A Dramatic Reading of JD Vance’s Awful Book

Summary

Bulwark Takes: "A Dramatic Reading of JD Vance’s Awful Book"

Podcast: Bulwark Takes
Hosts: Tim Miller & JVL
Date: June 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tim Miller and JVL embark on a sharp, satirical "read-along" of excerpts from J.D. Vance's new book, Communion. With playful exasperation and biting analysis, the duo scrutinizes Vance's much-publicized conversion to Catholicism, his tendency toward self-congratulation and post-facto rationalization, his relationship with elite circles, and his track record of political opportunism. The episode blends irreverent humor, personal anecdotes from the hosts as cradle Catholics, and trenchant commentary on hypocrisy and performative religiosity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How the Book Frames Conversion

• Short Shrift to Actual Faith: The hosts note that Vance’s supposed conversion to Catholicism is more a vehicle for self-congratulation and social commentary than genuine exploration of faith.
  • "For a book that is ostensibly about the conversion to the Catholic Church, it seems like that journey got a little bit of short shrift as compared to... self congratulation." (Tim Miller, [02:19])
• Performative Alienation: Vance continually frames his journey in contrast to his "annoying Yale classmates," using them as stand-ins for out-of-touch elites and the root cause of his worldview.
  • "Basically most of his villain origin story... is that the classmates that I met at Yale were annoying as fuck." (Tim Miller, [03:08])

2. Evangelical vs. Catholic Critiques

• Lingering Love for Evangelical Culture: Vance praises the warmth and music of evangelical churches, even in a book about leaving them for Catholicism—a contrast that perplexes the hosts.
  • "Interesting that in a book about conversion... he thinks evangelicals are actually better than Catholics in a lot of ways." (Tim Miller, [05:48])
• Cradle Catholic Perspective: The hosts mock the stereotypical coldness of Catholic liturgy, and the aversion Catholics have to the “sign of peace,” in contrast to Protestant friendliness.
  • "The Catholics, we don’t even really like to look at each other during Mass." (JVL, [07:56])

3. Elitism, Self-Advancement, and the WASP Ideal

• Ambition Contradicts Message: Despite Vance’s professed disdain for elitism, he “checked all the boxes” of American elite paths: Yale, venture capital, Hollywood, politics.
  • "He checked all the boxes before he even turned 40... Even really ambitious people, he’s tried to do all." (Tim Miller, [05:48])
• Misappropriating the WASP Code: Vance wistfully invokes WASP “duty,” via Ross Douthat, yet throws in with figures who never served (i.e., Trump, Don Jr.), mocking the “servant-leader” ethic he claims to value.
  • "Instead, JD throws in with people who’ve never served anything... it’s just this upside down, like everything is post facto rationalization for JD." (JVL, [12:16])

4. Hypocrisy and Strawman Arguments

• Self-Aware, Yet Unchanging: Vance identifies personal flaws (emotional detachment, daddy issues) but refuses to meaningfully address them.
  • "He does identify some of his flaws. He doesn’t usually act on any of them." (Tim Miller, [23:11])
• Therapy Dismissed: The hosts roast Vance for claiming therapy is “divorced from any sense of responsibility or guilt,” highlighting his misunderstanding of the process.
  • "I don’t think that’s how therapy works. Certainly not the responsibility aspect..." (JVL, [24:13])
• Classic Strawmen: Vance constructs crude caricatures of secular, progressive, or intellectual types for easy rhetorical victories.
  • "He constructs this strawman and he’s like, that was me... I was the worst imaginary progressive." (Tim Miller, [16:09])

5. Peter Thiel & Rene Girard’s Influence

• Thiel as Christian Guide: Vance credits Peter Thiel (notably not Catholic) as “possibly the smartest person” he’d met and a key inspiration for faith.
  • "Thiel impacted me in another way. JD writes. Possibly the smartest person I’d ever met..." (Tim Miller, [15:22])
  • "Why is the word 'possibly' in there? Because he’s got to make sure he leaves wiggle room so he can tell, Mr. Trump, sir, you’re the smartest person I ever met." (JVL, [18:00])
• Girard Misread: Thiel and, by extension, Vance, seem to draw from Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence not as a warning, but as a cynical instruction manual.
  • "Peter Thiel listens to Rene Girard and loved him because he thought... Girard was giving him a manual." (JVL, [21:03])

6. Confession, Guilt, and Selective Contrition

• Therapy as “Whining,” Confession as “Liberation”: Vance valorizes Catholic confession while misunderstanding both therapy and the actual depth of penance.
  • "It’s like therapy, but with less whining and more guilt." (JD Vance via Tim Miller, [29:07])
• Performative Apologies: The only apology Vance offers is for a widely-panned “cat lady” comment—a sin with no specific victim.
  • "There’s one thing... he does ask for forgiveness for... One of the dumbest things I ever said came when I argued that childless cat ladies..." (Tim Miller, [33:36])
  • "If you apologize for the childless cat ladies, there’s no actual human being you have to apologize to." (JVL, [37:06])
• Unrepentant on Actual Harm: No mention or apology for more consequential actions, such as false claims leading to deportations or incitements to violence.
  • "It does not seem to me that he is giving the benefit of charity... as his treatment of Renee Goode, as mentioned earlier." (Tim Miller, [34:23])

7. Conversion as Performance

• Skipping the Substance: Vance bypasses communal elements of conversion (like RCIA) in favor of "personal study," reinforcing the performative aspect.
  • "It's noteworthy though. I thought I was coming to the Catholic Church for the communion... Like J.D. Vance: No, I think I'll just sit in my house and read Pope Leo's epistles." (Tim Miller, [41:36])
  • "He didn’t do it. That’s what I’m saying. He didn’t do it. This is all fake. Like, it’s all fake. He didn’t do it." (Tim Miller, [43:31])
• Integralism Contradictions: The hosts lampoon Vance’s “super trad” posturing, including the odd fact that his spouse remains Hindu despite his embrace of Catholic traditionalism.
• Political Calculation: Wording in the book appears designed to be unassailable by internal critics—Vance hedges statements so as not to offend the right people ("in early 2021, not long after Joe Biden was sworn in as president..." [46:31]).

