[music]

Donald Trump, Jr.: Deadly drugs keep pouring across our border. Pro-crime district attorneys have turned our cities into giant crime zones.

Brooke Gladstone: So much for the Republicans' Unity Convention. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. The confidence of the MAGA movement is palpable in Trump's VP pick J.D. Vance, who rode the wave of his hillbilly pass to lead a new political faction.

Andrew Prokop: The New Right is far more extreme. They believe that the left controls much of the federal government and major actions are necessary.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, how the failed assassination of Donald Trump amplified fervent claims that he is God's chosen candidate.

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders: God Almighty intervened because America is one nation under God, and He is certainly not finished with President Trump.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC New York, this is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. In my many years on this beat, I've been around the block a few times, yet I still couldn't decide which was the most corrosive trend in third-millennium American politics: the rage, the deceit, or the hypocrisy. Finally, after tuning into the Republican National Convention, I decided it was the world-building so slick and delusional.

Donald Trump: Our opponents inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war. We're in a planet of war.

Daniel Dale: This is false.

Brooke Gladstone: Daniel Dale checks facts for CNN.

Daniel Dale: When he left office, there were active wars or armed conflicts in dozens of nations in 2020, a 51 by-1 research institutions count, and then 51 again in 2021. Trump handed President Biden ongoing civil wars in Yemen and Syria.

Brooke Gladstone: Dale told Jake Tapper that it would take too long to do a full accounting of Trump's tall tales, so he curated.

Daniel Dale: He repeated his usual lie about Democrats having cheated in the 2020 election. It's nonsense. He said crime is going up. The opposite is true. It is now lower than it was under Trump in 2020. He said we have the worst inflation we've ever had. Again, not even close. It is 3% right now. The US record is 23.7%. He said Democrats are proposing to quadruple people's taxes. That is imaginary.

Daniel Dale: He said his tax cut was the largest in American history, not even close again. There were other exaggerations about trade with China, about North Korean missile launches, about gas prices, about IRS agents. It just went on and on and on in terms of falsehood, just like the speech went on and on and on itself. Jake.

Brooke Gladstone: The depiction of America, of the world as a crime-ridden hellscape all fixed by Trump until Biden ruined it, was on infinite repeat at the RNC, and yes, I just can't help a little futile fact-checking because the RNC was such a banquet of BS. I'll skip over most of the speeches to land on the consequential address of Trump's vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance. His amiable America trashing was a key part of his national launch.

J.D. Vance: There's this chart that shows worker wages, and they stagnated for pretty much my entire life until President Donald J. Trump came along. Workers' wages went through the roof.

Brooke Gladstone: No, buying power did grow faster under Trump than Biden because of inflation earlier in his administration, but now wages have begun to outpace inflation again, and overall unemployment is lower under Biden. According to The Washington Post in April 2023, the Black unemployment rate reached an all-time low of 4.8%, and for the first time ever, the share of Black Americans with jobs exceeded the share of white Americans with jobs, but why nitpick? Well, because--

Ian Ward: His allegiance to Trump obscures his longer-term political project, which goes far beyond Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: We'll be getting to that later this hour, but first we'll hear more from Ian Ward, a Politico reporter who interviewed Vance earlier this year, and recently published a piece with "55 things to know about J.D. Vance."

Ian Ward: He was born in Ohio. His mother struggled with drug addiction. He didn't really have a solid father figure. He was bullied and had a difficult time making friends in school. His parents separated very early on. His mother remarried. He was raised primarily by his grandparents, who he calls Mamaw and Papaw, who were rough-and-tumble-Appalachian folk.

J.D. Vance: My Mamaw died shortly before I left for Iraq in 2005, and when we went through her things we found 19 loaded handguns.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: That's Vance at the RNC, establishing his dyed0in-wool MAGA Cred. Very different from his maiden voyage into the public eye back in 2016.

J.D. Vance: I'm going to vote third party because I can't stomach Trump. I think that he's noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place. There is definitely an element of Donald Trump's support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia.

Brooke Gladstone: That was when our callow youth was unready for the real world, ill-equipped with only a degree from Ohio State University in political science and philosophy, a law degree from Yale, and a job in venture capital, so he was prey to manipulation, as he explained to Fox News's Sean Hannity after his nomination.

