2024-11-02 04:40:03
This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“Have you seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics?” —J.D. Vance, in his three-hour interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, published Thursday
The Trump-Vance campaign has, in the final push, gone all out in the bro-podcast space in hopes of turning out the base. To that end, in an episode released Thursday, J.D. Vance made a three-hour appearance on the mother of all bro podcasts, The Joe Rogan Experience. Vance and Rogan covered a wide range of topics, but the most notable theme—given the particularly gendered nature of this campaign tactic—was Vance’s effort to define the GOP as the party of masculinity.
For example, when Rogan claimed that there were “very few things that will turn you into a conservative more than martial arts,” Vance jumped at the chance to connect support of Donald Trump to higher testosterone levels. Rogan was making a different argument—that martial arts encourage a conservative worldview because they emphasize the importance of hard work. But Vance went ahead with the implication that testosterone makes one a Trump voter.
“Maybe that’s why the Democrats want us all to be poor health and overweight,” Vance said, without clarifying in what way Democrats were plotting against public health. “It means we’re going to be more liberal.” It’s possible that Vance is referring to the body positivity movement, but it’s hard to know exactly what he meant.
Vance’s most heated points about gender dwelled not on hormones but on LGBTQ+ issues. He guessed, for example, that Trump would win the “normal gay guy vote” because these men were tired of being lumped in with gender-related debates. “Now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it that, they’re like, ‘No, no, we didn’t want to give pharmaceutical products to 9-year-olds who are transitioning their genders,’ ” Vance said. The Trump campaign embraced gay men, he way saying, as long as those men also embraced conventional ideas about gender and masculinity.
Transgender women, the second great boogeyman of the Trump campaign’s fearmongering (immigrants are always first), came up repeatedly as reminders of the threat to societal masculinity. Vance argued that transgender women were forcing children to see their genitals by wearing short skirts in public. (“If that’s what you’re doing, you’re a pervert.”) He asserted that Big Pharma was pushing hormones on children. He dismissed the idea of transgender children by talking about his 4-year-old son identifying as a dinosaur. (“I’m gonna take him to, like, the dinosaur transition clinic and put scales on him?”) He expressed concern that his daughter would get injured competing against transgender girls in sports. (“I’m terrified she’s gonna get bludgeoned to death because we’re allowing a 6-foot-1 male to compete with her.”)
On the surface, Vance may not seem like the best Trump surrogate on the topic of toxic masculinity: He, unlike Trump, has been married just once and has none of Trump’s gaudy-rich-man, reality-TV, grab-them-by-the-you-know swagger. But Vance is also a Harvard Law–educated intellectual, so he knows how to craft intellectual frameworks for Trump’s emotional outbursts.
So it’s fitting that his most bizarre argument around gender had to do with elite institutions. It came down to a wild theory: that white parents are incentivized to encourage their children to identify as transgender in order to get them into Ivy League Schools. Vance said:
If you are a, you know, middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids. But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans, and is there a dynamic that’s going on where, if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege.
It’s a patently absurd theory. There is no evidence that anyone has ever encouraged their child to pass themselves off as transgender for college admissions. And yet, if you look past the novelty of the argument, you can see how this claim fits into the worldview Vance is promoting: The social-order liberals want disadvantages for white people, to Vance’s mind. In an unfair system in which oppression is necessary to win esteem, white people are forced to seek out contorted ways to identify with oppressed groups, creating a twisted and tiring game of identity fraud.
It’s a petty mindset that does not acknowledge the disadvantages of actually being oppressed. But to many of the 14.5 million followers on Spotify and 17.6 million subscribers on YouTube who will spend three hours of their day with Joe Rogan, it could hit home. Many of these listeners want to be told that they should no longer feel obligated to challenge old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and gender—and J.D. Vance is happy to deliver.