8. Alignment with the Cynical & Cruel

• Associates: Despite professing the virtues of picking friends wisely, Vance surrounds himself with divisive right-wing operatives.
  • "And so I decided to hold hands with Benny Johnson and Donald Trump Jr. and Cash Patel..." (JVL, [38:19])
• Russia, Trump, and Power: Vance minimizes Russian election fraud and justifies pro-Trump turns as if these come at a cost—when they in fact, are clearly careerist choices.
  • "To be fair, there’s plenty of fraud in Russian elections, just like in America..." (Tim Miller, [48:46])
  • "It’s so outrageous. I can’t even. I don’t. I can’t dignify it." (Tim Miller, [49:16])

9. Host’s Final Takeaways

• Overwhelming Hypocrisy: Across all topics, the enduring theme is Vance’s eager rationalization, lack of self-awareness, and the way his actions contradict his supposed insights.
  • "It’s just like you wrote a memoir at, like, age 35 about your personal triumph to plaudits, and then you sold it to Hollywood and made a biopic about yourself. And you’re telling us that you recognized during this process that you were spending too much time measuring your life by how other people viewed you. Your whole life is in service formats." (Tim Miller, [26:18])
• Despair and Exasperation: The episode closes with the hosts at the edge of exasperation, incredulous at the unending parade of self-serving contradictions.
  • "He’s so fucking awful. Anyway, all right, we’re just going to leave it there. How much more can a person take, though, really, truly?" (Tim Miller, [51:14])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "This fucking guy." (JVL, [01:52])
• "He checked all the boxes before he even turned 40... he’s tried to do all." (Tim Miller, [05:48])
• "We don’t even like that." (JVL, on the Sign of Peace at mass, [07:56])
• "This is the Onion headline. The worst person you know just made a good point." (JVL, on Vance’s “shut the hell up” proposal, [13:34])
• "JD describes himself like he takes the worst possible caricature that you could imagine of a snooty atheist liberal on Harvard’s campus... And he’s like, that was me. Actually, that was me." (Tim Miller, [16:09])
• "Why is the word 'possibly' in there? Because he’s got to make sure he leaves wiggle room so he can tell, Mr. Trump, sir, you’re the smartest person I ever met." (JVL, [18:00])
• "We need to read the tweet. Shout out to a gravy. Every lifelong Catholic I've ever met is like, I think we're supposed to give food to the poor people. And every adult convert is like the Archon of Constantinople's epistle on the Pentecostine rites of the Eucharist clearly states women shouldn't have rights." (Tim Miller, [41:07])
• "He wants to be able to say, 'What more do you want from me? Jeez, these mouthy broads.'" (JVL, [37:17])
• "How much more can a person take, though, really, truly?" (Tim Miller, [51:14])

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Important Timestamps

• [02:19] – On the lack of genuine faith narrative in Communion
• [03:08] – Vance’s Yale classmates as the basis for his worldview
• [05:48]-[06:44] – Comparison of Catholic and Evangelical church cultures
• [11:00]-[12:16] – The WASP ethic, service, and Vance’s rationalizations
• [15:22]-[18:00] – Peter Thiel’s influence and Vance’s rhetorical hedging
• [21:03]-[22:38] – Rene Girard’s philosophy, misinterpretation by Thiel/Vance
• [29:07]-[30:05] – Misunderstanding confession and therapy
• [33:36]-[37:08] – Vance’s selective apology for the “cat lady” comment
• [38:19]-[41:08] – Surrounding himself with right-wing figures and the convert’s paradox
• [46:31]-[49:16] – Political evasions and minimizing Russian election fraud
• [50:32]-[51:14] – Attacks on Catholic hierarchy and final exasperations

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Flow & Tone

This episode is incisive, sardonic, and relentless. Tim Miller and JVL’s banter blends Catholic inside jokes, expletive-laden rants, and political dissection. Their tone is both wry and deeply concerned, as they spotlight the disconnect between Vance’s professed values and his public behavior—all while holding nothing back in their irreverent but insightful analysis.

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For listeners: This summary captures the episode’s biting humor, detailed deconstruction of Vance’s book, and the hosts’ underlying concern for sincerity (or its glaring absence) in public life—particularly as it relates to religion, politics, and character. The podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of faith and political performance, especially if you enjoy sharp, pointed cultural criticism.

Transcript

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[Tim Miller]

from rebel.com hey everybody, it's Tim Miller and JVL the Bulwark. As promised, we are going to do a little bit of a quasi read along with you of JD Vance's new book Communion. I thought about going down to my local bookstore, shout out Garden District Books or Octavia Books or all the other great bookstores here in New Orleans, but I was like, I just couldn't stomach it. I couldn't stomach actually letting my door be darkened.

[JVL]

Not one dime by this.

[Tim Miller]

And so Ansley and Jasmine on our team, you know, Jasmine from the Friday Mailbag, have done the duties for us, have read the book, put together some excerpts and JVL and I are just going to read some choice excerpts together and react to them and see if either of us managed to have a stroke or a, you know, hard event of any kind.

[JVL]

Of for me, Tim, not reading this book is self care because I got to say, just going through the 10,000 words of excerpt that we made our way through nearly put me in the grave. This fucking guy.

[Tim Miller]

I'm going to try to get you seven feet under here. Six. Not enough. We're going to go an additional foot down.

[JVL]

This one goes to seven.

[Tim Miller]

We'll start in the introduction. One thing I noticed from the excerpts is that there's some Catholic talk and we're going to get to the Catholic excerpts. But for a book that is ostensibly about the conversion to the Catholic Church, it seems like that journey got a little bit of short shrift as compared to you Know, self congratulation. JD Vance's personal advancement through the world. Some political. Quite a bit of political interest.

[JVL]

Conversions, for sure. Not a ton of Catholic conversion stuff, but in a way, I think that's good because I get the sense that we're just a few years away from another J.D. vance conversion back to evangelical Christianity.

[Tim Miller]

And that takes us to the introduction, because I thought this was noteworthy. There were two elements from that that I want to go over on. Kind of how he lays the groundworks, the introduction, how you lay the groundwork for your journey to Jesus. Here's how. On how he met Jesus, I saw my grandmothers taking care of their grandkids with divinely inspired patience. I saw normal people who, unconcerned with whether they'd ever be rich or powerful, were more content and less restless than friends in my Ivy League circles. I looked at my son's big brown eyes and realized he didn't need me to be rich or powerful. He just needed me to be a good dad. Yeah, so that's interesting. On the meeting of Jesus there, it is kind of tied to, like, basically most of his villain origin story, which is that the classmates that I met at Yale were annoying as fuck. And that is really what kind of everything comes down to. It's like, I like Donald Trump because of that. I want to become a Christian because of that. I want to be everything that the person that was in my dorm at Yale was not because I found them annoying.

