just don't care what diploma you have.
He's never really practiced law.
Again, it's just this venture capital guy.
He seems to have been chosen or anointed by Amy Chua and then the Peter Thiel people.
And others as kind of like our guy, but I don't really see the point of it all.
And even by the age of 30, he was already focused on this politics of personal success of like, isn't it amazing that I exist?
And I guess my response to that is not really.
I don't know what to say.
I actually watched his...
I think this really sums up the kind of fakeness, narcissism on his part, and also just meaninglessness of his working class thing.
To compare him to Obama, Obama has a Muslim-y background.
Obviously, we have the birthers who are obsessed with The fact that he wasn't born in this country and grew up in a mosque or whatever they were saying.
I don't believe that, but he ultimately did nothing for Muslims.
As Spencer Ackerman demonstrates in his book, the FBI and Homeland Security were still rounding up Muslims, infiltrating their mosques, kicking them out of the country.
Drone-striking innocent people, including an American citizen.
Barack Obama, it's his personal story.
You almost invest revolutionary politics in one person, and just by the fact that he exists, that's enough.
You've accomplished it.
Let's not actually change anything.
Let's not even do anything for the...
Supposed constituency of Barack Obama, just by the fact that he is existing as our president is enough.
And I think there's the same thing for J.D. Vance.
Whether he cultivated this himself, whether he grasped that that was in the zeitgeist, or whether other people found him as a kind of malleable person to construct in this image, probably a combination of the two.
I don't know which was more prominent.
But it's just all fake.
And let's just watch this TED Talk because you can tell a lot about people from the masks they wear and how they present themselves and the sort of anecdotes they tell.
I found this extremely revealing.
I imagine he wrote this himself.
I've not read Hillbilly Elegy.
I've seen smart people who have read it on Twitter and they're just like, it was a self-serving naval gaze, basically.
And I don't doubt it.
I might actually read the book.
I don't want to buy it, though, because I don't want to give this son of a bitch any money.
I remember the very first time I went to a nice restaurant, a really nice restaurant.
It was for a law firm recruitment dinner.
And I remember beforehand, the waitress walked around and asked whether we wanted some wine.
So I said,"Sure, I'll take some white wine." And she immediately said,"Would you like Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay?" And I remember thinking,"Come on, lady.
...
Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc were two separate types of white wine, and so I told her that I would take the Chardonnay because, frankly, that was the easiest one to pronounce for me.
So I had a lot of experiences like that during my first couple of years.
First off, that's not a terribly interesting anecdote.
The fact that you open with that is wet.
There's this theme of J.D. Vance of putting on a mask and pretending to be another person and congratulating himself for that and never really being comfortable in his own skin.
I would imagine a true Scotch-Irish Appalachia guy would maybe order a beer or say, hell, lady, I don't care.
So long as you fill up this glass to the brim, that's good enough.
There's a sort of earthy way of responding to that and saying it with a twinkle in your eye where it's kind of funny.
But he instead pretends to know the difference between those things.
Just hear this whole thing out because...
Throughout this speech, which I presume he wrote himself, there are numerous examples.
The way his survival mechanism throughout his life is pretending to be someone else.
And this is just the opener, and it's just, again, another example of the way he survives is he puts on a mask and a costume.
This man comes from a sociopathic...
Excuse me, a psychopathic family of drug addicts and criminals, and he is one.
He's just really good at it.
That's my basic lead on this.
I'll prove it to you as we go on.
Let's watch more.
Because despite all outward appearances, I'm a cultural outsider.
I didn't come from the elites.
I didn't come from...
The Northeast, we're from San Francisco.
I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways, in ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America's working class.
Heroin has moved in, killing a lot of people, people I know.
Family violence, domestic violence and divorce have torn apart families.
And there's a very unique sense of pessimism that's moved in.
Think about rising mortality rates in these communities and recognize that for a lot of these folks, the problems that they're seeing are actually causing rising death rates in their own communities.
