WEIRD: the podcast
This podcast offers a global, unconventional perspective on the US election and is hosted by anthropologists Vito Laterza & Louis Römer. Engaging commentary on what Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Donald Trump, JD Vance and other political players say, but also how they say it - the vibes, the emotions, the drama.
WEIRD: the podcast
The Walz-Vance debate unpacked: consensus and conflict in middle America
Behind the veneer of civility that cloaked the 2 October US vice presidential debate, there are radical differences that can't be reconciled.
Key topics:
- Fact-checking and post-truth: the CBS News debate moderators couldn't fact-check the vice presidential candidates, but, weirdly enough, candidates were encouraged to fact-check each other.
- JD Vance, like Trump, blames all American problems on immigration. Tim Walz reiterates Harris' "tough" stance on borders (a move to the right), while rightly denouncing the dehumanisation of Republican anti-immigrant propaganda.
- In a different dynamic from the Harris-Trump debate, Vance and Walz try to be nice to each other, while they both talk to rural and working class voters in middle America. Regional identity politics requires that they acknowledge their common roots, even as they disagree on pretty much everything else.
- Mainstreaming far right ideas through "civil" debate won't make them any less dangerous. Vance's polished salesman's style is a thin veil for his extreme views.
- Advocating for a transversal alliance of free speech warriors, Vance accuses Harris of "censorship", while Walz refocuses the attention on Trump's undemocratic attitude and the dangers of a repeat of the January 6 Capitol Hill riots.
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Thank you, Governor.
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And just to clarify for our viewers,
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Springfield,
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Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status,
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temporary protected status.
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Senator, we have so much to get to.
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We're going to turn out of the economy.
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Thank you.
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Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check.
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And since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on.
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So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant,
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apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a
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Kamala Harris open border wand.
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That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for 10 years.
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Thank you, Senator.
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of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership.
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Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process.
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We have so much to get to, Senator.
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Those laws have been on the books since 1990.
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Thank you, gentlemen.
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The CBP1F has not been on the books since 1990.
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It's something that Kamala Harris created, Margaret.
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Gentlemen, the audience can't hear you because your mics are cut.
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We have so much we want to get to.
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Thank you for explaining the legal process.
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Nora.
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Thank you, Margaret.
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That was one of the hottest moments in the Tuesday,
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1st of October debate between Tim Walz,
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the Democratic vice presidential nominee,
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and J.D.
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Vance, running as vice presidential candidate for the Republicans.
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Unlike the September debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump,
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the rules for this one were that the CBS news moderators,
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Norah Donnell and Margaret Brennan,
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would not fact check the candidates.
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And in fact, aside from the contentious moment you've just heard, they didn't.
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In a strange turn of events, waltz and bands were told that they could fact each other.
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This fundamentally undermines the whole idea that fact-checking is carried out by
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independent observers and further reinforces the post-truth condition we find
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ourselves in,
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where if we are to listen to US Republicans and their right-wing allies around the world,
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truth is what one makes of it.
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Moderators fact checking in the US vice presidential debate was dropped due to Republican pressure.
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Their team claimed that in the previous debate,
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the one featuring presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump,
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the ABC News moderators only fact checked Trump.
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But for those of us who still believe that truth and facts matter,
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CNN concluded that Donald Trump made more than 30 false claims,
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while Kamala Harris only won.
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Little surprise then that the moderators would take on Trump, but not Harris.
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You are listening to episode four of Weird, a global take on the US election.
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You can check the previous episodes of this podcast on weirdpodcast.com and on
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podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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My name is Vito Laterza.
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I'm an anthropologist,
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political analyst and associate professor at the University of Agder in Kristiansand,
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Norway.
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I'm currently based in Uppsala, Sweden, where I'm a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.
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So was it a good choice to let Waltz and Vance fact check each other?
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Did it make for a better debate?
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These are some of the questions I will tackle today as I provide some analysis on
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how the two candidates performed in the debate and what they conveyed to their
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intended audiences.
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Let's hear what Vance and Waltz said about immigration before the quarrel you just heard.
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Now,
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Governor Waltz brought up the community of Springfield,
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and he's very worried about the things that I've said in Springfield.
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Look,
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in Springfield,
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Ohio,
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and in communities all across this country,
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you've got schools that are overwhelmed.
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You've got hospitals that are overwhelmed.
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You have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of
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illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.
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The people that I'm most worried about in Springfield,
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Ohio,
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are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris's
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open border.
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It is a disgrace, Tim.
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And I actually think I agree with you.
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I think you want to solve this problem, but I don't think that Kamala Harris does.
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Senator, your time is up.
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Governor, you have one minute to respond.
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Yeah, well, it is law enforcement that asked for the bill.
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They helped craft it.
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They're the ones that supported it.
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That's because they know we need to do this.
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Look,
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this issue of continuing to bring this up,
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of not dealing with it,
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of blaming migrants for everything,
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On housing,
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we could talk a little bit about Wall Street speculators buying up housing and
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making them less affordable.
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But it becomes a blame.
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Look, this bill also gives the money necessary to adjudicate.
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I agree it should not take seven years for an asylum claim to be done.
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This bill gets it done in 90 days.
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Then you start to make a difference in this and you start to adhere to what we know, American principles.
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I don't talk about my faith a lot,
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but Matthew 25,
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40 talks about to the least amongst us,
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you do unto me.
