Republican Vice Presidential nominee and junior Ohio Senator JD Vance, in a long-ranging podcast interview with Joe Rogan released Thursday, said he wouldn’t be surprised if he and Donald Trump won the “normal gay guy vote” in the 2024 election because “they just wanted to be left the hell alone.”
Vance also criticized transgender and nonbinary people throughout the interview and accused scientists of withholding research that suggests “the gender transition craziness has reached a boiling point.”
Vance then blamed wealthy white progressives.
“Look at where the gender craziness is the most common, it’s most common among upper middle class to lower middle class white progressives,” Vance said. “Now you can believe, OK, that there’s just like something genetic going on in the mind of a wealthy white progressive or you can believe that this is a cultural trend that we should be questioning a lot more than we are right now.”
At least one study published last year, however, linked gender nonconformity and sexual orientation with lower socioeconomic status.
In references to conversations with an unnamed LGBTQ friend, Vance pivoted from denouncing gender ideology and the religiosity of “wokeness” to offering specific critiques of trans athletes competing in school sports and men who wear skirts.
“This is not empowerment, this is not respecting lifestyle choices. We’re letting a grown man walk around in a miniskirt in broad daylight. Like what are you talking about?” Vance asked.
Rogan responded by saying he wasn’t bothered by men wearing skirts before taking the conversation elsewhere.
Vance at another point falsely claimed a school shooter who killed six people in Nashville in March 2023 was “motivated by some very radical trans ideology.”
Police in Nashville have not released any information connecting the shooter’s gender identity to a motive for the attack, NBC News reported.
The podcast episode has been viewed more than 12 million times on YouTube since its Oct. 31 release as of press time. Vance’s interview reached Rogan’s 18.1 million YouTube subscribers and 14.5 million Spotify followers.
Rogan and Vance later discussed Vance’s first attempt to cook for his wife; working conditions at tech giant Apple’s factories in China; the origins of the coronavirus and the ugliness of wind turbines in the freewheeling conversation, which veered into more unproven statements about said turbines killing whales, before finally returning to politics and the upcoming election.
“The biggest and most fundamental difference between Kamala and President Trump and the campaign is whether it’s Biden calling people garbage or Tim Walz calling people fascists and Kamala calling people Nazis, or endorsing explicit censorship, we’re not trying to censor our fellow Americans,” Vance said. “We’ll attack Kamala on her policies and ideas, but we’re not trying to say you should be silenced because you disagree with us.”
While Biden did use the word “garbage,” he later clarified his remarks, saying he was speaking about the rhetoric a Trump supporter used. That supporter, a comedian, spoke at a recent Trump rally where he made a joke calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
Democratic presidential nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris has not appeared on Rogan’s podcast in spite of negotiations for her to make an appearance. Rogan interviewed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Oct. 25.
When Rogan pushed the conversation to national abortion policy, Vance said women “go on TikTok, and they’ll celebrate having an abortion ... celebrating something like that is bizarre to me.”
Rogan pushed back, saying, “I think there’s very few people that are celebrating, though.”
The Harris campaign later shared a clip of Rogan’s abortion exchange with Vance on Instagram with a one word caption: “oof.”
The last day to vote is Tuesday, Nov. 5.
