Saagar Enjeti: belief

Transcript context

…It’s crazy that JD, the same guy, because that’s Hillbilly Elegy’s, what I kind of thought of him as. Yeah, I’ll tell you, for me, it’s actually pretty surreal. I met JD Vance in 2017 in a bar. I didn’t ever think he would be the Vice President-elect of the United States. Just kind of wild. One of my friends went back and dug up the email that we originally sent him, just like, “Hey, do you want to meet up?” And he was like, “Sure.” I was watching on television. The first time that it really hit me, I was like, whoa. It was like, name in a history book is whenever he became the vice presidential nominee. I was watching him on TV and the confetti was falling and he was waving with his wife, and I was like, “Wow, that’s it. ” You’re in the history books now forever, especially now as the literal Vice President-elect of the US. But his own evolution is actually a fascinating story for us too because I think a lot of the time I’ve spent right now is a lot of what I’m giving right now are 2016 kind of takes about why Trump won that time. But we just spent a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election and what happened, some of the failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for the Great Awokening. But also, if you look at the evolution of JD Vance, this is a person who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. And not a lot of people pay attention to this, but if you read Hillbilly Elegy, JD was much more of a traditional conservative at that time. He was citing a report, I think the famous passage is about payday loans and why they’re good or something like that. I don’t know his position today, but I would assume that he’s probably changed that. But the point is that his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional Republican with a deep empathy for the white working class than eventually become a champion and a disciple of Donald Trump, and to believe that he himself was the vehicle for accomplishing and bettering the United States, but specifically for working class Americans really of all stripes. And that story is really one of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political project, as an ideology. It’s also one of the Republican Party which coalesced now with Donald Trump as a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark against cultural leftism and elitism that eventually was normalized to the point that majority of Americans decided to vote for him in 2024. So let’s talk about 2024. What happened with the left? What happened with Biden? What’s your take on Biden?…

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