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

The Trump-Vance campaign, in its latest push, has gone all out in the bro-podcast space in hopes of becoming the base. To that end, in an episode released Thursday, JD 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 striking theme was given the extraordinary gender nature of this campaign tactic was Vance’s attempt to define the Republican Party as the party of masculinity.

For example, when Rogan claimed that there were “very few things that would make you a conservative rather than a fighter,” Vance took the opportunity to link Donald Trump’s support to higher testosterone levels. Rogan made a different argument: that martial arts encourage a conservative worldview because they emphasize the importance of hard work. But Vance continued with the implication that testosterone makes one a Trump voter.

“Maybe that’s why Democrats want us all to be in poor health and overweight,” Vance said, without clarifying how Democrats were conspiring against public health. “It means we will become 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 on gender weren’t about hormones, but about LGBTQ+ issues. For example, he suspected that Trump would win the “normal gay male vote” because these men were tired of being lumped into gendered debates. “Now you have all this crazy stuff on top of that, they say, ‘No, no, we didn’t want to give pharmaceuticals to nine-year-olds who are changing gender,’” Vance said. The Trump campaign embraced gay men, he said, as long as those men also embraced conventional ideas about gender and masculinity.

Transgender women, the second big bogeyman of the Trump campaign’s fear mongering (immigrants always come first), emerged 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 dismissed the idea of ​​transgender children by talking about his four-year-old son who identified as a dinosaur. (“I’m going to take him to the dinosaur transition clinic and give him scales?”) He expressed concern that his daughter would be hurt if she competed against transgender girls in sports. (“I’m terrified she’ll be beaten to death because we allow a 6-foot male to compete with her.”)

On the surface, Vance may not seem like the best Trump surrogate on the topic of toxic masculinity: unlike Trump, he has only been married once and has none of Trump’s flashy rich man, reality TV, ways to get them. -the-you-know-it swagger. But Vance is also a Yale Law-educated intellectual, so he knows how to set intellectual frameworks for Trump’s emotional outbursts.*

So it’s fitting that it’s his most bizarre discussions around gender had to do with elite institutions. It boiled down to a wild theory: that white parents are incentivized to encourage their children to identify as transgender so they can attend Ivy League schools. Vance said:

If you’re a white, middle-class or upper-middle-class parent and all you care about is whether your child goes to Harvard or Yale, then that path has obviously become a lot more difficult for a lot of people. children from the upper middle class. But the only way these people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is by being trans, and there is a dynamic where if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege.

It’s a downright absurd theory. There is no evidence that anyone has ever encouraged their child to pose as transgender for college admissions. And yet, if you look beyond the novelty of the argument, you can see how this claim fits into the worldview Vance promotes: social order liberals want disadvantages for white people, Vance believes. In an unfair system where oppression is necessary to gain esteem, white people are forced to find distorted ways to identify with oppressed groups, creating a twisted and tiring game of identity fraud.

It is a petty mentality that does not recognize its disadvantages actually be oppressed. But for many of the 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 coming. Many of these listeners want to be told that they should no longer feel obligated to challenge outdated ideas about masculinity and gender – and JD Vance is happy to do that. deliver.