JD VANCE ON THE DEMOCRAT PARTY: “THE WAY THEY TALK ABOUT THEIR FELLOW CITIZENS IS REALLY DEMEANING.”

Audio By Carbonatix

Published: March 25, 2022 | Date of Source Audio: March 24, 2022

Transcribed and modified for publication from the original audio program

Eric Metaxas breaks down today’s political climate with author and senatorial candidate, JD Vance

Eric Metaxas: I'm excited because I have as my guest right now someone that I've come to admire. His name is JD Vance. He is running for the Senate in Ohio. JD, welcome.

JD Vance: Thanks Eric. Good to be with you.

Metaxas: At what point in your life are you going to be known as the guy who's in the Senate versus the guy who wrote “Hillbilly Elegy”? I just think it's going to be interesting to see how that goes. I'm really excited about your run. And there was just a straw poll that put you way ahead. Can you share that with us?

Vance: Yeah. So we've had a couple of debates in the past three or four days and we've done very well. I think the audience responded very well and you know, one in particular, we had a straw poll of the attendees who came in pretty undecided, and I think at the end of the debate we sort of won 45% and the other four or five candidates combined to get the rest. So, you know, in a good place, the campaign's going well. We need people to actually vote May 3^rd Ohio. If your listeners are in Ohio, please remind them to get out there and vote.

Metaxas: If I can get to Ohio, can I vote?

Vance: Well, actually, thanks to the way our elections work, you can vote three or four times, and if you have any deceased relatives, maybe bring them —

“You have this rare thing called common sense.”

Metaxas: Listen, rules are just part of the white patriarchal construct that needs to be dismantled. Let's just have a free-for-all. Come on. So, you're running for the Senate in Ohio. And when you were here in New York, you were on this program and we got to know each other a little bit that day. And I just want to say to my audience, you know, how impressed and really thrilled I was to hear you because you have this rare thing called common sense. I mean, to find somebody running for political office who has basic common sense, it's almost shocking in this day and age. And there are many things that you shared.

I want to talk to you a little bit about the transgender madness. I mean, I think as a country, we're very forgiving and understanding, and if people are dealing with issues, we want to, you know, we want to love them and respect them. But the idea that you've got this six-foot-four dude crushing it in women's swimming, I think most Americans know it's preposterous. It's almost funny, except why aren't people in leadership saying, excuse me, we have a problem, this is not acceptable. I mean, what do you think, what do we do about this? … I couldn't have imagined until now that we would ever be in a position where anybody would have to weigh in on something like this.

Vance: Yeah, I think the simple thing we have to do is actually change Title IX so that biological males can't compete in girls sports. It really destroys the entire enterprise of girls sports.

You know, it's funny, like I'm pretty far out on this, as you are Eric. I mean, I think this is fundamentally an assault on male and female as God and nature have us. And that's really what this transgender moment is about. But it's funny. I was talking to a friend of mine who's much more liberal on the gender issues than I am. And she was like, you know, you are more conservative, I'm a little bit more liberal, but even I can accept that biological males shouldn't be participating in female sports, right? Their bodies are different. The whole idea of why we separate male and female into different sporting categories is to recognize that. And again, it's just basic common sense that this shouldn't happen. It's unfair to the girls, by the way. I think it's insulting to them. Many of these athletes have gone, you know, a young lifetime competing, training, preparing for these moments to have it taken away from them by progressive social policies. Pretty sickening.

Metaxas: Well, you're one of the few voices that is willing to talk about the idea of these progressive social policies. I mean, it seems to me that anybody with half a brain in America, which is, you know, more than half the country, sees that there's something off, that there's something — it's not in everybody's best interest. There's some ideology that — it’s basically taking over and it's ruining lives. I mean, we could go down the line, it's like talking about, well, we don't want to have borders and you think, well, okay, that's a really sweet idea, you know, in a Dr. Suess book or something. But in reality, fentanyl is coming into the country, lives are being destroyed. You've seen that up close. So, I wanted to know if you would talk about that for a moment.