So there's a very real sense of struggle.
Now, I had a very front row seat to that struggle.
My family has been part of that struggle for a very long time.
I come from a family that doesn't have a whole lot of money.
The addiction that plagued my community.
It also plagued my family and even, sadly, my own mom.
There were a lot of problems that I saw in my own family, problems caused sometimes by lack of money, problems caused sometimes by lack of access to resources and social capital that really affected my life.
...
We've struggled with what academics call upward mobility.
So upward mobility is an abstract term, but it strikes as something that's very core at the heart of the American dream.
It's the sense, and it measures whether kids like me who grow up in poor communities are going to live a better life, whether they're going to have a chance to live a materially better existence, or whether they're going to stay in the circumstances where they came from.
And one of the things we've learned, unfortunately, Isn't as high as we'd like it to be in this country.
And interestingly, it's very geographically distributed.
So take Utah, for instance.
In Utah, a poor kid is actually doing OK, very likely to live their share and their part in the American dream.
But if you think of where I'm from, in the South, in Appalachia, in southern Ohio, it's very unlikely that kids like that will rise.
The American dream in those parts of the country is, in a very real sense, just a dream.
I mean, yeah, a lot of gullible wasp and German types were taken in by Mormonism, and there was even a selection process of making the trek to Utah in which the strongest survived, and that is why they're like that.
I remember driving around.
I was visiting Paul Gottfried.
I think I've told this story before.
But just driving from the south into German Pennsylvania, you drive from front yards in which there is a broken down car on bricks, a broken rusty car sitting on bricks in the front yard,
to driving to a well-kept, almost goofy...
I mean, all this upward mobility, the way he imagines it is like becoming another person, like putting on a mask or putting on a new costume.
I mean, JD, you are who you are.
People don't change, actually.
The takeaway that I get from his...
From JD's stuff is he doesn't offer any solution to this outside of upward mobility.
Like your ability to kind of finagle your way into a position where you're drinking sparkling wine and Chardonnay as opposed to grain alcohol is kind of like his only message.
But let's go on.
So why is that happening?
So one reason is obviously economic or structural.
So you think of these areas, they're beset by these terrible economic trends built around industries like coal and steel that make it harder for folks to get ahead.
It's certainly one problem.
There's also the problem of brain drain, where the really talented people, because they can't find high-skill work at home, end up moving elsewhere, so they don't build a business or nonprofit where they're from.
They end up going elsewhere and taking their talents with them.
There are failing schools in a lot of these communities, failing to give kids the educational leg up that really makes it possible for kids to have opportunities later in life.
These things are all important.
I don't mean to discount these structural barriers, but when I look back at my life and at my community, something else was going on, something else mattered.
It's difficult to quantify, but it was no less real.
So for starters, there was a very real sense of hopelessness.
In the community that I grew up in, there was a sense that kids had that their choices didn't matter.
No matter what happened, no matter how hard they worked, no matter how hard they tried to get ahead, nothing good would happen.
So that's a tough feeling to grow up around.
That's a tough mindset to penetrate.
And it leads, sometimes, to very conspiratorial places.
So let's just take one political issue that's pretty hot: affirmative action.
So depending on your politics, you might think that affirmative action is either a wise or an unwise way to promote diversity in the workplace to the classroom.
But if you grow up in an area like this, you see affirmative action as a tool to hold people like you back.
That's especially true if you're a member of the white working class.
You see it as something that isn't just about good or bad policy.
You see it as something that's actively conspiring, where people with political and financial power are working against you.
And there are a lot of ways that you see That conspiracy against you, perceived, real, but it's there, and it warps expectations.
So if you think about what do you do when you grow up in that world, you can respond in a couple of ways.
One, you can say, I'm not going to work hard, because no matter how hard I work, it's not going to matter.
Another thing you might do is say, well, I'm not going to go after the traditional markers of success, like a university education or a prestigious job, because the people who care about those things are unlike me.
They're never going to let me in.