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I think that's true of most Americans.
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They simply want order to it.
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This bill does it.
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It's funded.
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It's supported by the people who do it.
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And it lets us keep our dignity about how we treat other people.
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So what's happening here?
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I mean, we hear Waltz talking about the bill.
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He's referring to the bipartisan bill that the Democrats were trying to push to
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show their tough stance on immigration.
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So fundamentally pandering to the right wing with the kind of explosion of
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anti-immigrant sentiment that has taken the U.S.,
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something that we've seen in the last few years in Europe,
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too.
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So,
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Waltz is saying one of the key refrains of the Harris-Waltz campaign is basically
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the bill was there,
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the Republicans were on board,
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or at least most of them were in Congress,
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and then Trump basically gave an order to just sink the bill so that he could
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exploit that electorally.
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I continue to say,
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like Vance is saying here,
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that Kamala Harris is just keeping borders open and letting everybody in.
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On the other hand, what we have is basically vans.
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keeping on this constant obsession with immigration, very much like his presidential mate, Donald Trump.
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And throughout the whole debate, anything that Vance can blame on immigration, he does.
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So migrants are to blame for rising housing prices,
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they are to blame for low wages,
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they are to blame for drugs,
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they are to blame for like gun crime,
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et cetera,
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et cetera.
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So whenever Vance wants to kind of spin or he doesn't want to answer a question,
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he wants to deflect,
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he goes back to immigration.
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We've seen a very similar dynamic actually in the Harris-Trump debate with Donald Trump.
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And we analyzed that in the previous episode with the Louis Römer episode three
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that you can check in our archives.
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But let's go back for a minute to the issue of fact checking.
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The dynamic here, it's quite different if we look at the Harris-Trump debate.
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And in fact,
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the ABC News anchors did a pretty good job in taking on Trump,
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even compared to that contentious moment you just heard at the beginning of this podcast.
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You can see here how David Muir fact-checks Trump on the false claims that Asian
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immigrants are killing and eating their neighbors' pets,
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for which,
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of course,
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there is no evidence.
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In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in.
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They're eating the cats.
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They're eating the pets of the people that live there.
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And this is what's happening in our country.
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And it's a shame.
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As far as rallies are concerned, as far as the reason they go is they like what I say.
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They want to bring our country back.
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They want to make America great again.
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It's a very simple phrase, make America great again.
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She's destroying this country.
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And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success.
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Not only success will end up being Venezuela on steroids.
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I just want to clarify here.
(00:08:08):
You bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there.
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He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed,
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injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.
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Blessing people on television.
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Let me just say here.
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The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food.
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So maybe he said that, and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.
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I'm not taking this from television.
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But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.
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Again, the Springfield city manager says there's no evidence of that.
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Vice President Harris, I'll let you respond to the rest of what you've heard.
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So you can hear here quite a different dynamic.
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The tone of the Harris Trump debate was much more confrontational.
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I'm not going to go into the details of the debate.
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We already discussed it in episode three.
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You can go back to that.
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But the point here is that there is really a big difference with what happened with the waltz and bands.
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In fact,
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many media commentators talked about a much more what they call the civil debate,
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much more respectful.
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there were several moments when both of them,
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both waltz and bands appeared quite conciliatory with their opponents.
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They almost mirrored each other in this.
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You know,
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they say things like,
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well,
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I agree with you,
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but we share quite a lot of common ground,
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but,
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and then of course they will mark their differences.
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You heard Vance earlier saying that he believes that Waltz agrees with him.
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Not quite clear on what though, but not Kamala Harris, right?
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Waltz uses the same tactic elsewhere.
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He agrees with much of what,
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you know,
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Vance says,
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but he then says,
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well,
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your presidential mate Trump actually doesn't agree,
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you know,
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with you.
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So there's one highlight of this more,
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if you say,
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courteous dynamic almost between the two candidates that to me captures what was
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going on throughout the debate.
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Here's Waltz talking about gun violence.
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Governor, you have two minutes.
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Well, I think all the parents watching tonight, this is your biggest nightmare.
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Look, I got a 17-year-old, and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball.
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Those things don't leave you.
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As a member of Congress,
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I sat in my office surrounded by dozens of the Sandy Hook parents,
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and they were looking at my 7-year-old picture on the wall.
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Their 7-year-old were dead, and they were asking us to do something.
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And look, I'm a hunter.
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I own firearms.
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The vice president is.
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We understand that the Second Amendment,
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is there, but our first responsibility is to our kids to figure this out.
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In Minnesota,
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we've enacted enhanced red flag laws,
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enhanced background checks,
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and we can start to get data.
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But here's the problem.
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If we really want to solve this,
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we've got folks that won't allow research to be even done on gun violence.
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And this idea that we should just live with it,
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and here's what I do think,
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that this is a good start to the conversation.
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I 100% believe that Senator Vance
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hates it when these kids, it's abhorrent and it breaks your heart.
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I agree with that.
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But that's not far enough when we know there are things that work.
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I've spent time in Finland and seen some Finnish schools.
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They don't have this happen, even though they have a high gun ownership rate in the country.
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There are reasonable things that we can do to make a difference.
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It's not infringing on your Second Amendment.
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And the idea to have some of these weapons out there, it just doesn't make any sense.
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Kamala Harris, as an attorney general, worked on this issue.
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She knows that it's there.
