JD Vance is Not Weird (version 2)

Vance's recent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast let us know one thing for sure: He's not weird.

Note to Readers: I am republishing this essay which I released earlier today to include a relevant and potentially revelatory story that broke on the Valuetainment podcast, hosted by Patrick Bet David three days ago. It appears near the end of the article under the subheading “Rigged Elections”

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Rogan and JD Vance recorded a three hour long conversation on Halloween. Watch it. If only to dispel the idea that everyone in politics is a shill for special interests, a serial liar or cognitively impaired.

In the typical JRE format, the two sat across from each other and had a friendly conversation. This one covered a large range of topics from Vance’s embarrassing attempt to prepare a vegetarian meal for then girlfriend Usha Chilkuri (Vance) to his opinion on gender reassignment surgery on pre-pubescents.

It was reported that Rogan also extended an invitation to VP Harris to join him at his studio in Austin, TX for a long form conversation as well. The Harris team balked, insisting on recording the interview in D.C. over no more than an hour. To his credit, Rogan politely declined such an arrangement. His audience demands more. Rogan is comfortable in his own space, with his own mic and his own tech bro Jamie running the backend of things. And why should the parameters be different if the intent was to give his vast following a way of comparing candidates vying for the highest positions in the land?

In today’s battle for attention getting on the Rogan podcast is the pinnacle of success. According to YouTube, the Rogan/Vance interview has gotten over 11 million views in just 48 hours. What a boon it must be for a candidate to be able to present yourself to tens of millions of voters while sitting comfortably in a chair nursing a beverage of your choice rather than flying from one rally to another to speak to audiences numbering in the tens of thousands.

Moreover, Rogan’s podcast audience draws from all political perspectives. It begs the question, why would Harris decline this kind of opportunity just a week before election day? She didn’t have to debate anybody. It was an opportunity for the public to get to know her better. Perhaps that was the issue? I’m just asking…

President Trump appeared on Rogan last month, but I didn’t watch it. Although I am not bothered by Trump’s flight of ideas and bombastic tenor as I once was, I still feel like he has trouble articulating what he believes. I was hoping that running mate JD Vance would do that for him. I think he delivered.

The convo opened with Vance recounting how he found out that he would be Trump’s running mate. He apparently missed the call when it came. When he realized what had happened, he called back and reached President Trump who kidded,

“JD, you missed a very important phone call. I’m going to have to find someone else…”

The initial exchange set the tone for the entire three hours. Both host and guest enjoyed each other’s willingness to be lighthearted. Serious topics were also hit head on.

Overall, Vance was completely at ease and was never at a loss for words. He was careful not to opine on matters he was not familiar with and had no problem admitting that was the case. Refreshing.

I was surprised, however, at his lack of understanding on some key issues. He was unaware of the powerful therapeutic value of psychedelics in treating veterans with PTSD and seemed to have little grasp of the history behind the prohibition of cannabis in this country. Most surprising was that he didn’t look into the Trump assassination attempt more closely. He acknowledged that there were certain things that were “fishy” about the event in Butler, PA this summer when Trump narrowly escaped a bullet purportedly fired from an AR-15 wielded by a 20 year-old who couldn’t make his high school rifle team. For example:

• Why didn’t the SS put snipers on sloped roofs?

• How did this twenty year old with a rifle and range finder make it to the roof without being confronted by police or SS?

• His abode was apparently completely scrubbed—no computer, no silverware, etc. when the FBI got there.

• Why was he cremated 10 days later with no autopsy report or toxicology screen?

• Why did the media stop covering it so quickly?

Perhaps he knows that stating the obvious, that everything points to an inside job would be too much to put out there a week before an election. Vance is either very naive, or extremely talented at feigning naiveté. Vance assured Rogan that if in office the incident would be investigated.

If I were to guess, Senator Vance hasn’t looked into the JFK assassination either. I have to admit, I was very disappointed but not too surprised that when the two discussed the debacle of the Iraq war, Rogan didn’t bring up 9/11. We’re still not there yet…

Big Points

As I have written before, I have friends on both sides of the political aisle. What I have noticed is that my liberal leaning friends have almost no understanding of what the Republican platform really is, where as those voting for the GOP ticket are doing so because of what they see as a lack of transparency and frank lies coming from the Harris campaign.

So, to my friends who are voting for Harris mainly because, well, she isn’t Donald Trump, I hope you will take the time to watch Vance explain where he and Trump are coming from.