When I got admitted to Yale, a family member asked me if I had pretended to be a liberal to get it by the admissions committee.
Seriously. And it's obviously not the case that there was a liberal box to check on the application, but it speaks to the very real insecurity in these places that you have to pretend to be somebody you're not to get past these various social barriers.
Okay, he ends there.
So it's a very significant problem.
Yeah, thanks, JD, for that brilliant answer.
Yeah. Why do you think people have a perception that affirmative action is anti-white?
Why is that, do you think, JD?
And what are you going to do about that?
Does this need to be changed?
Or is this just an example of conspiratorial thinking that people descend into?
He's like...
He is like the hillbilly whisperer in the sense that he'll tell liberals real talk now, guys.
This is how people think.
They think that only liberals are at these elite colleges and affirmative actions holding the white man down or something.
That's one way they could think.
I don't know why this guy bothers me so much, but I know what he's doing.
He's almost monitoring Any sort of resentment, even rage, or righteous criticism of the system, or so on,
and then just kind of like observing it, and then moving on and talking about how he got into it.
It's just...
Very weird, because I think some people could even hear this and get the sense that he's opposed to affirmative action.
There's no reason to believe that, actually.
Let's go on.
Give in to that hopelessness.
Even if you don't give in to that hopelessness, even if you think, let's say, that your choices matter and you want to make the good choices, you want to do better for yourself and for your family, it's sometimes hard to even know what those choices are when you grow up in a community like I did.
I didn't know, for example, that you had to go to law school to be a lawyer.
I didn't know that elite universities, as research consistently tells us, are cheaper for low-income kids because these universities have bigger endowments, can offer more generous financial aid.
I remember I learned this when I got the financial aid letter from Yale for myself-- tens of thousands of dollars in need-based aid, which is a term I'd never heard before, but I-- Turned to my aunt when I got that letter and said, you know, I think this just means that for the first time in my life, being poor has paid really well.
Yeah, like, the point is that you can't get in.
It's exceedingly difficult to get into Yale.
And I'm glad that you were kind of the chosen one.
I have no idea why this...
Person who does not...
Strikes me as pretty moderately intelligent and articulate and uncharismatic is chosen over others.
I really have no idea what makes this guy special, but you got in.
The reason...
That's not a solution to a problem of the decline of the middle class, is that if you get into Yale, which is about a 1% chance, I would assume, on your application.
For every 100 applicants, I would imagine 99 are rejected.
It might even be more than that.
That because these guys have more endowments that they can offer you more aid.
To think of that as any sort of solution to the problem that he is putting forth is just absurd.
I mean, what is his solution?
Go to Yale and don't go to U of Ohio?
And he's just talking about his little specialness.
This kid got the golden ticket in the chocolate bar, and he's instructing people, well, what you need to do to get ahead is to find the golden ticket in the Wonka chocolate bar.
It's just truly absurd, actually.
I'm not even sure I agree with the 2016 Trump notion of we're bringing back coal mining and so on.
I'm not even sure I agree with that.
But putting that aside, That is a solution to bring back coal to revitalize these communities.
What is he saying outside of get into Yale Law School?
Why do you even go into Yale Law School if you're not going to practice law?
Is it just to be part of the club?
Apparently, you don't actually care about the law or being a prosecutor or whatever.
You went into venture capital.
But anyway.
So I didn't have access to that information.
I didn't have access to that information because the social networks around me didn't have access to that information.
I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well.
I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe.
The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter.
How to get ahead.
I didn't learn how to make the good decisions about education and opportunity that you need to make.
To actually have a chance in this 21st century knowledge economy, economists call the value that we gain from our informal networks, from our friends and colleagues and family, social capital.
The social capital that I had wasn't built for 21st century America, and it showed.
There's something else that's really important that's going on that our community doesn't like to talk about, but it's very real.
Working-class kids are much more likely to face what's called adverse childhood experiences.
Which is just a famous word, fancy word, for childhood trauma.