J.D. Vance: If you go back to what I thought in 2016, another thing that was going on, Sean, is I bought into the media's lies and distortions. I bought into this idea that somehow he was going to be so different, a terrible threat to democracy. It was a joke. Joe Biden is the one who's trying to throw his political opposition in jail. Joe Biden is the one who's trying to undermine American law and order.

Brooke Gladstone: Now that's some world-class world-building.

Ian Ward: It was at Yale Law School that he attended a talk by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist Silicon Valley scion, an early investor in Facebook.

Brooke Gladstone: Ian Ward.

Ian Ward: Thiel gave a talk about what had gone wrong with American elites and what its implications were, specifically for technologies. Thiel famously has this quote that what we wanted were flying cars and what we got were 140 characters. The core of that being that technology promised to completely revolutionize our lives and make the world a very different and ultimately better place, and what we ended up with were these phones we carry around that make us unhappy and anxious and jealous of each other, and Twitter, where we fight over politics and post cat videos. How did we go from this utopian promise of tech to this dystopian reality of tech?

Ian Ward: Thiel in this talk connected that to the pathologies of the American elite. He said elites are so busy fighting with each other for status and to maintain their foothold in a precarious economic order that they don't really have the time or the energy or the imagination or the conviction to build these revolutionary technologies. Thiel subsequently played an important role in his conversion to Catholicism in 2019.

Brooke Gladstone: Vance calls meeting Peter Thiel the most significant moment of his time at Yale. After graduating, he worked in corporate law and then for a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Mithril Capital run by Peter Thiel. In 2016, he left California for Ohio to start a charity, Our Ohio Renewal.

J.D. Vance: [Our] nonprofit is going to focus on the opioid epidemic, which is killing, at this point in the United States, more people than gun violence. I'd like to see those opioid addiction death rates go down as opposed to up as they've been doing for the past few years.

Brooke Gladstone: So he needed some expertise, but--

Simon Van Zuylen-Wood: What's really weird is that they hired this researcher from the American Enterprise Institute.

Brooke Gladstone: Simon Van Zuylen-wood wrote an article in 2022 called The Radicalization of J.D. Vance for The Washington Post.

Simon Van Zuylen-Wood: She was famous for being friendly to the opioid industry. She would share drafts of her writing ahead of time with Purdue Pharma people, the oxycontin manufacturers. She was a skeptic of the idea that pharmaceutical over-the-counter opioids were as big of a factor in unleashing the opioid epidemic, heroin and fentanyl, all that stuff, and then eventually what came of it was almost nothing.

Ian Ward: It went belly up.

Brooke Gladstone: Ian Ward.

Ian Ward: It was embarrassing for everyone involved and it died pretty fast.

Brooke Gladstone: All the while, Vance kept working on a memoir he'd started writing at Yale, and Hillbilly Elegy was published in June 2016.

Ian Ward: It blended stories of his childhood and his upbringing in Ohio with some political theorizing, basically. The explanation he offered was that the people he grew up with suffered from these pathologies. The poverty they experienced, the broken homes they experienced were not the product of national economic forces or global political forces. They were the result of failures of individual initiative. The people were lazy, the people didn't get jobs.

Glenn Close: You got to take care of business, you got to go to school, you got to get good grades to even have a chance.

Brooke Gladstone: Glenn Close played Vance's Grandma in the film based on the memoir.

Gabriel Basso: What's the point?

Glenn Close: I'm talking about a chance. You might not make it, but you sure as hell won't if you don't try.

Gabriel Basso: Why do you even care what I do?

Glenn Close: I ain't going to live forever. I could have done better, but you, you got to decide you want to be somebody or not.

Ian Ward: The book took off in an incredible way. It was published right around the time of the 2016 election, and it was taken up really enthusiastically by liberals and center-left people, and even center-right people as a sort of Rosetta stone for the Trump phenomenon.

Brooke Gladstone: Vance was the shiny object the pundit class kept reaching for. He became a contributor to The New York Times, a commentator on CNN.

Judy Woodruff: Now, in this topsy-turvy election year, we have a timely portrait of Americans who were often ignored and misunderstood, depicted as only an insider could, J.D. Vance, welcome to the NewsHour. Educate us. What is it that the media, what is it that the politicians or the anti-Trump people don't get about the people who voted for Trump and continue to support him?

J.D Vance: In these communities where everything has fallen apart, folks aren't going to church, their kids are addicted to drugs, they don't have a whole lot left and Donald Trump is one of the few things that they do have.