[JVL]

There's a lot of that. And to be honest, I've always wondered this about jd if even that is genuine, because you remember there was a. Some. Some Yale law friend of his who was. I don't know, it was like a trans lesbian or something. I don't remember exactly, but, you know, a close friend who he, like, always dined out on stories about, like. I don't know, like, it seems equally possible to me that JD liked all these people just fine while he was there and has only now retroactively decided that he's got to cast them as the villains for why he decided to do what he did. My favorite part about this, though, is, you know, he realizes that his son didn't need him to be rich or powerful. That's interesting, it's true. But also, JD has spent his entire adult life trying to become rich and powerful. So not clear that this is a lesson he internalized.

[Tim Miller]

There's never even a moment, actually, where he took a break from that or stopped. And it was either on the VC path. Book Single Upward Trajectory Movie and he touched all of the main centers of riches and power in the country. Law, like, he went into investing ownership,

[JVL]

venture capital and investment. Hollywood politics like the Senate and then the Vice presidency.

[Tim Miller]

He checked all the boxes before he even turned 40. And a lot of people just only go for one. Even. Even like really ambitious people. He's tried to do all. So anyway, okay, here is to your point with evangelism. And maybe a path back to evangelicism was another part of the introduction. By the same token, I've never felt more welcomed in my life than I did when I walked into a Southern Baptist or Pentecostal church as a kid. I have encouraged priests I know to go to an evangelical service to see what I mean. Besides the amazing music, I promise you'll find people who invite you to coffee or to their house for a meal. I'll encourage you to come back. That's interesting that in a book about conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism in the introduction of the book, he wants to make it very important that you know that he thinks evangelicals are actually better than Catholics in a lot of ways and that Catholic priests could learn from them.

[JVL]

It's such a weird thing that you and I, as cradle Catholics. Look at this. And I have always viewed Catholicism, to me, is barely even Christian. Like when we had the big fight the other day about, I mean, not our fight, but Pete Hegseth with the Christian denominations, there was like, Christian Catholic. And I was like, why is Catholic listed under Christian?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, Christian Catholic. What is that? It's like the Mormons were mad that they got moved out of the Christians. But had the Catholics gotten moved out? Everybody, like, well, obviously, obviously.

[JVL]

And part of that is things like the music. I am sorry. All love to my great friends who are evangelicals or just Protestant in general with their music. But you go to Catholic church and what you're signing up for, not all Catholic churches, but you're signing up for Palestrina and sacred music that's thousands of years old that is really, really good. And. And listening to. Do you remember the movie Saved?

[Tim Miller]

I do not.

[JVL]

Fantastic thing about, like, the youth pastors and stuff, like listening to, like, Christian church rock. Sorry, that's not amazing music.

[Tim Miller]

It's horrible.

[JVL]

It's an abomination. And about the friendly stuff, again, this is definitely a point of differentiation between Protestant sects and the Catholics. The Catholics, we don't even really like to look at each other during Mass. Like when you gotta do the sign of peace. There's one point during the Mass where You gotta do the sign and you gotta turn to your neighbor and say, oh, peace be with you, and shake hand. Peace be with you. We don't even like that.

[Tim Miller]

No. Part of the reason why Catholics have such big families, I think, is for during the sign of peace, they can spend most of that period giving peace to their own family members. Right. That's what I do. Yeah, Right. That's why you have so many children. If you only have the one child, then you gotta spend most of the period where you're doing peace, you know, touching the clammy hands of strangers. And that's not appealing. So. Yeah, I know. It's just the whole thing is like, okay, well, you were in those. You ostensibly could have just been a Baptist. You didn't have to convert.

[JVL]

So it is weird to be like, you know, to convert and then to go to priests and like, you've been a Catholic for five minutes, you're like, hey, excuse me, Father, I get some thoughts about how we could change things up around here. So do you think we could maybe xna some of the Latin, if you

[Tim Miller]

know what I'm saying?

[JVL]

And just like, it is like the guy who's been at the job for five minutes and is telling his boss how to do their job.

[Tim Miller]

We all know that guy. All right, chapter one is titled what's the Matter with J.D. vance? We're gonna skip through that, but that's just funny. That's the title. It's a deep question. It doesn't seem like J.D. vance has done a lot of reflection on that, but maybe at some point he will. I want to move ahead to chapter three because Ross Drothak gets mentioned.

[JVL]

Yes.

[Tim Miller]

So we'll just go there. This chapter three is titled, they Probably Don't Serve Beer in Hell, But they do in Columbus. A lot of this chapter is basically, to my understanding, kind of like a reflection on the values of regular folks versus the values of the elites as we've been highlighting. Did not at least pretends to not like his Yale classmates. And that is what is undergirding his faith and his political identity. Here it is. And he leans on Ross Delkat's wisdom to make this point. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat wrote a brilliant column titled why We Miss the wasps.

[JVL]

It's pretty funny.

[Tim Miller]

Now, after complimenting the evangelicals for how friendly they are, we've got to touch the wasps as well. We got to give them a shout out. All part of our Catholic conversion book. All right. In the New York Times, Ross Douthert wrote a brilliant column titled why we missed the wasps, in which he argued not long after George H.W. bush died, that Bush represented something the country needed to recover. Blush, the scion of a wealthy and powerful family, was driven by an overwhelming sense of duty. Douthan argued that our modern class of meritocrats lacked. So I'm not sure exactly how that supports the Catholic conversion or his life story or his life journey as a meritocrat, but. Jv, I just wondered if you had any reflections.

[JVL]

Yeah, I do. So, I mean, it is, it is true that this is a thing that used to be a big part of WASP culture, especially at the elite levels. Right. It's, it's like, it's why the Kennedys were. Went to war and stuff like that. Pappy Bush was. I mean, this guy did everything right. You know, first baseman, captain of the Yale baseball team, bomber pilot in the, in the war, head of CIA, elected representative, vice president, president hand wrote thank

[Tim Miller]

you notes to everybody.

[JVL]

Yeah, and I think we do have a lot of that still in America. The person who exemplifies that best, I think is probably Robert Mueller, who was a guy born in well to do and child of privilege and signed up to go to Vietnam and then became a criminal career prosecutor and worked in public service for most of his life. And I don't think JD has a lot to say say about him. Instead, JD throws in with people who've never served anything. What has Don Jr ever done to serve? What did Donald Trump ever do to serve? Like this is. And in fact, again, a lot of JD's Yale classmates went on to do things like work in public law, and he views them as like busybodies.