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No one's trying to scaremonger and say, we're taking your guns, but I ask all of you out there,
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Do you want your schools hardened to look like a fort?
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Is that what we have to go when we know there's countries around the world that
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their children aren't practicing these types of drills?
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They're being kids.
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We owe it to them to get a fix.
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These are things that shouldn't be that difficult.
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You can still keep your firearms and we can make a difference.
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We have to.
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If you're listening tonight, this breaks your heart.
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And here is Vance's response.
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Senator.
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Tim, first of all, I didn't know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting.
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I'm sorry about that.
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I appreciate you saying that.
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Christ have mercy.
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It is awful.
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And I appreciate what Tim said,
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actually,
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about Finland,
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because I do think it illustrates some of the,
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frankly,
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weird differences between our own country's gun violence problem and Finland.
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First of all, we have way higher rates of mental health abuse or mental health substance abuse.
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We have way higher rates of depression, way higher rates of anxiety.
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We unfortunately have a mental health crisis in this country that I really do think
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that we need to get to the root causes of,
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because I don't think it's the whole reason why we have such a bad gun violence problem,
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but I do think it's a big piece of it.
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Another driver of the gun violence epidemic,
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especially that affecting our kids,
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it doesn't earn as many headlines,
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but is the terrible gun violence problem in a lot of our big cities.
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And this is why we have to empower law enforcement to arrest the bad guys,
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put them away,
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and take gun offenders off the streets.
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I think there's a whole host of things that we can do here,
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but I do think at our schools we've got to talk about more security.
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So Vance is showing sympathy for the ordeal that Waltz's son has gone through.
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And Waltz was already sounding quite conciliatory, right?
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This is a good start of the conversation.
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I believe my opponent doesn't like gun violence either.
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And then Vance goes on on something pretty reasonable, right?
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As they kind of legitimize each other,
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then now Vance sounds pretty normal, right?
(00:13:40):
We discussed already this in episode two, when we looked at this more kind of libertarian thinking.
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What Vance does, he starts with what sounds like a pretty noxious point, the one about mental health.
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It's not quite clear where he wants to go,
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but you know,
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there doesn't seem to be anything particularly wrong with that.
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And then goes back,
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still with the same reasonable tone,
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to say that the bad guys with guns in cities,
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these are the ones that need to be arrested.
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So we need more law enforcement.
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So here we're just back again to the xenophobic innuendos about the purported causes of violent crime.
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which,
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according to Vance and Trump,
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in their very false claims,
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you know,
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based really on no evidence,
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all of this is always connected to illegal immigration.
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And of course,
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the biggest one to blame for that is Kamala Harris,
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who's in government and who's just letting people come in.
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That's the narrative that we keep on hearing over and over again.
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But the difference again with the Trump debate, with the Harris-Trump debate, is this
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this kind of dynamical reasonableness.
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So in this,
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in the moment in which there's nobody taking on Trump,
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and of course it's not just the fact checkers there,
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Harris herself did this,
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kind of got into this very confrontational mode with Trump and apparently quite
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successfully so,
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also,
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you know,
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from the polls that were made right after the debate,
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you know,
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from those who viewed it.
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Here we have this dynamic,
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this so-called,
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you know,
(00:15:10):
this kind of dynamic where they're having a respectable,
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polite debate,
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but then Vance ends up saying very extreme things,
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but,
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you know,
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with this kind of smooth polish over it.
(00:15:24):
I also wonder whether behind this conciliatory dynamic between waltz and bands,
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there's also some kind of regional identity politics here.
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Okay, let me explain what I mean.
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These two candidates have really been picked.
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That's what many analysts say, and it
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It seems quite obvious also given the nature of the race.
(00:15:44):
Remember that basically,
(00:15:47):
as is often the case in US election,
(00:15:50):
it is not the popular vote that ultimately counts,
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but how many of these electoral colleges you get.
(00:15:56):
So basically,
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you had to win certain states,
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and some states count more than others in terms of electoral votes.
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So the race ends up being in a few what are called battleground states or swing states.
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In this case,
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we're talking about seven states,
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and many of these states are in what some people call Middle America,
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right?
(00:16:16):
So the goal of these two candidates,
(00:16:19):
that's why they were picked,
(00:16:20):
or at least that's one of the reasons why both of them were picked by their
(00:16:23):
respective sides as vice presidential candidates,
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is really to attract this kind of rural and working class voters,
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which are in this vast expanse of land that lies between the main urban centers of
(00:16:36):
the East and West Coast.
(00:16:39):
We already talked in previous episodes about the Midwestern origins of the two candidates.
(00:16:45):
Waltz is from Minnesota, or at least is governor of Minnesota.
(00:16:49):
So lived in Minnesota most of his life.
(00:16:52):
Vance is from Ohio and claims rural Appalachian roots through his grandparents,
(00:16:57):
who are from a small town in Kentucky.
(00:16:59):
So there's a bit of
(00:17:00):
ambiguity that whether he himself can claim to be Appalachian or not.
(00:17:05):
But anyway, it's from that area, broadly speaking.
(00:17:08):
Both have stressed this identity politics in the debate,
(00:17:11):
and they've done that also in their campaign rallies.
(00:17:14):
And both of them are pretty skilled at this.
(00:17:16):
Vance mentions his allegedly working class Appalachian background and the mother's
(00:17:20):
struggle with addiction.
(00:17:22):
He does that again also in the debate.
