Michael. Peter. What do you know about Hilbilly Elegy? I know that the book made the argument that we have to understand rural whites so that they can run for senate and take our rights away.

So this is sort of a weird episode for us and unusual episode because this is a memoir. The subtitle of Hilbilly Elegy is a memoir of a family and culture in crisis.

And it is, of course, written by Senator JD Vance. It is Jesus Christ. Sorry, but I'll be saying Senator a lot just for emphasis throughout the episode.

We're already in the could kill part of the episode. Yeah.

What makes this book pernicious, what makes it a good book for a podcast is that when it came out in 2016, it was a sensation among mainstream liberals. Right.

You have to sort of situate yourself in 2016 to understand it. We're in the midst of the ascendance of Trump. His success, I suppose, just leaves a lot of liberals kind of stumped.

And the dominant media narrative that emerges is that Trump was kind of hoisted to victory by the white working class.

The economically anxious among us. That's right. The coverage of this demographic was just breathless. Like they had discovered a new species of white people.

And every piece of mainstream political reporting for like six months was just a reporter wandering into a waffle house. Right.

And being like today, we're speaking to the complete buffoons.

We love Donald Trump. Just like physically shoving aside all the minorities who live in the South.

You're like, no, I need the downtrodden whites. So it's this moment that catapults JD Vance to some fame because Hilbilly Elegy came out in 2016 before the election.

And it allowed him to position himself as like the white working class whisperer. The guy who understood these people and was here to explain them to the New Yorker set.

Right. The blurbs in the book speak volumes because you have like the basic conservative David Brooks liked it. Rod Dreyer.

Oh, but then also mother Jones, Vox slate, the daily beast, the Atlantic and Bill Gates. Oh, yeah.

All with the kind words to say about Hilbilly Elegy. That's worth noting because this is a book that maligns poor people to book with very weird racial politics.

So I want to pull some of these themes out, but also just talk about how and why this stuff gets laundered for mainstream consumption. Right.

And why this was such a hit with liberals. It's the weird like self-flagulation industrial complex. You know the old quote that a liberal is someone who's too fair minded to take his own side in an argument.

Yeah. It's like something about the sort of I guess over analytical centrist relatively well off liberals that it's like we have to understand this.

And like basically keep digging until you find something sympathetic, which as a philosophical principle, I think is really good right being generous being fair.

And also when that is not matched by any similar impulse on the other side, what you basically have is an entire media where it's like the conservatives are bashing liberals and liberals are bashing liberals.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I also think that another component of that is that when someone like Vance comes along and offers a criticism of like his own people, liberals eat that up because to them it seems like very thoughtful.

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