[Tim Miller]

Right?

[JVL]

So it's just this upside down, like everything is post facto rationalization for jd.

[Tim Miller]

Moving on to chapter four, More money, more problems. Again, all of the life lessons that he is offering in the book seem to be in direct counter to his own personal life choices. But here he's once again complaining about his classmates at Yale. And I enjoyed this little nugget in particular, he was referencing that women are less likely. There was concern that women are less likely to participate in classroom discussions. Classroom discussions are dominated by men. But he also was tired of what he called the arrogant classmates who droned on a lot about material dialectics. Arrogant people that drone on a lot annoy jd. That's interesting.

[JVL]

Can't think of somebody like that.

[Tim Miller]

That's interesting. Anyway, he doesn't like that. And so he was upset with the Speak up movement, which is Encouraging him to speak up. And he writes this. I didn't understand how the solution to that problem was to have women talk a lot more. Why shouldn't the men just talk a lot less? Rather than a speak up movement directed at the women of Yale Law School, why not a shut the hell up movement directed at everyone? Sign me up.

[JVL]

You know what this is? This is the Onion headline. The worst person. You know just made a good point. Yes.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, I guess, but it's him. You shut the hell up, J.D. you shut the hell up.

[JVL]

Fair.

[Tim Miller]

Writing a book. Yeah, like me writing a book about a movement which is like, people should stop talking so much about gay stuff and cursing on their podcasts. It's really annoying. It's like, well, okay, well, why would I. I don't think I would be the best messenger for that. Yeah. Anyway, move forward. We finally, in chapter five, really start to get the kind of his conversion story. And, boy, before we get to the person that really most impacted his conversion, you might assume it would be a religious leader of some kind. Somebody that's very pious. A Catholic writer, Mother Teresa. A saint. It's not. We'll get to that person in a second who it is. But there was kind of a door cracking that did come from reading about a saint. And he describes St. Augustine of hippos meditations as creating the first crack in his atheist armor. He writes this above all else. It gave me a certain humility. Debates about science and technology and faith and how to harmonize them hadn't first been presented to an arrogant young Christian in Milltown, Ohio. Rather, they were as old as the church itself. I began to see the world of the Christian faith as richer, more interesting than I'd realized.

[JVL]

Local man discovers that water is wet. I don't know. I mean, like, it does make you wonder, how the fuck did he get into yale law? Like J.D. vance learns that fides et ratio is a thing. What a fucking provincial little burger. I don't even know what to say.

[Tim Miller]

All right, now let's take us to the man that really set J.D. vance on a course towards faithfulness. A homosexual who has achieved more money than God, more money than anyone in human history. Somebody who has a harem of side boyfriends. That's Peter Thiel. Thiel impacted me in another way. JD Writes. Possibly the smartest person I'd ever met. He identified very openly as a Christian. Notice he doesn't say Catholic there. Again, he defied the simple social template I have constructed, that dumb people were religious and smart people were atheists. I have another sentence I want to get to, but can we just stop there for a second?

[JVL]

Yeah, because we got to get to that next sentence, too.

[Tim Miller]

We're going to. We're going to. J.D. vance describes himself like he takes the worst possible caricature that you could imagine of a snooty atheist liberal on Harvard's campus, and he constructs this strawman of this horrible person that doesn't believe that there are any smart religious people and that all of the smart people are atheists like them, and everyone that's religious is a fucking moron. He constructs this strawman and he's like, that was me. Actually, that was me. I was the worst imaginary progressive that you have met. It did not even occur to me that there could be a person that believed in any religion and that was also smart. Like, how? I don't know. How is that possible? How did he go through life for three decades and not meet anybody who was religious that he also found smart? Did he not read? Did he not fucking read again? How do you get into that?

[JVL]

Never picked up Witness to Hope.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Did you not read a single book from any religious person through history? I'm not even talking about religious books. I'm just talking about great works of fiction. I do not read any columnists. Like many of the prominent conservative columnists, the people that he would come to admire.

[JVL]

Bill Bennett, pretty smart guy.

[Tim Miller]

They were all religious. You thought they were all fucking morons. You thought they were all Forrest Gump and that you were the only smart one. I mean, you're as. He just describes himself as the biggest piece of shit ever. And there's something, I guess, clarifying about that and insightful, and I don't believe it's true, even. But like the fact that he created a fantasy version of himself that was that bad. To create a straw man to attack liberals, I think is a pretty interesting debate nerd move.

[JVL]

It is. The thing that jumped out at me about this passage was that there. There are a couple times in the. The book where it is very clear that JD is writing to insulate himself in case somebody tries to. On the inside of the Trump administration, to clip something, give it to Trump and say, look, JD's taking a shot at you. And so possibly the smartest person I'd ever met. Why is the word possibly in there? Because he's got to make sure he leaves wiggle room so he can tell, Mr. Trump, sir, sir, you're the smartest person I ever met.

[Tim Miller]

But Teeter Teal Impacted me in another way. Possibly the smartest person I've ever met. It's just like the idea of the teal also is a Christian in any meaningful way, or a Catholic, or that teal would help you on your journey towards Catholicism. I mean, like, teal is. What did Tucker call trump? A demonic force.

[JVL]

Demonic force. Can I say a word about Peter Thiel before we get. Because we do got to get to the renegia arts. I do not like to probe at the faith of others with my hands. The thing about Peter Thiel is that, like, if you had to boil down what is the central tenet of Catholicism or Christianity, it is that God so loved the world that he gave his only son to save us so that we don't have to fear death anymore. As far as I can tell, Peter Thiel's entire worldview is based around the utter terror of death. Like this. All he wants to do is avoid death. He thinks death is horrible. Death is. Now, again, we all struggle.

[Tim Miller]

Skin is melting, and he looks like his exoskeleton and endoskeleton are inverted. And that's why he's drinking and injecting twink blood into his body, because he wants to try to defeat death.

[JVL]

We all struggle with aspects of our faith. Maybe that's just his struggle, his fear of death. But again, it is a little weird to say at once, I am a believing Christian, and also, please, God, don't ever let me die. These things are intention.

[Tim Miller]

I think that there's a lot intention between Peter Thiel's choices, and there's just not a, you know, ton of evidence that, you know, he, you know, cares about the neighbor. He judges others like he himself would like to be judged. Anyway, we could. We could go down the list of the Beatitudes and do a check and list and see how Peter Thiel's doing, but I think that's probably not that helpful. Okay, so Peter Thiel's taking JD Vance into the Catholic faith. And jd, where does he lead him, you might wonder. Thiel led me to Rene Girard, the French philosopher under whom he had studied at Stanford. Now, I don't know a ton about Rene Gerard Jabiel, but it seems like you might.