(00:17:25):
also as an example of this post-industrial decline of the Midwest, Waltz mentions Minnesota a lot.
(00:17:31):
And that's also because he's the governor of the state.
(00:17:33):
So in that way, he's showcasing his governing experience.
(00:17:37):
So I was reading in this BBC article by Hannah Feige recently,
(00:17:42):
about the views of some midwestern voters you know basically she interviewed a few
(00:17:48):
midwestern voters on what they thought about the debate and what's quite
(00:17:52):
interesting is that they all seem to agree that they liked the tone of the debate
(00:17:57):
some called it respectable other people use the word nice so i've been wondering
(00:18:03):
how much of this regional identity politics
(00:18:07):
I played a role in this, right?
(00:18:10):
Because when you have this more, when you're trying to establish your roots from a place,
(00:18:17):
you actually pretty push towards establishing some commonality,
(00:18:22):
even towards people that you might not like,
(00:18:24):
or they might have very different views from you,
(00:18:26):
right?
(00:18:27):
So think here,
(00:18:27):
Vance and Waltz,
(00:18:29):
in terms of political views,
(00:18:30):
what they stand for,
(00:18:31):
values,
(00:18:32):
at the almost,
(00:18:34):
I would say,
(00:18:34):
pretty clear the opposite end of it.
(00:18:36):
But if they want to claim
(00:18:39):
those roots from those parts of America,
(00:18:42):
if they want to show that they are really from there and that they are talking to
(00:18:46):
voters from there,
(00:18:48):
then it looks like this dynamic of consensus will make sense,
(00:18:51):
right?
(00:18:52):
You need to acknowledge your adversary,
(00:18:54):
you need to acknowledge that you're at least part of the same broad community,
(00:18:57):
and then you mark the differences from within.
(00:19:00):
I mean, I'm
(00:19:01):
based in Scandinavia.
(00:19:03):
I live in between Norway and Sweden.
(00:19:05):
This is very common in consensus societies like Norway and Sweden are.
(00:19:10):
You need to make your claim that you belong to the society and then from within the claim,
(00:19:15):
from that commonality that unites everybody in that society,
(00:19:19):
at least in this kind of ideal,
(00:19:23):
view of it then from there you can mark some differences then from there you can
(00:19:28):
you know be in favor or against certain policies in favor or against certain values
(00:19:32):
but you are pretty much pushed to acknowledge first that you all belong to the same
(00:19:37):
community so to me that's something quite interesting that emerges in this debate
(00:19:44):
and going back also to some of the issues we discussed in previous episodes we
(00:19:49):
actually showed the positive effect
(00:19:52):
of having Waltz there on the Democrat side,
(00:19:55):
because from the very beginning,
(00:19:57):
Waltz presented himself as a kind of middle America.
(00:20:00):
So the main idea that Waltz is trying to push and has pushed already from early on
(00:20:05):
is that he's trying to regain common sense from the grip of the far right.
(00:20:10):
It is common sense to be in favor of women's reproductive freedoms.
(00:20:14):
It is common sense to be open and supportive of different sexualities.
(00:20:19):
It is common sense to support workers and national paid leave.
(00:20:23):
This was one of the discussion also in this debate.
(00:20:28):
So, Waltz is showing
(00:20:30):
for instance,
(00:20:31):
when he talks about gun violence as well,
(00:20:33):
and he presents himself as a hunter,
(00:20:35):
so,
(00:20:35):
you know,
(00:20:36):
a pretty,
(00:20:37):
not the classic leftist that you have in mind.
(00:20:40):
But then he says, still, regulations on gun violence is common sense.
(00:20:44):
We don't want our kids to
(00:20:47):
to die unduly.
(00:20:48):
We don't want these awful security measures in schools where schools around the
(00:20:52):
world don't need to follow these kind of measures.
(00:20:54):
So I think that some of the dynamic is happening there.
(00:20:59):
In many ways, even as Watts is trying to make the big difference, they make the big jump to say, hey,
(00:21:05):
uh i'm offering something different and hey you don't need to be you know you don't
(00:21:09):
need to be in the stereotype box that if you are a white working class voter you're
(00:21:12):
supposed to be some kind of awful uh extremist conservative but to do that he has
(00:21:18):
to claim some kind of insideness so in that way he can't completely discard he
(00:21:23):
can't completely dismiss the opponent in the effective way that harris did with
(00:21:28):
trump by basically saying you know you're extreme you're you're not credible you
(00:21:33):
you will not be a good leader
(00:21:34):
So this is a very different strategy,
(00:21:36):
but perhaps justified by this kind of different audience and different context that
(00:21:43):
Harris and Waltz have been working in in terms of these two debates.
(00:21:49):
I think there is also a broader issue about a consensual approach and this idea
(00:21:56):
that you try to find some legitimation.
(00:21:59):
So I think we can move now beyond these more regional aspects,
(00:22:02):
which are very important in the US election,
(00:22:04):
because it's quite likely that this time,
(00:22:07):
again,
(00:22:07):
very much like in 2016,
(00:22:09):
everything will be decided by a few thousand voters in a few states.
(00:22:14):
But I think there is a broader point here about consensus.
(00:22:18):
We can now compare the two debates as examples of the pros and cons.
(00:22:23):
On one hand, Trump-Harris, much more polarized, much more antagonistic, much more conflictual.