Getting hit or yelled at, put down by a parent repeatedly, watching someone hit or beat your parent, watching someone do drugs or abuse alcohol.
Yeah, no shit, JD.
These are all instances of childhood trauma.
Why is this person telling us something that, like, everyone knows?
Like, economists call it personal trauma.
Like, if your dad beats you up and shoots your mom.
What the fuck is this?
That may have a negative impact.
He didn't know.
Yeah, I think so.
You'd have to go to law school to be a lawyer.
I didn't know that.
Bro, I think I knew that when I was nine.
What the fuck do you think you go to law school for?
Well, I don't know.
He's offering some crucial insights.
Economists say that if your mom puts meth in your Cheerios, you're a lot less likely to understand what Chardonnay means.
This is the most obnoxiously dumb person.
I mean, again, I know it's a TED Talk, so you kind of have to boil things down, but isn't this just a kind of expression of this malformed brain?
He's a self-made midwit, is what he is.
He's proud of being a self-made midwit.
Because I wasn't a dumbass in a trailer park.
I didn't just pound Bush Light all day.
I decided to pull myself up by the bootstraps and articulate and use corporate buzzwords.
Yeah, and like Obama, I wrote an autobiography at age 30. And again, he hadn't done anything.
Making it meant getting into Yale Law School and then just having a sinecure at a venture fund or whatever.
This guy is not just because of his face physiognomy, but he is extremely punchable.
I just have to say.
The fat face.
He's round.
His head is round.
He's got the small feet.
There are ethnic differences in the white race.
The fact that we want to pump up the J.D. Vance type is just really fucking insulting.
We should be promoting blonde, German, tall, angular badasses.
That's the fucking white race in my opinion.
And even Italians and people who are more fun and earthy and passionate or whatever, that's also great too.
But just these lifeless, boring roundheads, just go fuck.
You're embarrassing.
In the words of John Wayne, you ain't white.
You're not the best of us.
And the fact that you're from a family of psychopathic...
It just kind of makes me think that Oliver Holmes was correct, that the most moral thing to do to the Vance family is to sterilize them.
Sorry to be this much of an asshole, but I really hate this motherfucker.
There's no fucking redeemable quality to this piece of shit.
He represents physically the degeneration of a race.
Everybody should be mad when they look at him.
There's another thing as well, that classes don't come out of nowhere.
It's often just an expression of racial differences.
Especially under a liberal society, because if you have feudalism or whatever, there's this...
Like, stagnation.
Yeah, I get it.
That's what I was implying.
This is the other thing I would say, that I kind of almost regret bringing this, being this much of an asshole towards him, but there's no fucking redeeming quality to him, because, like, I would, like, I like things that are lower in a way.
You know, like, I...
I love going to the fucking minor league baseball team here in the Flathead Valley, where you have a bunch of just dudes drinking beer and having fun.
Now, they are the drug-addled criminal class that he derives from.
But I don't look down upon them.
I like the fact that they exist.
I think they're pretty earthy, and they have something to tell me that I don't know.
In fact, they have an experience.
They're redeemable, in other words, in the sense that they're good-hearted and kind of fun.
And it's like, the way he understands his redneck background is basically like, I escaped my criminal family.
And you'll learn more about this.
Psychopathy is heritable, and there is no question that he comes from a family of psychopaths.
And I think he's actually probably not telling us the whole story of the Vance clan.
But it's like, there's nothing...
He doesn't even see anything redeemable in his family.
He just pities them that they haven't become venture capitalists.
And again, I haven't heard JD, I haven't heard any policy proposal, whether it's...
Community college education, bringing back industrial jobs, manufacturing, Andrew Yang-style $1,000 a month, basic minimum income.
I haven't heard fucking anything from your fat ass outside of get into Yale Law School, write an autobiography, and become a venture capitalist.
Has he offered any solution to these problems?
Am I wrong?
Please, someone correct me.
Someone tell me what this fat fuck is bringing to the table.