[JVL]

So I saw this, and I thought, wait a minute. I know something about Rene Girard. Why do I know about Rene Girard? And I know about Rene Girard because my second favorite podcast is behind the Bastards. And Robert Evans did a long, long exegesis on Rene Girard after Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures. And Rene Girard was a French philosopher who talked a lot about man as a memetic creature. And he was really, he was very keyed in on how authoritarians always scapegoat people. Right. That part of the rise to authoritarianism is scapegoating. And looked a lot at Nazi Germany, a lot about how the minorities are always there to be. To be hurt. And when you. Again, gotta go back to the Robert Evans thing on this, the case Robert makes is that Peter Thiel listens to Rene Girard and loved him because he thought that Rene Girard was giving him a manual. Rene Girard is presenting this as a warning and a philosophical exegesis on what not to do. And this is, this is like the old tech joke. Like, you know, we read a book, why not to build the torture nexus? And we decided, hey, we should build the torture nexus. That's what this is. And if the fact that JD zeros in on this, and the guy who would go on to say, sure, I'll make things up about Haitians killing your dogs and eating them, and it's because he looked at Rene Girard and saw that scapegoating is a very powerful thing to do when trying to take control of society. He thought, huh, there's something to that.

[Tim Miller]

A couple of pages later. It was in law school that I first became aware that I was susceptible to intense pressure to believe certain things you don't say. Are you aware of that now? Jd, do you feel like you're under intense pressure to believe certain things now? Blink twice if you're looking for help in the Vice President's residence. Fucking douche.

[JVL]

Is this a good deal we're getting with the Iranians?

[Tim Miller]

JD, do you really believe the 2020 election was stolen?

[JVL]

Was it good that America went to war with Iran? Jd, tell us what you really think.

[Tim Miller]

Did you do Ivermectin? All right, moving on to chapter six. I don't know, maybe we should just skip over this part. There's a long section about how JD is a Vulcan. He self assesses, he doesn't have a lot of emotion. And I just, I thought that was at times, you gotta guess, handed to him that he does identify some of his flaws. He doesn't usually act on any of them and try to improve himself.

[JVL]

That's because he later then talks about how he didn't find therapy useful.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, we'll get. Yeah, that's what I'm going to next. Yeah.

[JVL]

He explains why he should be in therapy and then says, man, I went to A therapy thing. I didn't like it.

[Tim Miller]

You know, it's like, hey, I was in a relationship with a girl and I was like, I guess I won't really give a fuck if she dumps me. And I really don't care about her feelings at all. And I don't have any empathy. And it might be tied to the fact that my dad didn't love me. That's page 103. Then page 107. I attended a few therapy sessions at the Yale student health clinic. The therapist I spoke to was a good guy, but I found therapy too uncomfortable. But there was a deeper problem with therapy. It was divorced from any sense of responsibility or guilt.

[JVL]

I don't think that's how therapy works. Certainly not the responsibility aspect of it. A lot of responsibility talk in therapy. As far as I understand the guilt more of a Catholic specific thing than a therapy thing.

[Tim Miller]

We're getting into that. But I also, as again cradle Catholic, very intimately familiar with Catholic guilt and the ways it can be valuable and at times less valuable to personal choice. You know, I'm aware. I've lived it. But like, you do cover that territory in therapy. You do. Like, one of my big things that I that. That helped me when I was in therapy was identifying the difference between guilt and shame internally and kind of like separating those things and thinking about how you need to treat them differently. And, you know, shame being kind of a sense that you are bad and guilt being a sense that you did bad things and how if you do bad things, you can ease your guilt by doing things within your integrity, doing good things. We covered this in my therapist. I'm sorry that you didn't like the one therapist you went to. One therapy lesson at Yale and you're like, this dude's an idiot. This dude's a fucking idiot. I'm good.

[JVL]

You found it uncomfortable. It's supposed to be uncomfortable. If therapy is comfortable, you're probably not getting a lot of work done. Just a thought.

[Tim Miller]

We move forward. It looks like JVL. You want to cover this? Page 112. He talks about hollow goals here. My career was on a rocket ship. I had a prestigious federal clerkship and an offer at a major international law firm. I had an elite law school diploma. I had the promise of financial riches I had only dreamed of as a kid. Prestige elite riches. These were the hollow goals of a person who measured his life by how other people viewed him.

[JVL]

So he gave it up and founded a food pantry to help his community, right?

[Tim Miller]

No, I think he wrote A memoir. He wrote a memoir about how great he was and how he overcame.

[JVL]

It's an astonishing thing to have a guy who has raced up the ladder and is still running up the ladder, using the existence of the ladder as a way to say that everybody else is bad.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, it's just like you wrote a memoir at, like, age 35 about your personal triumph to Plaudits, and then you sold it to Hollywood and made a biopic about yourself. And you're telling us that you recognized during this process that you were spending too much time measuring your life by how other people viewed you. Your whole life is in service formats.

[JVL]

That's the weird thing. Also, it's not like, oh, other people were looking and judging me. This kid was like, out strutting on the catwalk, telling everybody, look at me, look at me.

[Tim Miller]

And then at the end of that, he's like, you know what I want to do? I want to get into the one business where the entire goal of the business is to get other people to view me. Well, politics.

[JVL]

It's almost like he doesn't mean it, Tim.

[Tim Miller]

Now we get to his adult conversion to Catholicism and familiarity with Catholic guilt. He starts page 125. For an evangelical, the weirdest Catholic sacrament may be the right of confession and reconciliation. For people who don't know that, jvl, do you want to give people a description of what the rite of reconciliation is?

[JVL]

So this is a sacrament of reconciliation is the thing. If you know anything about Catholic Church from the movies, it's that. So a Catholic goes into a box. There's a priest on the other side of the box. Through a screen, you can't see each other. You say, bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been three months since my last confession. And he says, you know, my son. First he mutters some Latin. Then he says, tell me, my son. And so you just. You tell him this. And he said, well, I took the Lord's name in vain this many times, and I jerked off this many times, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, talking to priests

[Tim Miller]

about your masturbation as a child, in retrospect, was maybe kind of a misguided. Maybe some unintended consequences from that.