(00:22:30):
And on the other hand,
(00:22:31):
you get this Vance Waltz dynamic of almost being neighbors with very different views.
(00:22:37):
I'm thinking also about what's happening in Europe because one danger of this kind
(00:22:43):
of consensus approach to trying somewhat to absorb this more extreme far right
(00:22:51):
views into the center,
(00:22:53):
into the mainstream in Europe,
(00:22:55):
we're not seeing this as very positive.
(00:22:57):
So in my opinion, I don't think for the most part
(00:23:02):
the mainstream or the far right has actually neutralized it or has actually
(00:23:06):
diminished the anti-immigration sentiments and policies.
(00:23:11):
I think far from it.
(00:23:12):
I'm Italian, so I've been watching this quite closely in my own countries.
(00:23:16):
And there we're seeing that the centrist mainstreaming of far right ideas,
(00:23:20):
it's actually taking place often through these appeals to being reasonable,
(00:23:27):
appearing to be moderate,
(00:23:29):
moderate your tone,
(00:23:30):
be sober in your tone.
(00:23:32):
Centrist commentators in Italy,
(00:23:34):
you know,
(00:23:35):
keep on praising Giorgia Meloni,
(00:23:36):
who's a far right prime minister with close ties to fascist,
(00:23:40):
nostalgic and neo-fascist movements.
(00:23:42):
So they praise her every time she talks soberly,
(00:23:46):
right,
(00:23:47):
with a more moderate,
(00:23:48):
with a more presidential style,
(00:23:50):
regardless of what she advocates for.
(00:23:52):
They really focus on the tone.
(00:23:54):
This is quite important.
(00:23:55):
They also reprimand her when she takes on an openly vitriolic,
(00:24:01):
anti-establishment,
(00:24:02):
conspiratorial style,
(00:24:03):
which she's well known for.
(00:24:05):
That's what she did actually throughout her career and got into government.
(00:24:10):
So the narrative there is that somehow they reprimand her for something that is her past,
(00:24:17):
some kind of legacy of the past that she has to get rid of,
(00:24:20):
that doesn't have to be central to who she is and what she represents.
(00:24:25):
And the point is that she gets praised because she's outgrowing populist roots.
(00:24:32):
It's quite a dangerous framing because it assumes
(00:24:35):
those vitriolic,
(00:24:36):
anti-establishment,
(00:24:37):
often xenophobic speeches she has and she continues to do,
(00:24:41):
she does a lot of code switching,
(00:24:43):
depending basically to which audience she's talking to.
(00:24:46):
This kind of framing by the centrist media frames this as accidents,
(00:24:51):
slippages,
(00:24:52):
some kind of backsliding,
(00:24:53):
but this is not the case.
(00:24:54):
I mean, Meloni has been very good and that's why
(00:24:57):
You know,
(00:24:57):
she's becoming almost one of the international inspirations for far-right leaders elsewhere,
(00:25:04):
exactly because by alternating this more moderate,
(00:25:08):
sober tone,
(00:25:09):
especially with people outside your base,
(00:25:12):
outside your far-right base.
(00:25:13):
See Meloni when she goes to the UN,
(00:25:15):
for instance,
(00:25:16):
or see Meloni when she shakes the hands of the president of the European Commission,
(00:25:21):
von der Leyen.
(00:25:22):
and then still continuing to fuel her base,
(00:25:26):
always signal to her base that she's still the authentic populist,
(00:25:30):
right-wing populist.
(00:25:31):
She still believes very strongly that there is a conspiracy of the left and she
(00:25:36):
keeps and repeats it over and over again to certain audiences and in certain moments,
(00:25:40):
usually when she loses or when she has some challenges that she has to get out.
(00:25:44):
In that way, she's quite similar to
(00:25:47):
Trump and Vance.
(00:25:48):
So this is actually a political strategy.
(00:25:50):
There's nothing to do with backsliding.
(00:25:51):
There is no outgrowing her roots.
(00:25:54):
She's very conscious of what she's doing.
(00:25:56):
I think in the same way, we need to be very careful of Vance doing something similar.
(00:26:01):
It's clear that Vance's views are extreme.
(00:26:03):
It doesn't matter whether he can put them in a way a bit like salesman style that
(00:26:11):
that make him sound reasonable.
(00:26:14):
That actually doesn't matter.
(00:26:15):
It doesn't mean that if he's legitimized as a kind of reasonable opponent,
(00:26:20):
his views somehow become less extreme.
(00:26:21):
And I think the debate with Waltz is a very clear example of that.
(00:26:25):
Okay,
(00:26:26):
sober tone,
(00:26:26):
okay,
(00:26:27):
they can even somewhat acknowledge each other from time to time,
(00:26:30):
but the views that Pence espoused throughout the debate remain extreme nonetheless.
(00:26:35):
It really matters little whether they are shouted or not.
(00:26:39):
So I think that's something quite important to remember.
(00:26:42):
In any case,
(00:26:44):
going back again to these views and ideologies and what the two candidates and what
(00:26:48):
the two parties stand for,
(00:26:50):
so what the Harris-Walls ticket and what the Trump-Vance ticket stand for,
(00:26:56):
I think it's clear that there remains a huge divide.
(00:26:59):
So I want to give this as an example.
(00:27:02):
how Vance and Waltz talk about the challenge that Trump did in 2020 when he didn't
(00:27:09):
acknowledge his defeat.