I'm ready and waiting.
His job is to make it socially acceptable to hate poor people again in a way.
So he's there as the token.
Like, I did not need government programs to do this for me.
If you're abject poverty, all you have to do is be a midwit like me, and you can crawl your way up.
So his job is just to say, if someone comes around and says, we need some sort of public spending on this issue, he could say, Are you insulting my people?
Do you think we're not good enough to do it on our own?
Well, the thing is, Yale has a multi-billion dollar endowment, so they can actually offer more assistance.
The degree to which that is not a solution to any problem cannot be overstated.
The level at which he is offering nothing is incredible.
And again...
You know?
Like, I don't know, JD.
Is there a problem with, like, logic among your folks?
You don't logic so good?
Because you are offering non-sequiturs, is what you are doing.
You are not intelligent.
That is my impression.
I have no earthly idea why he became the golden boy and has been chosen.
But I can only conclude that he has been chosen for cynical reasons.
Because he is obnoxiously unintelligent.
I fucking hate this person more than Ron.
I hate Ron DeSantis.
I loathe this motherfucker.
I get this feeling from him and a lot of other conservatives that it seems like they think the only real poor people are from Midwestern steel towns.
If you're not from some place with a population density of beneath 2,000 out in the country, you're not really a poor person.
You're just either a mentally ill homeless dude or a criminal.
Yeah, something like that.
The noble poor comes from the Midwest, and the Midwest only.
Well, I think it helps to have him on the ticket to say, oh, Trump's rich, and this guy's poor, and he made it up.
He pulled himself up by the bootstraps.
But the whole idea is he's clearly not offering any solutions, as you said, and he's just pulling up the ladder after he's made it up to the top.
That's fundamentally who this person is.
Like a true psychopath.
He is a psychopath.
Exactly. And again, I know Dr. Grande is like, I'm not here to diagnose anyone.
Just merely speculating.
It's like, I'm diagnosing this son of a bitch.
He just puts on costumes like he's going to Halloween.
And who is...
Is there any there there?
Is there anything below the layers of fat?
This is a good point that he brings up that he's fat and psychopathic because he does lie in his autobiography because I didn't know what he looked like for many years because I read his book and I just sort of fade into obscurity.
But he does say in his book that, and this is something that always bothered me since I became more in the media and I know what he looks like because he does say, I used to be fat as a kid and I owned the Marine Corps and I lost all my weight.
And then you see pictures of him.
Like, both in the military and now, and you just think, like, you always were, like, a fath.
Like, why are you lying about this?
And it's just such a, like, thing of...
I mean, you're lying to, like, the libtards who are buying this kind of book about class journey or whatever.
There's another thing I want to bring up.
I mean, like, class journey, like, that's not really a thing.
Because if you look at...
This is, like, particularly, like, obvious in the South, but also other places as well.
There are groups in America who have had the same social economic status for hundreds of years, including his.
So there is no thing about that for HPD reasons, for IQ reasons and such.
Yeah, upward mobility.
As opposed to finding something redeemable in those people.
Look, you can't have a fucking society.
I can't believe I have to tell an idiot like J.D. Vance's.
There is no society ever that is going to be a bunch of Yale graduate venture capitalists.
Like someone has got to like fix the plumbing.
Like someone's got to make the burger for you.
I'm afraid to say.
Someone has to be the youth pastor in your rural community.
That is, you need people who are kind of not...
Yale quality people for any society to function.
And the question is, are you going to treat those people like crap?
Or are you going to find redeemable qualities to average folk?
Or are you going to worry about why they didn't get a scholarship from Yale?
It's just absurd.
It is absurd what this guy is talking about.
I even think I was being too nice to him by suggesting that he's intelligent.
He's not intelligent.
He's wily.
He doesn't understand the truth of the matter.
He can't think logically.
He can just say what you want to hear.
He's this wily and sophist, as Plato would say, intelligence.
It's all bullshit.
And they're pretty commonplace in my family.
