The episode was outrageous. But one thing was very clear.

That is Totally normal quote of the daya function that highlights a statement from the news that is currently illustrating how extremely normal everything has become.

“Have you seen all these studies that fundamentally link young men’s testosterone levels to conservative politics?” – JD Vance in his three-hour interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, published Thursday

The Trump-Vance campaign has been doing its best in the bro-podcast space in the final push, hoping to turn out the base. To that end, JD Vance made a three-hour appearance on the mother of all bro podcasts in an episode released Thursday. The Joe Rogan Experience. Vance and Rogan covered a wide range of topics, but the most notable topic – given the particular ones gender specific The essence of this campaign tactic – was Vance's attempt to define the GOP as the party of masculinity.

For example, when Rogan claimed that “there are very few things that make you more of a conservative than martial arts,” Vance jumped at the chance to link support for Donald Trump with higher testosterone levels. Rogan made a different argument – that martial arts promote a conservative worldview because they emphasize the importance of hard work. But Vance concluded that testosterone makes you a Trump voter.

“Maybe that's why Democrats want us all to have poor health and be overweight,” Vance said, without clarifying how Democrats were acting against public health. “That 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 arguments about gender weren't about hormones, but about LGBTQ+ issues. For example, he suspected that Trump would win the “normal gay vote” because these men were tired of being lumped together in gender debates. “Now you've got all these crazy things saying, 'No, no, we didn't want to give pharmaceutical products to 9-year-olds who were changing genders,'” Vance said. The Trump campaign embraced gay men, he said, as long as those men also represented conventional ideas about gender and masculinity.

Transgender women, the second major bugbear of the Trump campaign's fear-mongering (immigrants always come first), have been mentioned repeatedly as a reminder of the threat to societal masculinity. Vance argued that transgender women forced children to see their genitals by wearing short skirts in public. (“If you do that, you’re a pervert.”) He claimed that Big Pharma was forcing hormones on children. He rejected the idea of ​​transgender children by talking about his four-year-old son identifying as a dinosaur. (“Like, am I going to take him to the dinosaur transition clinic and put a scale on him?”) He expressed concern that his daughter might injure herself competing in sports with transgender girls. (“I’m afraid she’ll be beaten to death because we let a 6-foot-tall man compete with her.”)

On the surface, Vance doesn't seem like the best replacement for Trump when it comes to toxic masculinity: Unlike Trump, he's only been married once and has none of Trump's flashy, rich-man-reality-TV-attack style-you-know -already-bragging. But Vance is also a Yale Law-trained intellectual, so he knows how to create intellectual frameworks for Trump's emotional outbursts.*

So it's fitting that his the most The bizarre gender dispute had to do with elite institutions. It came down to a wild theory: that white parents have an incentive to encourage their children to identify as transgender in order to get them into Ivy League schools. Vance said:

If you're a middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent and all you care about is whether your child goes to Harvard or Yale, that path has obviously become much more difficult for many upper-middle-class children. But the only way for these people to participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans, and is there a dynamic that leads to when you become trans, you become white in that way Rejects privilege?

It's a patently absurd theory. There is no evidence that anyone has ever encouraged their child to identify 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 that Vance represents: social order liberals, in Vance's view, want disadvantages for whites. In an unfair system where oppression is necessary to gain respect, white people are forced to seek twisted ways to identify with oppressed groups, resulting in a twisted and tiring game of identity fraud.

It's a petty mindset that doesn't acknowledge the disadvantages actually be suppressed. But for many With 14.5 million followers on Spotify and 17.6 million subscribers on YouTube spending three hours of their day with Joe Rogan, it could be a success. Many of these listeners want to learn that they should no longer feel obligated to challenge old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and gender—and JD Vance is happy about that delivery.