[JVL]

Have you seen Wake Up, Dead Man? No. You have to see Wake Up, Dead Man. So it's the last Knives out movie. It's the best Catholic movie ever made. And there is a scene in which these two priests, one of whom is a very bad guy, one priest played by Josh Brolin is giving his confession to the other priest, and he's just like. And then I whacked off in the shower. And after that, I was just going to town on it.

[Tim Miller]

Wait, I'm sorry. I did see this. I did see this really good.

[JVL]

The point is, you. You are contrite, right? As the person seeking this, you don't do it until you've examined your conscience and you see what you did wrong. And you talk to the priest, and the priest sometimes will give you some advice, sometimes will give you some counsel. Sometimes we'll just say, you know, by the power and rest in all of you of your sins, do ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers, go forth and sin no more. That's confession.

[Tim Miller]

So JD describes it thusly. It's like therapy, but with less whining and more guilt. I don't like Ken. This seems to be more about you than either the act of confession or therapy.

[JVL]

You get to choose how much whining you do in a confessional. Right?

[Tim Miller]

But he moves on. But I found liberation and guilt. The recognition that I had screwed up, that I must ask forgiveness of God and of the people I'd wronged, forced me to think about my own conduct in a profoundly different way. Way. Fuck you. I mean, fuck you. This is just so fucking ridiculous. Like the idea that J.D. vance is the type of person that really has come to appreciate the value of acknowledging when you've screwed up and need to ask your fellow man for your forgiveness. I mean, he did a whole bit about how he's going to make up stories,

[JVL]

Witness, as a for instance, like,

[Tim Miller]

he said that he does that on purpose and he doesn't care who it hurts. He doesn't care about the Haitian kids that got mocked as dog eaters in their school or that got wrongly deported, or he doesn't care about fucking Renee Good who got shot by police. He doesn't care. He doesn't. God, the one that pissed me off so much. People, really, if your blood pressure's not up on this one enough on this one, people go back and watch my reaction video to JD and Ross's interview at the Vatican where Ross is asking him about the deportations to Sicat. And JD's like, well, I just. I haven't seen any evidence that any of these people are wrong. People can bring me evidence if they want. And it's like, everyone is bringing you evidence. You guys wrongly sent people to a torture prison. It was your fault. You did it. There's been no recognition, no acknowledgement, no Asking of forgiveness. I don't know what's happening between him and his priest in the little box, but I don't believe that's how it works. Jbl, is that how it works? Where you go into the box and you ask for forgiveness and you come out and you doing the thing that you asked for forgiveness on, and then you feel better? Is that how it works?

[JVL]

That is how it works for some people. I do think that's funny, though. This is in stark contrast to Trump. So Trump's whole view of Christianity, you remember this going back to, like, 2016, when it was a big like, oh, Christians will never get behind him because he says he's never done anything wrong, he's never sinned, he's never had to ask for forgiveness. Right. This is like a recurring thing with him. No, I've never done anything wrong. No, I've never had to free if I did anything wrong. Maybe I hired some people who I shouldn't have because they were losers and bums, and I had to fire them. And J.D. kind of since he made the turn to Trump, there's been a lot of like, I'm never wrong. I'm never wrong. I'm never wrong. Except for all those times in the past when I was wrong. And of course. But that doesn't count anymore. But now he's like, you know, of course, in private, I talk about all the bad things I do. Okay, bro. Very strange.

[Tim Miller]

The fact that there was a sacramental ritual around guilt of publicly confessing something, admitting you did wrong, and performing an act of penance attracted me to Catholicism. And I guess in one sense, this might be the skeleton key that connects his conversion to Catholicism with his conversion to Trumpism, where he looked at Catholicism and he said, you know, this is cool ritual where I get to do this and I feel cleansed and I feel. And I get to have a rebirth. And if I confess I did something wrong and I admit that I did it, and then I perform an act of penance, and then I come around the other side. Except, like, the thing that J.D. vance is asking for forgiveness for is not any of the things he sinned. It's not any of the sins that he wants penance for. It is the fact that he once did not trust Donald Trump. And so now he's gone. He's going through kind of a continual public confession where he gets his penance through Donald Trump's praise. It's the best I can do because the idea that he likes to admit he did wrong is not something that is, in my experience with JD Vance, except for the one thing that he admits he did wrong a lot of times, which was not trust Donald Trump.

[JVL]

Literally just go back to the Haitian thing, right? He's caught on the Haitian thing. He's on cnn and I forget who the host was like, but you said this thing was wrong. You made it up. He's like, you're damn right I did, and I'll do it again. I don't know. I don't know how to square that with any of this, Tim.

[Tim Miller]

I fucking hate him. There's one thing. If we're going to give JD Credit, there's one thing that he does ask for forgiveness for in the book. Ah, all of his sins. You know, for all of his empty promises, he does acknowledge that he erred one time in the campaign. It goes like this. One of the dumbest things I ever said came when I argued that childless cat ladies across the Democratic Party were running our country into the ground. It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally and successfully, provocative rather than illuminating. I could have made that point much more effectively and with the benefit of showing a little charity to the many Americans who don't have children. When I consider the church's admonition to respect the dignity of every life, this was a clear moment where I failed. What do you make of that?

[JVL]

One is supposed to strive for charity at all times, not just a little charity sometimes. But that's. Oh, that's, you know, good on you, Mr. Vice President.

[Tim Miller]

I got a little problem with it. I mean, it's okay. It seems to me like he has decided that he's done some polling and he's looked at the opposition research. You know, like he tested it and he's like, what is the thing that I've done that people like the least that stuck with people the most? It's like, man, people, it's like, man, it seems like people really were mad at me about this childless cat lady thing. So that's going to be the one thing I ask forgiveness for. And I don't really think it's in the spirit of the sacrament of confession to pick the one convenient thing that you want to apologize for because you think that will make the priest look at you a little better. It seems to be me to be what he's doing here. And one, I think, data point I would offer that it does not seem to me that he is giving the benefit of charity to childless cat ladies or that he is not respecting the dignity of every life as his treatment of Renee Goode, as mentioned earlier, because Renee Goode is basically an example of the person that he was mocking, right? And it's a liberal activist woman. She has a kid. She has a kid. But I just mean, like the stereotype he was trying to create when he called them childless scout ladies. It was like the type of person that was showing up to these protests and, you know, had the Subaru or whatever car she had. And after she was murdered by the state, he said this. Everyone who's been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot her. You should be ashamed of yourself. He said he felt very, very sad for Goethe. She was brainwashed. She was a victim of left wing ideology. Her death is a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled in an entire movement, a lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers. We've learned subsequently from the New York Times that he wanted to call in the Insurrection act so that more protesters could be murdered. I don't know. I don't. I don't think that he's actually reflected and that he actually respects the dignity of every life and he actually wants to show charity to liberal women. I think that he just thought that there was one time when he was attacking liberal women where he said something that was a little too far.

