Joe Rogan exposed the JD Vance the liberal media don’t want you to see

Over more than three free-wheeling hours, the Republican vice-presidential candidate showed he’s both bro and pro

He swears, he bakes, he calls other men “dude” – but the most surprising revelation of the Joe Rogan/JD Vance interview was JD’s reaction to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. He said he rushed home, gathered his kids, “loaded all my guns, and stood like a sentry at our front door”. The Republican vice-presidential nominee is what Sarah Palin might call a “Papa Grizzly”.
The three hour-plus, freewheeling conversation with Rogan will not shift a single vote in this election, but it might set the scene for the next.
Vance will someday run for president; podcasts have become the baptism of fire for any candidate. Donald Trump spoke with Rogan last week and it garnered 41 million views on YouTube. Rogan approached Kamala Harris with a similar offer and she reportedly demanded he fly to her and cap the talk to an hour. Rogan refused, which demonstrates how ridiculously powerful this medium has become – and the fact that she’s said to have demanded a time limit probably says something about how weak her candidacy really is.
Harris cannot talk to anyone for three hours; her personality doesn’t extend that far. She has one or two catchphrases, memorised and performed with all the naturalism of kabuki theatre: democracy is fragile, dream of a new tomorrow, yada yada.
Vance by contrast is endlessly fascinating. We learnt that when Trump first offered him the VP pick, he missed the call: “I just s— a brick,” he laughed, reminding us that the Yale grad is a hillbilly at heart. He calls Emily in Paris “a masterpiece”. He bakes oreo cakes with his son. He believes the “environmental impact of turbines is totally bananas”; on Ukraine, “I don’t really care about Russia, I just don’t think we should have a nuclear war.” Vance is accused of peddling isolationism to get in with Trump, but if Trump is a populist by instinct, JD is one by considered conviction.
“Some immigrants are good, some immigrants are not good,” he shrugged, it’s a matter of “human nature”. The ticket doesn’t want to ban all abortion but allow communities to set their own limits. Biology is a reality: “We’re the hardware and the software is the ideas we have in our head,” of which the most pitiless belong to the church of woke: “It has excommunication. It doesn’t have the forgiveness part.”
He wouldn’t be surprised if “me and Trump won the normal gay guy vote”, as per the backlash against trans. Note that he calls Trump “Trump” – not “Donald” or “the former president” – as if he’s neither a boss nor a friend but a phenomenon he has the luck to observe up close. As for Trump’s attempted killing, “I hope that we win and get to the bottom of it”, because he still can’t figure out how it was allowed to happen. That’s grist to the mill of Rogan listeners, for whom much of life is an elite grift and a transparent cover-up.
In normal times, the US media might regard Vance honestly and acknowledge his brains – perhaps float the idea that he embarrasses Trump by comparison. But hatred of conservatives in principle has closed their eyes to the appeal of this one in particular, namely that he is at once bro and pro – relatable and highly intelligent.