Lack of Transparency

Vance appropriately asked why Harris won’t give a straight answer as to when she noticed that Biden was in cognitive decline? The question is, in my opinion, rhetorical. If she claims that he isn’t, she would be insulting our intelligence or appear as someone who can’t tell up from down. If she acknowledges that Biden is impaired, she should have invoked the 25th amendment and replaced him already. She’s stuck. Repeating statements like “President Biden is a great leader and statesman and has proved his commitment to the American people” is not an answer. But why won’t the Democratic base call her out on it?

Vance did not raise the question which I have repeatedly raised to my Dem friends: why did the DNC arrange for a debate with Trump two months before the national convention?

Vance goes further, offering Rogan a humorous anecdote about his four year old helping him to bake an Oreo cake. Vance left him alone with the ingredients and when he returned, half the cookies were gone. “Where’d the cookies go buddy?”

“I didn’t eat them Daddy. You did!”

This is what JD means when he says Kamala lies like a four year old. She recently said Trump will take away second amendment rights. WTF?

She also says that Trump will jail his political opponents. Trump never did that when he was in office, but Steve Bannon, just served prison time for “contempt of congress” for failure to appear after being subpoenaed by Congress to answer questions regarding J6. Bannon was acting on his attorney’s advice who assured him that he didn’t have to appear because he was protected by Executive privilege. The Biden/Harris administration are the ones incarcerating their political opponents, not Trump.

1A rights

Vance, like me, is extremely concerned about the fact that the Dems are signaling that Freedom of Speech is an impediment to living in a safe society. Governor Tim Walz has already openly admitted that he believes hate speech isn’t protected by the Constitution. First of all, he’s wrong. There is no such limitation. Secondly, how can he say that while Harris is calling Trump a fascist and saying that he’s Hitler? That isn’t hate speech?

Rogan also reminded us of the absurdity behind considering misinformation unprotected under 1A when so many, many things that were labeled misinformation during the pandemic turned out to be true.

Unfortunately Vance didn’t bring up the scariest fact: Biden’s National Security Council statements and CISA bulletins both hint that mis/dis and mal information can be considered anything that stokes distrust in governmental institutions, and that spreading of such information is considered a terrorist act. The Dems are coming dangerously close to being the fascists right now, not Trump.

Abortion Rights

This is a pivotal issue for the Democratic Platform, however they falsely claim that women will not be able to terminate pregnancies under a Trump administration. Vance assures Rogan that is not the case. It is Harris who has been misleading the public again.

The reality is that abortion rights is extremely nuanced. Vance explained the problem sensibly in just a few minutes. Very, very few amongst us believe that late term terminations, aside for medical reasons, should be permitted. Very, very few people believe that early terminations, before six weeks, should be forbidden.

At what point does the life of the fetus trump the bodily autonomy of the mother? There is no right answer.

This is why Vance feels the Federal government has no right to interfere. It should be left up to states to decide. He reminded Rogan that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, probably the biggest advocate for abortion rights, often said that this decision should not be made by judges but by legislatures. In other words, let the people decide, not a judge appointed by an executive.

The Border Crisis

Vance doesn’t want to shut down immigration; he and Trump want to end illegal immigration. Harris, he says, continues to decry that Trump is being disingenuous about his desire to end illegal immigration because he once vetoed a “bipartisan border bill” that would have secured the borders while never acknowledging the reasons why Trump (and a number of Democrats) knew it wouldn’t have worked.

There were few provisions to improve border security in the bill (a well-known Trump priority). But more importantly it would have allowed those who circumvent the required channels for entry by claiming they are seeking asylum to enter and stay in the US while their case is adjudicated. This process can take up to fifteen years. This “catch and release” strategy can, of course, be easily abused. Whether or not you agree with Trump on this matter, he did take a principled approach to the bill.

Senator Vance shared the anecdote that opened his eyes about the real interests behind an “open” border. A CEO of a large company candidly explained to him and his wife why he hated Trump: closing the borders would end the supply of cheap labor. He didn’t want to pay Americans the wages they would demand to do the same work. In other words, immigrants helped the ruling class get richer at the expense of working class Americans.

Vance also taught Rogan about how illegal immigration dilutes the representation of legal residents have in Congress. A given state’s number of Representatives in the House is based on population alone, not the population of people who reside there legally. No matter how strict we are about allowing only citizens to vote in elections, illegal immigrants who reside in this country will, in his view, influence legislatures.

“Green Energy”

I was pleased to hear Vance echo my own concerns around the frenzy around CO2 driven global warming. The reality is that there is an enormous amount of uncertainty in the models used to predict climate sensitivity and an enormous amount of money to be made for those pushing for a revolution in energy production.