Vance: Yeah, absolutely. You know, this is one of the reasons I care so much about the U.S. Southern border. Of course, the left accuses us of caring about our border because we're allegedly racist or xenophobic. And I look at this through the eyes of Ohio grandparents, right? Who've had, you know, really two double whammies from the Biden administration. The first is that many of them have lost children to fentanyl overdoses. It's a leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds in our country and certainly in my home state. But then you think of all these grandparents taking care of grandkids they weren't expecting to take care of on a fixed income, doing in some ways the most selfless and loving thing imaginable in their golden years of life. And now we have a horrible inflation crisis with their fixed income, making it harder for them to put food on the table for their grandkids.

And you just realize that so much of what the Democrats accuse of us of, right? We’re either idiots or we’re xenophobes or we’re racist, like whatever or buzzword they're going to use. It's not because they actually care about minorities. It's not because they care about whatever group they allegedly care about. It's really weaponized compassion. They're trying to take our own compassion and turn it against us so that we ignore the problems that are happening in our own community. I just refuse to play that game. We need politicians who are willing to say, look, it's ridiculous that we have poison flowing into our communities, killing our people, orphaning our children. It has to stop. Not because we hate anybody but because we love our own people and want to put their interests first.

“Leadership of the democratic party have really been taken over by ideology.”

Metaxas: Well, it's difficult for most people, certainly for me, to comprehend that the leadership class in this country could be so out of touch, that they lack the most basic compassion to want to solve these problems. I do not think the democratic party of the past was that out of touch. I might have disagreed with the party, generally speaking, on many issues, but it struck me that most of them were coming from places of compassion, looking for solutions. It seems — and I don't know if you can respond to this or want to, but it really seems to me like certainly Biden and his vice president and his administration —but others in leadership of the democratic party have really been taken over by ideology. And they seem blinded, genuinely blinded to real people, the people they're supposed to represent. It doesn't seem to occur to them that there are people suffering, that they need to do something about that.

Vance: Yeah, it's funny. I was actually watching old clips of President Trump at rallies or at debates. And I was watching for something in particular, which is he obviously he loves the political combat. But the object of President Trump's combat is the media or other politicians, or sort of people who are in the public square. He doesn't talk about the citizens of his own country with scorn. Whether they voted for him or not, there's not this sense that he hates people who live in his own country. You listen to the Democrats talk — and I agree with you, this is very different. I mean, I grew up and lot of my family members were sort of classic blue dog, Kennedy-style Democrats. The way they talk about their fellow citizens is really demeaning. Remember when Joe Biden was going on about the vaccine mandates and it was the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and you know, you're going to have a “winter of suffering and death” because you guys are all stupid and you've made terrible decisions?

“The political leadership of this country seems to hold the rest of the country in such contempt.”

I am 37 years old. I've never lived in a moment where the political leadership of this country seems to hold the rest of the country in such contempt. And it's very dangerous, right? Because our whole constitutional republic, the whole idea is that it's held together by leaders that see their citizens not as subjects, not as people to look down on, but as fellow, sort of common interests tying them together in this shared project all of us call America. Hard to do that when you hate your own citizens.

Metaxas: Well, part of this goes back to, you know, roughly since the sixties, we've not been teaching civics, we've not been teaching basic patriotism, why the American system is beautiful, glorious, fragile, worth defending, worth spreading to the rest of the globe. These ideas have not come around before in history. Only in one moment, one glorious moment, were they able to be put into our Constitution, into our founding documents and to create the freest, most prosperous society since the beginning of humanity.

I mean, it's an amazing thing. But these ideas have not been taught to recent generations. And I really do think that that's kind of the answer. In other words, the idea that we would either rule ourselves or some elite class would rule over us — that used to be normative, people kind of understood that we get this or we get that. That’s kind of gone out of the picture it seems to me, and it's because of education.

Vance: Yeah, that's right. And of course, you know, education indoctrinates children into something, right? You're always teaching children something. You could be teaching them good civic virtues, you could be teaching them to respect one another, you could be teaching them that there are differences between boys and girls, and those differences are natural. Or you could be teaching them that you're either a victim or an oppressor based on the color of your skin, that there's no difference between the biological sexes and that America's fundamentally an evil country that its leaders have no obligation to.

And unfortunately, you know, you're very good about this, Eric. But this really all starts with education. The ideas that you and I are fighting against in 2022, they didn't come out of nowhere two years ago. They've been slowly working themselves through our universities and then our schools. And now through our corporations, our governments, our entire institutional world. And that really does go back to education. It started somewhere and it started frankly in the universities.