Importantly, they're not just commonplace in my family right now.
They're also multigenerational.
So my grandparents, the very first time that they had kids, they expected that they were going to raise them in a way that was uniquely good.
They were middle class, they were able to earn a good wage in a steel mill.
But what ended up happening is that they exposed their kids to a lot of the childhood trauma that had gone back many generations.
My mom was 12 when she saw my grandma set my grandfather on fire.
His crime was that he came home drunk after she told him, if you come home drunk...
You are from a family of psychopaths.
Period. End of statement.
You're from a family of criminally insane psychopaths.
You don't set people on fucking fire.
I don't know what to fucking tell you.
There are people...
Like, rural poverty in Montana that don't fucking act that way.
Margaret Sanger was right.
Yes. And psychopathy is significantly heritable.
It's not like eye color or something.
It's heritable.
And these multi-generational poverty...
What is he even talking about when these people had high wages 50 years ago, but apparently they're still setting their family members aflame?
So maybe there's something else going on here.
I don't even think he's even gesturing towards reviving manufacturing.
He's only gesturing towards get into Yale Law School.
But even if he were, it doesn't even make sense.
His argument has no validity.
He's offering evidence that goes against what he's saying because he is a sophist idiot.
I am just...
My level of contempt for J.D. Van...
I mean, I didn't even know how much I hated him until I started looking into him.
It's really sad when psychopaths destroy other people's lives.
But what is the answer to this?
Get into Yale.
That is the only answer that I have heard him offer.
The way that that affects a child's mind.
Wow, I wonder if murder might affect a child.
Thank you, JD.
Let me think about that for a little bit, JD.
You're so profound.
What the fuck is this?
Oh, there's a study.
A study by the Wisconsin Children's Trust Fund found that 40% of low-income kids face multiple instances of childhood trauma compared to only 29% for upper-income kids.
Of children who witness intrafamilial murder don't get into Yale Law School.
There's a fascinating new study that's just out.
What the fuck is this guy?
On its head.
It's counterintuitive.
I mean, what the fuck is this?
Why did liberals buy this?
This is like the midwit Jesus, basically.
Wow. I don't know what that really means.
If you're a low-income kid...
Almost half of you face multiple instances of childhood trauma.
This is not an isolated problem.
This is a very significant issue.
We know what happens to the kids who experience that life.
They're more likely to do drugs, more likely to go to jail, more likely to drop out of high school.
And most importantly, they're more likely to do to their children what their parents did to them.
This trauma, this chaos in the home is our culture's very worst gift to our children, and it's a gift that keeps on giving.
That's why we should continue that gift.
We should continue that gift for generation and generation in Virginia and all these places because these are the real Americans.
We just need to continue that forever.
So you combine all that, the hopelessness, the despair, the cynicism about the future, the childhood trauma, the low social capital.
And you begin to understand why me, at the age of 14, was ready to become just another statistic, another kid who failed to beat the odds.
But something unexpected happened.
I did beat the odds.
Things turned up for me.
I graduated from high school.
From college, I went to law school, and I have a pretty good job now.
So what happened?
Well, one thing that happened is that my grandparents, the same grandparents of setting someone on fire fame, they really shaped up by the time I came around.
They provided me a stable home, a stable family.
They made sure that when my parents weren't able to do the things that kids need, they stepped in and filled that role.
My grandma especially did two things that really mattered.
She provided that peaceful home that allowed me to focus on homework and the things that kids should be focused on.
But she was also this incredibly perceptive woman, despite not even having a middle school education.
She recognized the message that my community had for me, that my choices didn't matter, that the deck was stacked against me.
She once told me, J.D., never be like those losers who think the deck is stacked against them.
You can do anything you want to.
And yet she recognized that life wasn't fair.
It's hard to strike that balance, to tell a kid that life isn't fair, but also recognize and enforce in them the reality that their choices matter.
But Mamaw was able to strike that balance.
The other thing that really helped was the United States Marine Corps.