Ian Ward: It's interesting to think back about how much of a media creation J.D. Vance was. He became an absolute sensation and was embraced really, really enthusiastically by the mainstream media and liberal political elites, which is ironic, to say the least now.

Brooke Gladstone: Thus embraced, he became a Never Trumper, then he became a Trumper, and then some. Some suggest that the shift coincided with the bad reviews of the Hillbilly Elegy movie, but that's too cynical, even for me. This is how he explains it. This time, without me interrupting, to note the untruths and misdirection that enabled this kind of world-building.

J.D Vance: They're firing American workers and hiring illegal aliens to replace them. This is the entire point of illegal immigration, and what this means is the eradication of the American dream. I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally. I made what seemed to me a plainly obvious observation that Alex Jones, the Infowars guy, is a better source of information than Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC gal.

J.D Vance: The most important truths often come from people who are crazy 60% of the time, but they're right 40% of the time. I'm very close friends with Peter Thiel. I think Peter Thiel is one of the most important sources of non-conventional truth in our society. Peter Thiel believes some things that are considered crazy by opinion makers. Was the election in 2020 free and fair? Was it above board? My answer is no. If I had been vice president, I would've told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.

Brooke Gladstone: Then, in November 2022, he won a seat in the US Senate with the help of over $10 million from Peter Thiel. Now, much ink has been spilled on the question of Vance's political evolution. Cynical opportunism or a genuine change of heart? "Neither," says Simon Van Zuylen-wood.

Simon Van Zuylen-Wood: The central question that's raised in Hillbilly Elegy is why did this part of America get left behind? It's about his upbringing in this town, which was devastated by the loss of industry. In some sense, when you look at post-industrial America, you're looking at his recipes for more social cohesion. He's raised by his grandmother instead of his mom who is a drug addict. He converted to Catholicism as an adult. His vision now as a religious conservative, as someone who's interested in intense local social cohesion, that makes a lot of sense, as does his now economic populism on trade, on borders, even fainting towards pro-union movement.

Ian Ward: He has a lot of different registers he operates in.

Brooke Gladstone: Ian Ward.

Ian Ward: He can go to a political rally and fire up the MAGA base. He can go into a room full of conservative intellectuals and name-drop people and drop references to articles to let everyone know that he's read the latest conservative magazines. He's up with the latest academic discussions on really obscure political philosophy. He can also go to a mainstream media studio and go toe to toe with an adversarial anchor. He can code-switch really effectively between these different worlds, but you don't really know on a given day which J.D. Vance is going to show up.

Ian Ward: He fits very uneasily into the right-left binary that we often use to understand politics. He's reframing politics in a way we haven't really seen. There's this term often thrown around in conservative circles in Washington, which is the political realignment of the Republican party with a working-class pro-worker vision built around immigration restriction. My big takeaway from the reporting is that Vance's vision of the country goes well beyond Trumpism.

[MUSIC - Kronos Quartet: John's Book of Alleged Dances: IV. Pavane: She's So Fine]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, what comes after Trumpism, and who's paying for it?

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. Donald Trump and the WWE go way back. He himself is a Hall of Famer. On Thursday night at the RNC, retired wrestler, Terry Bollea, AKA Hulk Hogan, took the stage.

Hulk Hogan: Let Trump-mania run wild, brother. Let Trump-mania rule again. Let Trump-mania make America great again.

Micah Loewinger: For Hogan to hype up a candidate who's waged war on the press was deeply symbolic. It was Hogan's defamation lawsuit that brought down Gawker in 2016 after the site published his sex tape. It was Peter Thiel, in an apparent act of revenge, who secretly funded that lawsuit after the site outed him as gay. The same Peter Thiel who set J.D. Vance on the path to vice president.

Micah Loewinger: In fact, Thiel has opened his wallet for a series of political campaigns, think tanks, and cultural festivals aimed at advancing a fringe but growing offshoot of conservatism dubbed The New Right. It includes J.D. Vance, one-time presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, and a loose cohort of politicos and public intellectuals known for their musings on racist pseudoscience, abortion bans, and explicit fantasies of a right-wing dictatorship. Writing in Vox this week, Senior Politics Correspondent Andrew Prokop charted Vance's roots in The New Right and what its influence on the new VP nominee might mean for a second Trump term.