The Dubious Origins of the Carbon Dioxide driven Global Warming Hypothesis

If the planet is truly at a tipping point because of CO2 is now at 4 parts per 10,000 instead of three, why not push for more nuclear energy? It’s a technology with obvious downsides in the long run, but we know it would work right now.

Wind turbines have their own massive environmental impact and are expensive and last no more than a decade or two.

Vance claimed that the biggest advocate for green energy in Europe is Russia because it leads to greater dependence on natural gas, a commodity that Russia possesses in great quantity.

The point here is that there is a lot of money to be made in the renewable energy movement. With money comes influence over politics and media. The whole thing doesn’t smell right to Vance. Rogan and I agree.

The Covid-19 Shots

I was surprised that the conversation did not focus more on the issue that engulfed the world for most of the last four years. Vance admitted that he took the primary series. He had never felt so ill in the last fifteen years as he did after receiving the second jab. Bedridden for two days with a racing heart.

The scary thing was that you weren’t allowed to talk about it.

Rogan informed Vance that Pharma has only been allowed to advertise their drugs on TV since the mid-nineties. Both agreed that the industry was not spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads to sell more product, they were doing this to buy positive media coverage.

While not making any promises, Vance signaled that he would look into reversing this ruling if elected. THANK YOU.

Rigged Elections

While the Dems continue to call Trump supporters “insurrectionists” because of the protests on J6 (which ultimately did not lead to an open investigation of the evidence of voting irregularities prior to certification of the results), they ignore the fact that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was real and provided hard evidence that our sitting President used his influence while VP to funnel money into his son’s enterprises. It was corruption at the highest level.

The nastiest part was that the Democratic party and the FBI colluded with legacy media to scuttle the story in the weeks before the 2020 election because they knew it would result in a Trump second term.

The same day that this podcast aired, Mike Benz, once Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Communications and Information Policy and now whistleblower appeared on Patrick Bet David’s extremely popular Valuetainment podcast to drop some devastating truth bombs regarding plans that were being drawn up in the summer of 2020 to counter a situation where Trump refused to honor election results if he lost. Plans to overthrow a legitimate Trump second term were also laid out. According to Benz the strategy included:

• Using mail-in ballots appearing after election day to swing key states from Red to Blue

• Implementing a wide umbrella of censorship over all major media platforms to target any posts that attacked the legitimacy of such ballots, voting machine reliability and early voting drop boxes

• Using mainstream media to run articles arguing the illegitimacy of the Electoral College system and a demand to honor the popular vote instead

• Convincing the Governors of California, Oregon and Washington to secede

• Leveraging the destabilizing power of Racial justice activists who would respond to a call from Biden to take to the streets

Who was responsible for such a strategy? The Election Integrity Partnership, partnering with the DHS, the (now defunct) Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlanta Council (which has seven CIA directors serving on its board). According to Benz, the Atlanta Council is “basically a military intelligence backchannel for NATO to be able to coordinate civilian side changes to society and laws”.

It’s unclear whether this plan would have worked. It’s also up to you to decide whether Benz is an authentic whistleblower, counter-intelligence or a crank.

Personally, I am not so quick to discount Benz’s story. He says he has the receipts. And I have no doubt that there are very powerful interests embedded deep within our government that operate outside of any real oversight. Whoever these folks are it’s not so hard to conclude that they would regard Trump as a much bigger threat to their objectives, whatever they may be.

Obviously Rogan and Vance were not aware of this information. I would suggest watching the video on YouTube for yourself, before it gets taken down:

Conclusion

Last month I had a conversation with two 21 year old college students. One let me know that they had a sincere interest in learning about the health benefits of mushrooms. I asked her if she had ever heard of Paul Stamets, the greatest American mycologist of all time. They hadn’t.

“OMG! You MUST listen to his interview on Joe Rogan from a few years ago!!”

The two Gen-Zers looked at each other and rolled their eyes. In their minds, anybody who knew anything about anything would never appear on the Rogan podcast. The two were not only planning to cast their vote for VP Harris, they were repulsed by anyone who didn’t.

This interaction is emblematic of the bigger problem. Democratic voters, in general, refuse to listen to any argument that isn’t curated by media that is highly biased towards their party while believing that they are voting from an informed position.

While this week’s election is a big moment for our country, it won’t seal our fate. Trump has embraced people like RFK Jr. to great success. Four years ago he was derided as an antivax kook. If Trump makes good on his word, Kennedy will be choosing who runs the CDC, FDA and the National Institutes for Health. Harris may walk away with the White House, but half the country has woke from their slumber. A real referendum will be in the offing, sooner or later.