(00:27:12):
You know,
(00:27:12):
he said that there was some kind of election rigging and that Biden basically stole
(00:27:17):
the election.
(00:27:18):
So we can see here that Vance and Waltz have, in fact, very different view.
(00:27:23):
Let's see Vance first.
(00:27:26):
I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country.
(00:27:29):
But unfortunately, it's not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about.
(00:27:35):
It is the threat of censorship.
(00:27:37):
It's Americans casting aside lifelong friendships because of disagreements over politics.
(00:27:43):
It's big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens.
(00:27:46):
And it's Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans,
(00:27:51):
she'd like to censor people who engage in misinformation.
(00:27:54):
I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we've seen in
(00:27:57):
this country in the last four years,
(00:27:59):
in the last 40 years.
(00:28:01):
Now,
(00:28:01):
I'm really proud,
(00:28:02):
especially given that I was raised by two lifelong blue-collar Democrats,
(00:28:06):
to have the endorsement of Bobby Kennedy Jr.
(00:28:08):
and Tulsi Gabbard, lifelong leaders in the Democratic coalition, of course,
(00:28:13):
They don't agree with me and Donald Trump on every issue.
(00:28:15):
We don't have to agree on every issue.
(00:28:17):
But we're united behind a basic American First Amendment principle that we ought to
(00:28:22):
debate our differences.
(00:28:23):
We ought to argue about them.
(00:28:24):
We ought to try to persuade our fellow Americans.
(00:28:26):
Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale.
(00:28:31):
She did it during COVID.
(00:28:32):
She's done it over a number of other issues.
(00:28:34):
And that,
(00:28:35):
to me,
(00:28:35):
is a much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said that
(00:28:40):
protesters should peacefully protest on January the 6th.
(00:28:43):
That was Vance.
(00:28:44):
He was basically responding to a question as to whether he would challenge an
(00:28:52):
election again,
(00:28:53):
even if he were to be legally certified,
(00:28:56):
as Trump basically was trying to do after,
(00:29:00):
on the day that Pence decided to,
(00:29:03):
his vice president decided in January 2021 to basically certify the election as legal.
(00:29:10):
Back then, Trump
(00:29:12):
played a really big role in fueling then those riots, those people who actually stormed the Capitol.
(00:29:19):
So the moderator was asking Vance, okay, are you going to accept defeat if that's the case?
(00:29:26):
If you lose the election, are you going to accept defeat?
(00:29:29):
Vance basically just deflates
(00:29:31):
and basically saying,
(00:29:32):
no,
(00:29:32):
no,
(00:29:32):
the problem,
(00:29:33):
the real threat to democracy is not what you're saying,
(00:29:36):
is not the danger that Trump or me might challenge the election results.
(00:29:41):
The real threat to democracy is Kamala Harris and her censorship kind of regime.
(00:29:48):
Here, it's quite interesting because we go back to some of the topics we explored earlier in the show.
(00:29:53):
See podcast,
(00:29:54):
you know,
(00:29:55):
the episode two of our podcast,
(00:29:56):
for instance,
(00:29:57):
where we discussed in quite some depth the whole idea of this free speech coalition,
(00:30:03):
right?
(00:30:04):
Quite interesting here, Vance, is bringing again this idea of diagonalism.
(00:30:08):
Okay, diagonalism is this concept.
(00:30:10):
We discussed it in most of the previous shows developed by Callison and Slobodian, two academics.
(00:30:16):
They wrote quite a popular essay on the Boston Review.
(00:30:19):
It's the idea,
(00:30:20):
basically,
(00:30:20):
there are movements,
(00:30:21):
this was especially strong during the pandemic with the kind of no-vax,
(00:30:25):
no-pass kind of copy skeptics movements.
(00:30:30):
The idea is that these movements go beyond left and right.
(00:30:33):
They're kind of new social movements that don't believe anymore in this division between left and right.
(00:30:37):
But effectively, very much like Vance, they still end up moving towards the right in that way.
(00:30:45):
So here what we have is Vance also playing on this topic,
(00:30:48):
basically by saying,
(00:30:49):
hey,
(00:30:49):
people who have some kind of leftist credential,
(00:30:52):
I would call them more red-brown,
(00:30:54):
basically,
(00:30:54):
again,
(00:30:55):
mixing these far left and far right topics quite strongly,
(00:30:58):
like Robert F.
(00:30:59):
Kennedy Jr.,
(00:31:01):
dropped from his independent race for president to endorse Donald Trump.
(00:31:06):
And Tulsi Gabbard,
(00:31:07):
who was a former member actually of the House of Representatives,
(00:31:09):
elected with Democrats and then left the Democrats,
(00:31:13):
they both endorsed the Trump-Vance ticket.
(00:31:15):
So,
(00:31:16):
Vance is here trying to say basically,
(00:31:18):
well,
(00:31:18):
the real distinction here is not really left and right,
(00:31:21):
but it's people who are in favor of free speech,
(00:31:23):
you know,
(00:31:23):
to defend freedom again,
(00:31:25):
and people like Kamala Harris at Kamala Harris camp who are
(00:31:28):
basically that set on stopping that.
(00:31:30):
And of course, this is kind of one of the themes of the Trump-Vance propaganda.
(00:31:38):
We should also mention here that
(00:31:41):
What Vance is also referring when he's talking about Harris alleged censorship role
(00:31:47):
during the pandemic is basically referring to a statement by Mark Zuckerberg,
(00:31:53):
the CEO of Meta,
(00:31:54):
basically the company that owns and runs Facebook and Instagram.