Andrew Prokop: The New Right is mainly an intellectual movement, which started online, really among a disparate group of online posters who really vary in their views, but shared the commonality that they were far more extreme than anything that was acceptable in the current Republican Party. In contrast to what we might think of as Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or Mitt Romney conservatism, which was fundamentally optimistic about the current state of America, they believe that America is badly flawed, failing, falling apart, and that major serious changes are necessary to put a stop to all this, but there are several different strains of it.

Andrew Prokop: There's one strain of The New Right that is more religious-focused. A lot of them are Catholics. They want to restore religion to government. Others are very focused on racism, "The current Republican party is not openly racist enough for our preferences." Then there is the other strain of The New Right, which is more about hostility to the left's power across institutions in America today.

Andrew Prokop: They believe that the left controls the media, academia, and much of the federal government, the permanent executive branch, civil servants, and they view this as a deep and fundamental problem for which major actions are necessary to combat that. This is the tradition that I put J.D. Vance in as well as some of his intellectual influences.

Micah Loewinger: One of those influences, maybe one of the most prominent writers in The New Right as I understand it, is a man named Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer who started an influential very-out-there blog. He's sometimes referred to semi-ironically as a prophet of The New Right. Who is he and what exactly does he believe?

Andrew Prokop: Curtis Yarvin is from the tech world. He's a programmer who started as a pure blogger. In George W. Bush's second term, he began posting these very long essays and he laid out his worldview in which he explained why he no longer believes in democracy as a form of government and why he believes that it's very important for American democracy to be replaced with one-man rule or monarchy.

Andrew Prokop: These were very long, discursive, sometimes gleefully offensive writings, but they basically laid out the theory that the president is not really in charge of the government anymore and the voters aren't in charge of the government anymore. Who's in charge is what Yarvin called The Cathedral, which is basically the elite, academic and media institutions that he argues set the bounds of acceptable political discourse. This might sound conspiratorial, but he's saying it's not a centralized conspiracy. It's more commonality of thought and everyone acting according to their own incentives, but the effect, in his view, is that the left is in power forever.

Micah Loewinger: You at Vox meet in public radio. We don't necessarily know that we're in The Cathedral, but the idea is that we're propagandizing people to believe in the status quo and to nudge institutions to the left. Is that the idea?

Andrew Prokop: Yes. That's what he's arguing, that this is about institutions and systems and the opinions that they end up holding are in line with their peer groups and his own preferred further right opinions are far out of bounds and viewed as unacceptable in political discourse. That's The Cathedral.

Andrew Prokop: Then he also argues that the American form of government, with democracy, with voting, with separation of powers, is simply a bad form of government. What he wants instead is a government run like a corporation or simply a monarchy with one leader holding absolute power, though perhaps accountable to a board of directors of some kind. This is in line with a strain of thinking in Silicon Valley about how old institutions don't work properly and are inefficient and that they should be disrupted. This feeds into a larger tradition on the right, which is hostility to government regulation, government bureaucrats, and so on, but this is from more of a techie Silicon Valley perspective of, why don't we just wipe away the old and bring in the new?

Micah Loewinger: Peter Thiel has funded a startup helmed by Curtis Yarvin. He cited him as a major influence. Thiel has funded all kinds of projects in The New Right aimed at raising up its personalities, boosting its influence. What does he see in this movement? What does he want out of these people?

Andrew Prokop: Well, Thiel has written about his own disillusionment with democracy since 2009. I think he is also looking for alternatives, ways to disrupt the existing form of government in the US and also he himself is very hostile to the left and liberalism, but I think it's important to know that Yarvin was just kind of like an isolated weirdo who didn't really get a lot of attention or have very much influence for many years. Thiel was a fan of his early, but even then it wasn't like the whole world was hanging on his every word or anything like that.

Andrew Prokop: I think the real turn for Yarvin came during the Trump administration when a new generation of conservatives were both disillusioned with the old order and the old GOP establishment and were also looking for explanations about the rise of what they call wokeness in American society, these cultural changes that have happened, and also why the Trump administration had often seemed to be so ineffective and how Trump so often failed to get what he wanted.

Andrew Prokop: Yarvin's theory of how politics works seemed to offer answers to a lot of that. Like Jarvin says, oh, the reason Trump failed is because there's this whole big formal bureaucracy and this informal cathedral that is the true power in America, and that is stopping him from doing that. That's who's behind cancel culture and wokeness and these big changes that these young conservatives are uncomfortable with. He started to develop a lot more of a following during the Trump years.

