Takeaways from JD Vance's interview with Joe Rogan

In an interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance suggested that he and Donald Trump can win the “normal gay guy vote” and that families with transgender children are looking for an edge in Ivy League college admissions.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won, just, the normal gay guy vote, because, they just wanted to be left the hell alone,” Vance said in the conversation, which lasted more than three hours and was released Thursday. “Now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it that they’re like, ‘No, no, we didn’t want to give pharmaceutical products to 9-year-olds who are transitioning their genders.’”

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The friendly and wide-ranging interview came less than a week after Trump held his own three-hour interview with Rogan — whose podcast has more than 17 million YouTube subscribers — and less than a week before Election Day.

An early portion of the interview focused heavily on transgender people and transition-related medical care, which Vance described as “pharmaceutical conversion therapy” for gay people.

“Every single day, my 4-year-old or 2-year-old will come to me and say something that is bats--- insane, because they’re 4 and 2,” Vance said at another point. “Like my 4-year-old will come and say, ‘Daddy, I’m a dinosaur,’ right? I’m gonna take him to, like, the dinosaur transition clinic and put scales on him?”

Vance also asserted that, for some affluent parents, having transgender or nonbinary children is a way to “reject your white privilege.”

“If you are a middle-class or upper-middle class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle class kids,” said Vance, who has talked about his family's economic struggles growing up and has a degree from Yale Law School. “But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans, and is there a dynamic that’s going on where, if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege?”

In an August poll of LGBTQ voters conducted by the Human Rights Campaign, 74% of respondents said they planned to or were leaning toward voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, 7.5% for Trump.

Some other takeaways from Vance’s interview with Rogan:

Vance indulged Rogan’s fears about Muslims

Rogan, speaking specifically about Muslims, worried about “religious influence” on the way people are “allowed to behave and the way their state is governed.”

“Worst-case scenario,” Rogan added, “is a state adopts Sharia Law.”

Rogan also referenced how the city of Minneapolis has approved broadcasts of the Islamic call to prayer and argued that it’s unfair to “cry against the concept of Islamophobia” if you have concerns about such issues.

“I mean that’s what to me is so crazy about some of the hyper-left-wing reaction,” Vance responded. “The idea that like, somehow, I want to force every man, woman and child to go to my church is ridiculous. I just don’t want to do that. I’ve never had any interest in doing that.”

“But where you see actual real religious tyranny is increasingly in Western societies where you’ve had a large influx of immigrants who don’t necessarily assimilate into Western values but try to create, I think, a religious tyranny at the local level,” Vance added. “And if you think that won’t happen at a national level, you’re crazy.”

Rogan also claimed that there are "activists" in Toronto who "have said our goal is to outbreed everyone who is not Muslim." Vance said that sort of scenario "scares the hell out of me."

Vance railed against the Covid vaccine, even though he received one

“I haven’t been boosted or anything, but the moment where I really started to get redpilled on the whole vax thing was, the sickest that I’ve been in the last 15 years, by far, was when I took the vaccine,” said Vance, describing how his thinking on the vaccine has changed. 

“I’ve had Covid at this point five times,” Vance added. “I was in bed for two days. My heart was racing. … No, like, serious injury. But even the fact that we’re not even allowed to talk about the fact that I was as sick as I’ve ever been for two days and the worst Covid experience I had was like a sinus infection — I’m not really willing to trade that.”

Trump invited Vance to Butler for the rally where he survived an assassination attempt

Vance, who met with Trump about the possibility of being his running mate hours before his July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, revealed that the former president initially wanted to bring Vance along and announce him as his pick.

“Well, I think I’m probably going to pick you, but I don’t know, and I’m not ready to make a decision,” Vance recalled Trump saying. 

“And then he looks at one of the staff members who’s in the room, he’s like, ‘Actually, wouldn’t it really set the world ablaze if we just made the decision today? And so why don’t you come up with me and we’ll just do the announcement in Butler, Pennsylvania?”

Vance liked the sound of that — “Absolutely, let’s get this over with, because I’m sick of not knowing,” he recalled thinking — but Trump ultimately decided to wait on an announcement and “prepare for it better” while making no guarantees that Vance would be the choice.

After learning of the assassination attempt that evening, Vance said he went into “fight-or-flight mode with my kids.”

“We were at a mini golf place in Cincinnati, Ohio,” Vance said, adding that he had to gather his children, “throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns, and basically stand like a sentry at or front door.”

Vance enjoys a good Netflix binge

While sharing some stories about how his life has changed since being nominated for vice president, Vance reflected on a quiet weekend back home with his family in Cincinnati shortly after the Republican convention.

“We’re sitting there watching, like, some stupid show, ‘Emily in Paris’ on Netflix or something,” Vance said, before catching himself. 

“Sorry, I don’t mean to call that a stupid show. I actually think ‘Emily in Paris’ is a masterpiece,” he clarified. “But set that to the side, bracket that for now … we’re watching some show on Netflix, and you see one guy walk past your window, and you see another guy walk past your window, and it’s just a Secret Service agent patrolling. You recognize that your zone of privacy is very narrow, and that takes some adjusting and getting used to.”