(00:31:59):
Zuckerberg at the end of August,
(00:32:01):
you know,
(00:32:01):
with the presidential campaign in full swing,
(00:32:03):
so in my opinion,
(00:32:04):
quite inappropriately so,
(00:32:07):
he went off and said that White House officials from the Biden administration
(00:32:12):
pressured Meta to,
(00:32:13):
quote,
(00:32:13):
censor certain COVID-19 content during the pandemic.
(00:32:18):
So this also shows that there is also a much broader alliance, not only across left-right lines here.
(00:32:25):
When we talk about these more extremist views of free speech,
(00:32:29):
the big tech platforms are never really that far away.
(00:32:32):
They monetize on free speech.
(00:32:35):
And even when this can cause really serious harm,
(00:32:38):
a lot of hate speech and a lot of violence against certain groups.
(00:32:42):
So there is a broader alliance here that one should consider.
(00:32:45):
And when somebody with a responsibility like Zuckerberg,
(00:32:49):
who's basically a company with huge amounts of power on what kind of media people
(00:32:54):
can produce,
(00:32:55):
distribute,
(00:32:56):
can read,
(00:32:57):
then they have to take quite a lot of responsibility when they kind of give these
(00:33:00):
boons to people like Banz to then,
(00:33:02):
you know,
(00:33:03):
authoritatively used to say,
(00:33:04):
you see,
(00:33:05):
Kamala Harris is censoring people,
(00:33:07):
you know,
(00:33:07):
and of course,
(00:33:08):
there is no proof and evidence that of what Zuckerberg really meant.
(00:33:11):
So is it censorship if you're asking Facebook to do, you know, to stop
(00:33:16):
content that says that COVID-19 is not real?
(00:33:19):
Is it censorship if you ask Facebook to stop content that says that people
(00:33:23):
shouldn't vaccinate when there is life or death at stake?
(00:33:26):
I think that's very questionable.
(00:33:28):
That is really Zuckerberg's opinion and he would have probably done better not to
(00:33:32):
have raised this in the middle of an election campaign in this way.
(00:33:36):
But we know again that there are very strong monetary interests.
(00:33:39):
Why?
(00:33:40):
People like Zuckerberg, even worse, Elon Musk,
(00:33:43):
Look at how Hex is coming, you know, full on supporting Trump in a very inappropriate way.
(00:33:48):
You know, a CEO that sends his own tweets saying, you know, I support Trump.
(00:33:53):
Let's hear now how Waltz is taking advance on the issue of Trump challenging the
(00:34:00):
2020 election results with a clear mention of the Capitol Hill riots.
(00:34:06):
Well,
(00:34:06):
I've enjoyed tonight's debate,
(00:34:08):
and I think there was a lot of commonality here,
(00:34:09):
and I'm sympathetic to misspeaking on things,
(00:34:11):
and I think I might have with the senator.
(00:34:14):
Me too, man.
(00:34:15):
There's one,
(00:34:16):
though,
(00:34:16):
that this one is troubling to me,
(00:34:17):
and I say that because I think we need to tell the story.
(00:34:20):
Donald Trump refused to acknowledge this,
(00:34:22):
and the fact is that I don't think we can be the frog in the pot and let the
(00:34:25):
boiling water go up.
(00:34:27):
He was very clear.
(00:34:28):
I mean, he lost this election, and he said he didn't.
(00:34:32):
140 police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day,
(00:34:35):
some with the American flag,
(00:34:36):
several later died.
(00:34:37):
And it wasn't just in there.
(00:34:39):
In Minnesota, a group gathered on the state Capitol grounds in St.
(00:34:43):
Paul and said, we're marching to the governor's residence and there may be casualties.
(00:34:47):
The only person there was my son and his dog, who was rushed out crying by state police.
(00:34:53):
That issue and Mike Pence standing there as they were chanting, hang Mike Pence.
(00:34:58):
Mike Pence made the right decision.
(00:35:00):
So Senator, it was adjudicated over and over and over.
(00:35:04):
I worked with kids long enough to know,
(00:35:06):
and I said as a football coach,
(00:35:07):
sometimes you really wanna win,
(00:35:09):
but the democracy is bigger than winning an election.
(00:35:11):
You shake hands and then you try and do everything you can to help the other side win.
(00:35:16):
That's what was at stake here.
(00:35:18):
Now, the thing I'm most concerned about is the idea that
(00:35:22):
imprisoning your your political opponents already laying the groundwork for people
(00:35:27):
not accepting this and a president's words matter a president's words matter people
(00:35:33):
hear that so i think this issue of settling our differences at the ballot box
(00:35:39):
shaking hands when we lose being honest about it but to deny what happened on
(00:35:45):
january 6th the first time in american history
(00:35:50):
that a president or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power.
(00:35:56):
And here we are four years later in the same boat.
(00:35:59):
I will tell you this,
(00:36:00):
that when this is over,
(00:36:02):
we need to shake hands,
(00:36:03):
this election,
(00:36:04):
and the winner needs to be the winner.
(00:36:06):
This has got to stop.
(00:36:07):
It's tearing our country apart.
(00:36:10):
I think Waltz is pretty clear here about the dangers of Trump not accepting defeat again in 2024.
