A Dramatic Reading of JD Vance’s Awful Book

Summary

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

Date: June 18, 2026
Hosts: Tim Miller & JVL

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Episode Overview

In this high-spirited episode, Tim Miller and JVL engage in a segment-by-segment critique and dramatic reading of JD Vance's new book, Communion. Rather than reading the entire book themselves, they've relied on their colleagues to excerpt some of the most telling passages. The discussion is both analytical and sharply satirical, focusing on the book’s religious themes, JD Vance’s self-contradictions, and his penchant for self-aggrandizement. The episode is as much a lampoon of JD Vance’s public persona as it is a commentary on the broader trends in American politics, faith, and ambition.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reluctance to Engage Directly With the Book ([00:00-01:11])

• Tim and JVL open with their inability—or unwillingness—to buy the book themselves for reasons of “self-care,” joking that even reading the excerpts was nearly fatal.
• Quote:
  • JVL: “For me, Tim, not reading this book is self-care. Because I gotta say, just going through the like 10,000 words of excerpt that we made our way through nearly put me in the grave, this fucking guy.” ([00:52])

2. Book’s Religious Shortcomings & Self-Congratulation ([01:19-02:08])

• The hosts note that despite being about Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, the book spends little time on religion and more on Vance’s achievements.
• JVL: Jokes that maybe Vance will convert back to evangelical Christianity soon.

3. On Meeting Jesus—and Hating Classmates ([02:08-03:27])

• Vance’s formative religious moments are described less as spiritual revelations and more as reactions against his Ivy League peers.
• Quote:
  • Tim: “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...it’s like, I like Donald Trump because of [annoying classmates]. I want to become a Christian because of that.”

4. Sincerity and Retconning of Vance’s Story ([03:27-04:20])

• JVL questions the authenticity of Vance’s backstory, suggesting Vance created or exaggerated grievances to rationalize his own choices.
• Quote:
  • JVL: “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.” ([03:27])

5. Vance’s Relentless Pursuit of Power ([04:20-04:48])

• Hosts highlight the contradiction between Vance’s claim that fulfillment isn’t found in power/wealth and his actual pursuit of both across industries.
• Quote:
  • Tim: “He touched all of the main centers of riches and power in the country. Law, investorship, venture capital, investment, Hollywood, politics—like the Senate and then the vice presidency.” ([04:41])

6. Evangelicals vs. Catholics—A Conversion Book That Praises the Former ([04:48-07:54])

• The oddity of a supposed Catholic conversion memoir spending significant time praising evangelical churches and culture is roasted.
• The inside-jokes about Catholic mass, family size, and the discomfort of Catholic socialization routines are explored with playful irreverence.
• Quote:
  • Tim: “Part of the reason why Catholics have such big families...is for during the sign of peace, they can spend most of that period giving peace to their family members.” ([07:24])

7. JD Vance as the Overeager New Convert ([07:54-08:16])

• JVL: “It is weird to...convert and then to go to priests and like, you’ve been a Catholic for five minutes, like, ‘Hey, excuse me, Father, I have some thoughts about how we could change things up around here.’”

8. The “Villain Origin Story”: WASPs, Elites, and Yale ([08:16-11:16])

• Discussion shifts to Chapter 3, where Vance lauds WASP duty and suggests modern "meritocrats" are spiritually lacking, though the hosts point out he chooses elites for role models anyway.
• Quote:
  • JVL: “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?” ([10:56])

9. More Money, More Classmate Resentment ([11:24-12:45])

• Chapter 4 features Vance frustrated with “arrogant classmates” who dominate discussion, yet the hosts observe this describes Vance himself.
• The “shut the hell up” movement is referenced as Vance’s solution to the speak-up campaign at Yale.
• Quote:
  • Tim (quoting Vance): “‘Why shouldn’t the men just talk a lot less?...Why not a shut the hell up movement directed at everyone?’ Sign me up.” ([12:08])
  • JVL: “This is the Onion headline. ‘The worst person you know just made a good point.’” ([12:34])

10. The Conversion Story—Peter Thiel as Spiritual Model ([14:22-19:07])

• The book aligns Vance’s religious awakening not with saints or clergy but with tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

• Vance claims Thiel showed him that intelligent people can be religious.

• The hosts point out the absurdity of needing Thiel—a controversial, death-phobic mogul—to discover Christian intellectual tradition.

• Quote:

  • Tim: “He constructs this strawman of this horrible [liberal] person...and he’s like, that was me, actually, that was me. I was the worst imaginary progressive that you have met.” ([15:08])

• JVL notes Vance’s hedging (“possibly the smartest person I ever met”) is likely meant to avoid offending Trump or others in power.