Micah Loewinger: Thiel is often described in the press as a libertarian, and yet here he's championing Curtis Yarvin, a blogger who's advocating for a dictatorship. Wouldn't giving one man absolute power over America present a threat to somebody who believes in limited government? How does it fit together?

Andrew Prokop: There's a famous 2009 essay that Peter Thiel wrote in which he says, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Basically, that the problem is that voters, again and again, end up voting for and supporting more government intervention and therefore producing less freedom. So the best way to defend this capitalist freedom is to limit democracy.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, and do away with welfare programs and stuff that he considers to be nonsense.

Andrew Prokop: Exactly.

Micah Loewinger: Enter J.D. Vance. In September 2021, Vance appeared on Jack Murphy Live, a conservative podcast. He references Yarvin explicitly and goes on to cite some of his ideas.

J.D. Vance: There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things. One is to basically accept-

Andrew Prokop: Vance says a few things. He's trying to explain why he became a Trump supporter after initially criticizing him. He says, "I saw and realized something about the American elite and my role in the American elite that took me just a while to figure out. I was red-pilled." That's the reference that Yarvin helped popularize coming from the Matrix about how you take a pill and it helps you, the illusions disappear and suddenly you see reality.

Andrew Prokop: He says, "We are in a late Republican period," referencing the Roman Republic. "If we're going to push back against it, we're going to have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with." He says that if Trump is reelected, he wants Trump to--

J.D. Vance: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. When the courts, because you will get taken to court, and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.

Andrew Prokop: Now, I don't want to give the impression that J.D. Vance has endorsed all of Curtis Yarvin's ideas because some of them are pretty far out there. J.D. Vance is not saying we should replace democracy with a monarch, but he is influenced by Yarvin thought and he wants Trump to go a lot further than perhaps even the courts will allow in trying to dismantle what he thinks of as the deep state.

Micah Loewinger: Andrew, thank you very much.

Andrew Prokop: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox covering the 2024 election.

[MUSIC - The Who: Baba O'Riley]

Micah Loewinger: Back in 2016, Peter Thiel was a rare Trump booster among leaders in Silicon Valley, long portrayed as a left-of-center industry. That seemed to change this week when a wave of tech billionaires and venture capitalists pledged millions to Trump's campaign.

News clip: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, they're reportedly now planning significant donations to political action committees supporting the Trump campaign.

News clip: Elon Musk pledged to donate $45 million a month to a new pro-Trump Super PAC called America PAC.

Micah Loewinger: John Herrman, tech columnist at New York Magazine, says that it's not so much a sea change as a return to form. John, welcome back to the show.

John Herrman: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: As you point out in your piece, Silicon Valley boomed under the pretty lax regulatory policies of the Obama administration and maybe that friendliness with Democrats helped feed a kind of tacit belief that big tech is ultimately a liberal force, but you wrote that that narrative was, "At best a misunderstanding and at worst a successful political campaign to pull them further in the other direction." Break that down. Where did this kind of liberal tech myth come from and was there ever any truth to it?

John Herrman: It's not really a myth but a much more complicated story than the one that often gets repeated about Silicon Valley as a sort of nest of progressivism. The tech industry, as most people think of it today, multiplied in size during the Obama administration during which it was given a fairly long leash, the industry cozied up to the Obama administration, lobbied, was successful in its lobbying. There was a very obvious revolving door. Obama administration officials went into tech immediately after the administration was over. In that sense, there is a very real relationship between the parties.

John Herrman: You've also got the context of Silicon Valley's history. Now, during the Trump administration, when the tech industry was vilified as this den of progressivism and anti-Trumpism, you saw the rise of employee protests against government contracts with, for example, Ice. You also saw the beginnings of some labor organization within tech, which the industry fought back against fiercely.

John Herrman: The emphasis on those employee objections, walkouts and minor uprisings masks the fact that Silicon Valley's roots are in defense contracting. The military was among the semiconductor industry's first big clients. The first Silicon Valley startups, in other words, were working with the American military. DARPA supported the development of what would become the Internet.

John Herrman: It also more recently supported the development of the technology that would become Apple's Siri. In recent years, defense tech has become a hot sector within the industry. This has been portrayed as bold contrarianism among Silicon Valley liberals, but in fact, it's really just a return to honest engagement for an industry that's been doing this kind of thing for a very long time.

Micah Loewinger: At what point do you think that the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Democrats started to break down?