[JVL]

The nice thing about this is, you know, if. So if he was going to apologize for something. If you apologize for the childless cat ladies, there's no actual human being you have to apologize to.

[Tim Miller]

There's no actual action you have to take either. Right?

[JVL]

So if, you know, if he was wrong, if he was going to say, boy, I just, you know, I got caught up in the moment. I didn't quite know what was going on. I was trying to defend the president. I should never have said that about Renee.

[Tim Miller]

Good.

[JVL]

Well, now you actually have to say something to Renee Goode's family. Right? There's an actual right. And JD Just wants to be able to check a box. Like he, you know, he wants to be able to say, well, okay, what more do you want from me? Jeez, these mouthy broads.

[Tim Miller]

He does discuss his daddy issues at one point. I don't know if there's anything worth discussing there, but noteworthy that he identifies that he still resents the men that his mother brought into his life. Don't know if there's any parallels you could draw there. No.

[JVL]

Who can say?

[Tim Miller]

Here we go. Here's another one. A recovering addict once told Me in jail, he met a preacher whose simple bit of wisdom changed his life. Show me your friends, and I'll show you your future. He goes on. I dismissed that quote, but took on new powers. I raised my son. The people we spend our time with, the cultural pond in which we swim would exert remarkable power over our life.

[JVL]

And so I decided to hold hands with Benny Johnson and Donald Trump Jr. And Cash Patel. And I thought, Lara Loomer. These are the people who I wanted surrounding me as I raised my child. Not Robert Mueller. No. Not Joe Biden. Not Bill Kristol, who he attacks in the book. Not David Frum. Not John Cornyn, or all these people he's gone to work against.

[Tim Miller]

Not the people at my church in Cincinnati.

[JVL]

The craziest fucking people in American politics. Those are the people he's with. Okay.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Peter Thiel. I just like, what. It's almost like, is this a troll? Does he not think. Has he. I guess the mind is powerful, and there's like, this powerful Elon Musk rationalization that you can do where you're just like. I mean, he's saying it. You would think that JD could leave his body and read the book and look at this and, like, have a moment of clarity where he's like, who people? Am I surrounding myself with Rod Dreher? These people are horrible. They're liars, they're corrupt. They. They don't care about human life. Stephen Miller. Like, this is my posse now.

[JVL]

It's such a weird thing to identify the thing that it. It's like the rest of it. It. It's bizarre.

[Tim Miller]

This relates to this. We go into chapter eight. There's a little more Catholicism. I want to hit a couple more things before we go. This was a comment on Pope Leo. He's talking about his theory of human nature.

[JVL]

Leo 13. Not the current Leo, not the bulwark Pope.

[Tim Miller]

It felt more right than any theory of human nature I'd ever read. I wasn't very good at praying, and I lacked an emotional connection to the faith. But these arguments engage me. I just have a tough time mashing that with his actions. It's like Pope Leo's theory of human nature, you know, is. Is, you know, talking about commitment to duty, commitment to family, commitment to community. And he, like, has warped that in this weird way that, like, means closed borders. And also, this is.

[JVL]

This is like the joke about Converse. Converts versus cradle Catholics, right? Because cradle Catholic could be like, yeah, bro, just. You read the summa, right? Like, this is all in the summa. And JD's like, I discovered Pope Leo the 13th. And then in his encyclical body.

[Tim Miller]

We need to read the tweet. We're putting it up on screen. Shout out to a gravy. Every lifelong Catholic I've ever met is like, I think we're supposed to give food to the poor people. And every adult convert is like the Archon of Constantinople's epistle on the Pentecostine rites of the Eucharist clearly states women shouldn't have rights.

[JVL]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

It's like Pope Leo XIII's theory of human nature is the thing that supports our alligator Alcatraz. Okay.

[JVL]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

He also discusses the rite of Christian initiation, rcia, which is what converts have to go to. Catholic converts. We've all been to some Catholic convert classes. If you're. I thought it was interesting that he did it through personal study.

[JVL]

It's fine. A lot of people do it that way. Nothing wrong with that.

[Tim Miller]

It's noteworthy though. It's noteworthy though. I thought I was coming to the Catholic Church for the communion and for the, you know, the community and how like, I want to surround myself with regular people. Like, what better opportunity to surround yourself with normal people. Also going through the Catholic conversion process to meet others that might invite you to their home in the future to build relationships. Like, what better chance to do that than through RCIA? Like J.D. vance? Like, no, I think I'll just sit in my house and read Pope Leo's epistles.

[JVL]

Can I let you in on a little secret of Catholic Washington? Sure. There are a lot of adult, professional conservative converts to Catholicism over the last 20 years, due in large part to our friends at the Pauline Book Center. Right. On K Street. I think it's K Street and never been. They. There's a lot of one on one stuff with the. It's like going to the baccarat room at the high rollers table when you're in a casino. Like, you know. Oh, sir, sir, you don't need to be in RCA with the hoi ploy. We will do a personalized concierge. What I thought was weird about this was so JD Rights. The process is pretty informal. No, it's not. The process of joining an evangelical church is informal. You just fucking show up. You put on flip flops and shorts and you show up, hey, great, you're a member of the church to convert to Catholicism. It's like a thing you gotta get to fill out. There's paperwork. There are classes that you gotta. Your name goes in a book that goes in Dioceses, there are records. You then show up at a mass, the bishop has to be there, they mark you with the oil of the chrism. I mean, it's. It is like the farthest thing from informal. It's insanely formal. Yeah. And it just made me wonder, like, what Catholic church is this dude talking about?

[Tim Miller]

He didn't do it. That's what I'm saying. He didn't do it. This is all fake. Like, it's all fake. He didn't do it. He had some, you know, he got. He did the personal study and they fast tracked him. We're this far in. Anybody's, this far in. Somebody's gonna clip this whatever in the future and it's gonna hurt my career, but I don't care. It's weird that his wife is still Hindu. It's weird. I'm sorry. It's fine. I understand there are mixed faith marriages and I respect that. I have a lot of friends who are in mixed faith marriages. You know, also, there are a lot about times where people convert for their spouse. I have many of those in my family. It's like J.D. vance is like, I am going to go through a private conversion to Catholicism

[JVL]

and be super trady and be super trad.