(00:36:15):
So I don't think there's much to add there.
(00:36:20):
We know that despite Vance's attempts at whitewashing this,
(00:36:23):
Trump has indeed already made several innuendos that he might not accept defeat
(00:36:28):
after 5th of November,
(00:36:29):
repeating a similar kind of propaganda.
(00:36:33):
A few days ago,
(00:36:34):
some court documents were unsealed from the federal 2020 election subversion case
(00:36:39):
against Trump.
(00:36:40):
So there is a court case actually against him for that.
(00:36:43):
The documents provide also additional evidence basically of Trump's involvement.
(00:36:49):
in the events that led to the Capitol Hill riots and new revelations.
(00:36:53):
You can go and check more on the media.
(00:36:56):
I recommend you do because these documents are quite important and they give even
(00:37:01):
more of a picture of what we already knew up to now.
(00:37:04):
The new revelations include Trump's disregard for his vice president's safety, basically
(00:37:10):
Trump attacked Vice President Pence on Twitter on the day of the riots,
(00:37:14):
just as Pence was being evacuated from his Senate office with all these rioters,
(00:37:19):
angry rioters around the place.
(00:37:22):
And there's also evidence basically that shows that Trump was well aware that these
(00:37:25):
allegations of election fraud were false.
(00:37:27):
He knew that.
(00:37:28):
In other words, he lied repeatedly just to pursue his desire to keep in power.
(00:37:35):
We've covered quite a lot of ground, so it's time to
(00:37:38):
wrap up.
(00:37:39):
So what can we say about the performance?
(00:37:42):
You know,
(00:37:42):
if you had to give some kind of overall commentary,
(00:37:46):
some kind of summary of how Vance and Waltz did.
(00:37:51):
I mean,
(00:37:52):
I think Waltz,
(00:37:53):
perhaps from a performative point of view,
(00:37:56):
stumbled a little bit at the beginning,
(00:37:57):
but he picked himself up pretty quickly.
(00:38:00):
I think he stood his ground and he came up perhaps more strongly on the issues that
(00:38:06):
he cared most,
(00:38:06):
that he's most passionate about.
(00:38:09):
which is welfare of people, you know, the national paid leave, housing, women's rights.
(00:38:14):
Those, I think, were the things where he definitely did best.
(00:38:18):
But I think he also took on the idea of a Trump and Sticker very well, especially on the
(00:38:24):
January 6th and on those Capitol Hill riots that we just heard about.
(00:38:28):
He made a clear cut through kind of Vance kind of sophistry and kind of attempts at
(00:38:35):
charming the audience with a lot of blah,
(00:38:37):
blah,
(00:38:37):
blah that often didn't actually make quite a lot of sense.
(00:38:41):
From Van's point of view, yes, okay.
(00:38:43):
Perhaps as a performer, he might sound quite slick.
(00:38:47):
He's very comfortable.
(00:38:48):
You can see that he's very camera savvy.
(00:38:51):
And again,
(00:38:52):
no matter what questions he has,
(00:38:53):
he can always find some answers,
(00:38:55):
some kind of charming answer that often deflects from the actual question.
(00:39:00):
There were very few questions that he actually answered or even attempted to answer,
(00:39:05):
especially the most difficult questions.
(00:39:09):
But then again, how far that is going to go with the voters or not, we don't know.
(00:39:14):
We know that Vance has this kind of,
(00:39:17):
you know,
(00:39:18):
origin really as a political commentator,
(00:39:20):
as a commentator on the way on TV.
(00:39:23):
That was,
(00:39:24):
you know,
(00:39:24):
we discussed it in previous podcasts,
(00:39:26):
also to do with how he was launched into the political scene with the
(00:39:31):
memoir of this Appalachian roots and Appalachian kind of cultural collapse and this
(00:39:37):
idea of the white working class in Hillbilly Helegy,
(00:39:40):
the book that he published in 2016,
(00:39:42):
actually in the middle of the other presidential campaign.
(00:39:47):
But whether that makes him a credible or trusted vice presidential pick, I think that's all to be seen.
(00:39:56):
we should be very careful of this kind of ability to spin a lot because behind the
(00:40:03):
spin there's actually a lot of very extreme views,
(00:40:05):
very far-right views and very dangerous views for democracy and for people in general.
(00:40:11):
The debate doesn't seem to have caused significant shifts in the election race in terms of polling.
(00:40:16):
And that actually was quite similar to Harris Trump,
(00:40:19):
even though many thought that Harris did much better than Trump,
(00:40:22):
it still didn't actually shift many votes,
(00:40:25):
at least according to the data we have up to now.
(00:40:27):
What we know is that this remains a very tight race.
(00:40:31):
Harris is leading by a low margin on the national vote and is completely within the margin of error.
(00:40:37):
And in the seven battleground states,
(00:40:39):
which are likely to determine the winner,
(00:40:41):
Harris and Trump are basically neck and neck.
(00:40:45):
So the next few weeks are going to be really crucial.
(00:40:48):
There is already early voting happening.
(00:40:50):
So some people have already started voting.
(00:40:53):
We'll need to see in the next few weeks how this is going to be unfolding and what
(00:40:58):
kind of situation we'll face on election day.
(00:41:02):
We've come to the end of the show for today.
(00:41:04):
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(00:41:07):
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(00:41:11):
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(00:41:13):
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(00:41:17):
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(00:41:23):
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(00:41:29):
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