John Herrman: There's been a lot of coverage of the conversion narratives in tech. We got a lot of people saying they've been forced by the crazy left and progressives to support the Republican Party that's been more welcoming to them or whatever. They tend to express this in very personal terms, but if you zoom out just a little bit, and also if you listen to some of, I think, the more honest members of this cohort, you get a much simpler story, which is that the Biden administration has been more aggressive in regulating technology.

John Herrman: It has been at least a little more vocal about support for different tax regime that specifically takes aims at billionaires. You've also got a growing sense among, not just people in the tech industry, but among many in the country that the second Trump administration is, at this point, quite likely. You've got a very practical realignment with what they believe to be the next administration.

Micah Loewinger: As you point out in your piece this conversion narrative of, "I used to be friendly with the Democrats, but when the left went crazy, I had no choice to switch to MAGA," sounds an awful lot like what J.D. Vance has said about his about face with Donald Trump himself.

John Herrman: It's extremely familiar and sounds a lot like opportunism. If you're in an industry that's operating relatively freely, growing very quickly, everyone's making a lot of money, it might cost you a little bit socially, particularly if you live in California, to support Donald Trump. You also don't really need to, to get what you want. Now, you kind of do. If you want lower taxes, as Donald Trump has promised, if you want less crypto regulation, as he has recently hinted at after years of expressing general skepticism around crypto, you'll support Donald Trump. If you're generally less interested in regulation, you'll probably also support Donald Trump.

Micah Loewinger: J.D. Vance himself has roots in Silicon Valley. He was a venture capitalist for a hot second. His senate campaign was funded by Peter Thiel after working for him. What are the implications, do you think, of Trump picking Vance as VP, somebody who's kind of swimming in the same waters as a lot of these powerful Silicon Valley guys? What kind of signal do you think it sends?

John Herrman: The message to the openly right-leaning part of Silicon Valley is, "Here, he's one of you. This man speaks your language." He's in the same strange, insular online circles as most of these people. Now, J.D. Vance as a pick here is slightly complicated. He's very pro-crypto. He has expressed some support for the work of Lina Khan at the FTC who has taken a fairly aggressive stance on antitrust issues and enforcement, but that I think is easy to understand and explain as a way of putting pressure on incumbent big tech companies.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, he's an investor in Rumble, which is the right-wing alternative to YouTube, and so he literally has a stake in wanting to see Google get broken up into little bits.

John Herrman: Yes. It's a testament to how much things have changed around the subject of conflict of interest that this isn't really part of the conversation now, but in the narrow sense that J.D. Vance is critical of tech, you can say he's critical of the basket of companies that Donald Trump is personally mad at, and that compete with at least one of his investments. I wouldn't read too much into that stuff. I think, again, it's useful here to not get too bogged down in these unreliable personal conversion narratives. You've got one of America's biggest and most powerful industries looking for less regulation, lower taxes, a sympathetic ear. There's a lot of risk here of over-explaining what's happening. [chuckles]

Micah Loewinger: Sure, if Trump enters office in 2025, they can expect a more lenient approach to crypto and lower taxes, but corporate profits have broken records under the Biden administration. The AI hype is booming, it's supercharging Wall Street. Most CEOs have not donated to either campaign. Many still support Joe Biden. Maybe these tech guys are just more conservative than they've led on in public. Maybe they're just down with the MAGA agenda more broadly.

John Herrman: Yes. I think in some cases, that's obviously true. Marc Andreessen on a podcast explaining why he would be donating to Trump talked a lot about taxes, regulation, how he really has no choice as someone in his line of business to vote this way. Also, as I'm listening to this, I'm thinking like, "Hey, we can see your posts on X, and we've been able to see them for years. You're clearly very engaged in culture war stuff. You're very, very annoyed at the critical press, at the concept of regulation in general."

John Herrman: This is not out of character, and this is how he's talked about stuff forever. He's very pugilistic and argumentative, but again, this is pretty normal stuff. We don't tie ourselves in knots wondering why energy executives tend to support Republicans and have been happy with Donald Trump. These things basically make sense in both practical and sociological terms.

Micah Loewinger: What I hear you saying is that this MAGA tech alliance to the extent that we're seeing it, what it's really doing is showing us what's always been there.

John Herrman: If you wanted to make an optimistic VC angry in 2012, all you had to do is suggest that technology really wasn't that different from finance. The tech industry likes to feed the perception that it is exceptional in every possible way, but in many ways, it isn't. This is an industry with an elite class of people who are extremely wealthy, who care about the things that extremely wealthy people care about.