[Tim Miller]

And I'm going to write a book about it and I'm going to talk about.

[JVL]

He's so trad that he's basically an integralist.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[JVL]

It's weird.

[Tim Miller]

My wife is not going to come on the journey with me. And in the book where I write about my traditionalist conversion to Catholicism, I'm also going to write about the traditional family structure. We kind of skipped over some of that. But there's a lot about how the man should be the earner and wife supports the man. Like in this case, she didn't come along with it. And it's just, I don't know. To me, it feels like if it was really, really an earnest passion project for him and not a political document. Like, if it was something where, like deep down in his private life not performing because he writes in the book about how he doesn't care about what other people think about him. If it wasn't a performance thing and it was deeply personal, like, it would probably be like something that's so personal that he would want to bring his family along on the journey with him or at least they would talk.

[JVL]

What's weird about it is the kind of Catholic he is. Right. Like, if he was a lib Catholic, if he was one of those America magazine reading libtard Catholics. Then I'd be like, sure. I bet his wife is Jewish or Hindu or whatever. Right. The weirdness is, again, he's like, pretty far out in the Patrick Deneen integralist side of this, which believes so strongly in all this that they think America should be a theocracy and that she's

[Tim Miller]

going to go to hell. I mean, they think she's going to go to hell. That's what's strange to me.

[JVL]

If he's a normie Catholic, then I would be like, yeah, so his wife is a different faith. Who cares?

[Tim Miller]

It's interesting to bring up hell, actually. Another segment of the book, he talks about how he's not scared of hell, which is like, makes sense. Fingers crossed.

[JVL]

In many ways, he lives in it right now.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, fingers crossed. This is all just for show because it was real, the real deal, you

[JVL]

know, where I'd be going is the bad place.

[Tim Miller]

But it's like, okay, well, maybe that explains why it doesn't concern him at all that his wife's gonna go to hell. Maybe he thinks she's gonna come around later. I don't know. The whole thing is just doesn't. Doesn't pass the sniff test for me. Is there anything else? We wanted to make sure.

[JVL]

We wanted to hit page one three. Talking about his decision to run for the Senate. This is another one of those times where he is writing for an audience of one. Here's the formulation he uses in early 2021, not long after Joe Biden was sworn in as president. Not after Joe Biden won the election, not after Joe Biden became president, was sworn in as president again. He's just got to make sure that nobody can clip this and show it to the dear Leader that there's an example of JD Doing deviationist thinking.

[Tim Miller]

I like how he writes about in that chapter how the key factor in his Senate race, like the differentiator from the other Republicans, was that he focused less on abstractions like GDP and more on the dignity of the workers than his opponents did. Dignity, you know. Yeah, because like, Josh Mandel is really focused on kind of like, you know,

[JVL]

he's a policy wonk. I mean, that guy was just, you know, all he talked about was his

[Tim Miller]

white papers, Hayek, white papers, economics. Not a lot of discussion about how Donald Trump endorsed him and carried him across the line. And his friendship with Donald Trump Jr. Which is probably fake, is the reason why he's in the Senate anyway, talking

[JVL]

about the post World War II order. He has a long, a long thing about that where he Basically is like all these boomers thinking that everything they did after World War II was good. Fuck them. That sucked. It's just ahistorical nonsense. But then he gets down to a point we talked about in being at the Munich security conference. He says, but when I pointed out Putin's popularity in another meeting, I was immediately chastised. His elections are fake. He's actually very unpopular. That was a quote from the. The people saying, and here's JD Again. To be fair, there's plenty of fraud in Russian elections, just like in America. But every independent, objective effort to measure Putin's popularity has found high levels of support among rank and file Russians. One might even call them the true

[Tim Miller]

Russian Volk, because he just cares about human life so deeply. He's got to point that out. He doesn't have to. He doesn't have to throw out there a point about all the people Putin killed, all the children they kidnapped from Ukrainians. No, it's wild, dude.

[JVL]

And, and we shouldn't, we shouldn't. We shouldn't gloss over his conversion story where he talks about how, you know, it was just so lucrative being anti Trump, and that's. That's really why he. Did you want to do that or. No, I'm just passing.

[Tim Miller]

It's so outrageous. I can't even. I don't. I can't dignify it.

[JVL]

It's not like switching over to being pro Trump has made anybody any money ever.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, he doesn't. I do want to talk about his attack on a cardinal. I like this. Also in the book about his conversion to Catholicism. Again, been a Catholic for two minutes in a public spat with the current pope, Pope Leo. In the book, he wants to make sure to volunteer that he was unsettled by something that was said by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who was one of the favorites to replace Pope Francis. Ended up going with Pope leo. Still, Cardinal J.D. writes this. I found our conversation unsettling, not because he expressed skepticism of the Trump administration's migration policies, but because of how generic the position was. It's like I had to get lectured. Oh, keep going, Cardinal. Okay, Tim, keep going. Treating people humanely. What did Cardinal Prolin take issue with exactly? Didn't specify. Did they object to deportations? Just to deportations of certain populations? Were they entirely fine with deportations so long as we didn't see say mean things about illegal immigrants?

[Blue Lizard Sunscreen Advertiser]

That.

[Rebel.com Advertiser]

That.

[JVL]

So he's admitting. Well, yeah, we talk shit about these fucking animals all the time. These vermin who are poisoning the blood of the nation. So do they want us to just not do that? Is everything fine? As long as we don't say that.

[Tim Miller]

Oh, did we ruffle your feathers? Are we, you know, are we a bunch of snowflakes? Cardinal Parolin? You want me to say nice things about other people now? Is that now that I'm a Catholic,

[JVL]

we're supposed to stop dehumanizing these people?

[Tim Miller]

I didn't realize that was what I was signing up for. That wasn't in the RCIA class that I got the fast track. Nobody mentioned me being nice.

[JVL]

That's the craziest fucking line in the entire book, Tim.

[Tim Miller]

He's so fucking awful. Anyway, all right, we're just going to leave it there. There are some other things. How much more can a person take, though, really, truly? I have another idea for something for us to do together. Jvl I don't know if we'll be able to pull it off, but it's a little bit more in the schadenfreude camp. So for people who made it to the end of this, just know that I have a treat plant, have a little dessert, and so hopefully you enjoyed that. Subscribe to the feed, send it to the JD Vance lover in your life and me and jv I'll be seeing you soon.