Know Your Enemy: What’s Wrong With J.D. Vance?

Know Your Enemy: What’s Wrong With J.D. Vance?

Matt and Sam revisit J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy to try to understand the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

In this episode, your co-hosts take a harrowing journey into the life, mind, and times of J.D. Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio and current vice-presidential pick of Donald Trump. You probably were introduced to Vance as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 memoir that attempts to explain the plight of the “white working class” in places like Kentucky and Ohio, and now know him as the deranged post-liberal purveyor of insults to single women, lies about Joe Biden targeting MAGA voters with fentanyl to thin their ranks, and deranged comments about the 2020 election and January 6. How did Vance become so weird—and menacing? We try to answer that question by starting with a close reading of Hillbilly Elegy, and then take listeners from the end of that book through the transformations that made Vance Trump’s toadie-in-chief.

Further Reading:

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016)

How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and Becoming Catholic, The Lamp (2020)

Matthew Sitman, Leaving Conservatism Behind, Dissent (2016)

Glenn Kessler, J.D. Vance’s Claim That Biden is Targeting ‘MAGA voters’ with Fentanyl, Washington Post (2022)

Colby Itkowitz, Beth Reinhard, and Clara Ence Morse, In Vance, Trump Finds a Kindred Spirit on Election Denial and Jan. 6, Washington Post (2024)

Ian Ward, The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview, Politico (2024)

Simon Van Zuylan-Wood, The Radicalization of J.D. Vance, Washington Post (2022)