So we think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is.
But for me, the US Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education.
It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances.
These are things my community didn't teach me.
Remember when I went to go buy a car for the very first time, I was offered a dealer's low, low interest rate of 21.9%.
I was ready to sign on the dotted line.
But I didn't take that deal because I went and took it to my officer who told me, stop being an idiot, go to the local credit union and get a better deal.
And so that's what I did.
But without the Marine Corps, I would have never had access to that.
My level of contempt is so high for this.
He even, like, destroys, like, military honor.
We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit.
But no.
Actually, yeah.
I want the military to be a bunch of, like, badasses, maniacs.
Yes. That's the, like, the idea that you go to the military to learn that 21% interest rate is a bit much.
You should go to a, like...
Isn't it amazing that I learned that?
Like, no, it's not.
Like, yeah, probably Meemaw should have taught you that or whatever.
But also, who the fuck cares?
Like, who the fuck cares that you might have paid $2,000 of interest on a $10,000 used automobile?
Who the fuck cares?
Seriously. Like, wow.
The Marine Corps saved me.
Who cares?
I've wasted money in my life.
Who the fuck cares?
I don't look down on someone who's like, fucking A. You know, I was such an idiot.
I bought a car.
It's too expensive.
I lost 20 grand.
I'm such an idiot.
Yeah, it's like, yeah.
It happens.
Who cares?
He's not special.
He's not special.
He's not this unique person who's had all these terrible things happen to him.
I just happened to survive.
I just happened to make my way through this world, this cruel world.
Pretty good job.
With Peter Thiel.
What do they see in this fucking person?
I mean, I can only suggest that there is some, like, cynical, like, profoundly cynical, almost, like, hateful urge that people see in him in order to promote him.
Yeah, yeah.
They're like, this is the way to win over redneck populists and bring them towards our tech accelerationist society.
We're going to have to trick them all into this.
Right, and it seems like he would be able to present that face, present both faces, one to the tech, one to the hillbillies.
I don't think he can do it, but it's just ridiculous that the notion, that this is their plan, that this is their grand...
Yeah. Unbelievable.
...knowledge, I would have had a financial calamity, frankly.
Last thing I want to say is that I had a lot of good fortune in the mentors and people who have played an important role in my life, from the Marines, from Ohio State, from Yale.
From other places, people have really stepped in and ensured that they filled that social capital gap that it was pretty obvious, apparently, that I had.
That comes from good fortune.
But a lot of children aren't going to have that good fortune.
And I think that raises really important questions for all of us about how we're going to change that.
We need to ask questions about how we're going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home.
We need to ask questions about how we're going to teach low-income parents how to better interact with their children, with their partners.
We need to ask questions about how we give social capital mentorship to low-income kids who don't have it.
We need to think about how we teach working-class children about not just hard skills like reading, mathematics.
But also soft skills like conflict resolution and financial management.
How all the fat in his body is.
I don't have all of the answers.
Is he even a Christian?
It's like the lack of idealism is just staggering.
Yeah. This is the guy being promoted by Harzoni and national conservatives.
Jewish and Catholic alliance for nationalism.
The lack of idealism, again, just to repeat myself, it's just breathtaking.
Yeah. We're asking these questions.
We need to find the answer, but there's no answer in sight, so what are we going to do?
No, he does not offer an answer, and the only anecdotes he's offered is about how not to get ripped off by a used car dealer.
Right. Like, literally, literally, that is the anecdote.
Hmm. This is one of the most contemptible pieces of shit I have ever encountered.
Like, you know, it's that, like, do you want to have a beer with someone?
Or, like, I would rather have a beer...
You would turn down a beer offered by this guy.
Yeah, I would rather have a beer with, like, a random...
Moron from Nebraska.
I genuinely believe would have more humanity and insight into the world than sitting in more interesting, more fun, and can tell a joke.
Unlike this fat fuck whose anecdotes are like, oh, I was so embarrassed at a restaurant.
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