11. René Girard and Girardian Thought in Vance’s Book ([19:07-end])

• Vance credits Thiel for introducing him to René Girard, who theorized on mimetic desire and how cultures scapegoat outsiders.
• JVL provides context: Girard’s philosophy is often cited by Thiel (“man as a mimetic creature”), and his explorations on scapegoating and authoritarianism are widely discussed.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Catholic vs. Evangelical Vibes:

  • Tim: “If you only have the one child, then you got to spend most of the period where you’re doing peace, like, you know, touching the clammy hands of strangers. And that’s not appealing.” ([07:24])

• On the Book’s Ironies:

  • JVL: “Local man discovers that water is wet...It does make you wonder, how the fuck did he get into Yale Law? Like, JD Vance learns that fides et ratio is a thing.” ([14:01])

• Self-Satire:

  • Tim: “You shut the hell up, JD. You shut the hell up.” ([12:40])

• Peter Thiel as Christian:

  • A: “Peter Thiel...who has a harem of side boyfriends...impacted me in another way. Possibly the smartest person I’d ever met. He identified very openly as a Christian.” ([14:22])
  • JVL: “As far as I can tell, Peter Thiel’s entire worldview is based around the utter terror of death...it is a little weird to say at once, I am a believing Christian, and also, please, God, don’t ever let me die.” ([18:44])

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00-01:11: Introduction, reluctance to read book
• 02:08-03:27: “Meeting Jesus” passage and its vibes
• 04:41-04:48: Vance’s career trajectory
• 07:24: Catholic family mass jokes
• 10:00-11:16: Reflection on WASP culture, JD’s praise for old-school elites while following new ones
• 12:08-12:45: “Shut the hell up movement” and hosts’ mock agreement
• 14:22-19:07: Conversion moments with Peter Thiel and René Girard

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Tone & Style

• The hosts employ sarcasm, humor, and insider Catholic jokes to scrutinize Vance’s claims.
• They constantly juxtapose Vance’s self-depiction with his real-world actions, finding rich irony in nearly every passage.
• The tone is irreverent, punchy, and often self-aware, especially when pointing out how Vance’s criticisms seem to mirror his own behavior.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This episode is a critical and comic riff on JD Vance’s Communion, dissecting its shallow religious musings, self-mythologizing, and contradictions. Through dramatic readings and unsparing banter, Tim Miller and JVL reveal how Vance’s story raises more questions than answers about authenticity, faith, and American ambition, all while providing plenty of quotable moments and memorable lines.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, everybody, it's Tim Miller and JVL of the Bulwark. As promised, we are going to do a little bit of a quasi read along with you of J.D. 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.

[B]

Not one dime by this.

[A]

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.

[B]

For me, Tim not reading this book is self care, because I gotta say, just going through the like 10,000 words of excerpt that we made our way through. Nearly put me in the grave, this fucking guy.

[A]

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

[B]

This one goes to seven.

[A]

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.

[B]

Interesting 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.

[A]

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 groundwork. It's 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.

[B]

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 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, my. 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.

[A]

There's never even a moment, actually where he took a break from that or stopped. And it was. He 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 investorship, venture

[B]

capital and investment, Hollywood politics like the Senate and then the vice presidency.

[A]

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 sorts of. So anyway, okay, here is to your point about 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.

[B]

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?

[A]

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 of it? Like, well, obviously.

[B]

Obviously. 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 listening to. Do you remember the movie Saved? I did Fantastic thing about, like, the youth pastors and, like, listening to, like, Christian church rock. Sorry. That's amazing music.

[A]

It's horrible.

[B]

It's an abomination. And about the friendly stuff, again, this is definitely a point of differentiate. 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. When you got to do the sign of peace, there's one point during the Mass where you got to do the sign and you got to turn to your neighbor and say, oh, peace be with you, and shake him. Peace be with you. We don't even like that. No.

[A]

Part of the reason why Catholics have such big families, I think, is for during the sign of peace, they can. They can spend most of that period giving peace to their 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 got to spend most of the period where you're doing peace, like, 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.

[B]

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, 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

[A]

know what I'm saying.

[B]

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

[A]

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 good. 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 Drauthack gets mentioned.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

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. 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 Dalcat's wisdom to make this point. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat wrote a brilliant column titled why We Miss the wasps.

[B]

It's pretty funny.

[A]

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, Russ Douthert wrote a brilliant column titled why We Missed the Wasp, in which he argued, not long after George H.W. bush died, that Bush represented something the country needed to recover. Bush, 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'll just wonder if you had any reflections.

[B]

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, um, hand wrote,

[A]

thank you notes to everybody.

[B]

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 and 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.

[A]

Right.

[B]

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

[A]

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.

[B]

Can't think of somebody like that.

[A]

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.

[B]

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

[A]

I mean, I guess, but it's him. You shut the hell up, jd. You shut the hell up.

[B]

Fair.

[A]

Stop 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, we 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.

[B]

Local man discovers that water is wet. I don't know. I mean, like you. 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. Huh? What a fucking provincial little burger. I don't even know what to say.

[A]

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. It'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 had 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?

[B]

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

[A]

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.

[B]

Never picked up Witness to Hope.

[A]

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.

[B]

Bill Bennett, pretty smart guy.

[A]

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. 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.

[B]

It is. The thing that jumped out at me about this passage was that there. There are a couple times in 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.

[A]

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 any meaningful way or a Catholic, or that teal would help you on your journey towards Catholicism. I mean, like, teal is like. What did Tucker call Trump? A demonic force.

[B]

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 evil. Now, again, we all struggle that his

[A]

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.

[B]

We all struggle with aspects of our faith. Maybe that's just his struggle is 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.

[A]

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 in less than six, 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.

[B]

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 preacher. And he was really. He was very keyed in on how authoritarians always scapegoat people, right?