John Herrman: As tempting as it is to fall back into the exceptionalist narrative about Silicon Valley to sort of trace a complicated twisting turning path from centrist Democrat CEOs and executives and investors to surprise MAGA donors, it's just not that helpful. This is an enormous larger than ever industry, moving in a lumpy, uneven, messy way toward supporting policies and a candidate that favor the bottom line.

Micah Loewinger: John, thank you very much.

John Herrman: Thanks for having me on.

Micah Loewinger: John Herrman is a tech columnist at New York Magazine. His latest piece is titled, Why Silicon Valley Elites Are Turning MAGA.

[MUSIC - Bill Frisell: Lost, Night]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, how the GOP's presidential pick came to be not so much nominated as anointed by God.

Micah Loewinger: This is On The Media. This is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday night, Trump told the story of his miraculous brush with death, saying--

Donald Trump: There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet, in a certain way, I felt very safe because I had God on my side.

Brooke Gladstone: At the RNC, many said the same, like Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders: God Almighty intervened because America is one nation under God, and He is certainly not finished with President Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: And Senator Tim Scott--

Senator Tim Scott: If you didn't believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.

[applause]

Senator Tim Scott: Thank God Almighty.

Brooke Gladstone: According to Lauren Boebert, the shooting proves that Trump is like Jesus.

Lauren Boebert: Jesus laid down his own life. No one took his life. He laid that down for you, and for me, and history repeats itself.

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, a small group of radical charismatic Christians claim not only that God saved Trump, but that prophecy foresaw all of this and what's to come. Matthew D. Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore is no a prophet, but he could have predicted the impact. Welcome to the show, Matt.

Matthew D. Taylor: Thank you for having me, again, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: You've said that from a religious studies perspective, this could be the best outcome for Trump. The devotion that this draws to him, the sense of destiny, divine providence and protection, he's invoked that, right? He's learned the dialect.

Matthew D. Taylor: He has. In the 2016 campaign, Trump made a number of major gaffes when he was trying to speak to evangelicals. He said, "2 Corinthians" instead of "2nd Corinthians." He called communion, "That little cracker," and many observers thought that would totally alienate Trump from the evangelical Christians he was trying to reach, but over the course of the last eight or so years, he's been in more and more of their church services. He's had more and more of them prophesy directly over him, and he's begun to adopt some of their phrases, and some of their art.

Matthew D. Taylor: There's a whole world of prophecy art with images of angels or demons surrounding Trump or trying to attack him. He has begun to post some of this art himself, including during the recent trial. He reposted an image of Jesus sitting next to him at the defense table. It is one of the most effective propaganda weapons in the Trump campaign arsenal.

Brooke Gladstone: More than immigration?

Matthew D. Taylor: In terms of securing the votes of evangelical Christians, yes. Many of them are in favor of stricter immigration rules, but it's these divine attachments, this quasi-messianic attachment is fueled by these prophecies and this belief that God has over and over and over again affirmed that Donald Trump is his chosen candidate. If you believe that, then you are going to work as hard as you can to see Trump elected.

Brooke Gladstone: Remind us what it means to be a charismatic Christian.

Matthew D. Taylor: Charismatic Christians believe in miracles and in things like healing, things like speaking in tongues. They're trying to infuse modern Christianity with what they believe are these ancient ideas, and virtually, everyone in that world believes that there are modern prophets. These folks are using YouTube, Rumble, entire websites like Charisma News, that cater to charismatic Christians.

Matthew D. Taylor: Using these charismatic prophecies, there are listserves, podcasts, conferences that are all about prophecy today, to the point where you now have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people who identify as prophets in the church in America and who more or less make it their full-time job to participate in this discourse of prophecy.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that since the attempt on Trump, the charismatic prophecy world lit up like a Christmas tree.

Matthew D. Taylor: Many of these entrepreneurial prophets came forward within minutes, within hours of the assassination attempt on Trump, pointing back to their prophecies and to say, "See, I predicted this," and that is all seen as validation not only of the prophets but of this divine special purpose that God has for Donald Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, so talk about Brandon Biggs.

Matthew D. Taylor: Brandon Biggs started a YouTube prophecy channel about nine months ago, was on a recording back in March with a couple of other prophets sharing different dreams or visions that they had.

Brandon Biggs: I saw Trump rising up, and then I saw an attempt on his life. This bullet flew by his ear, and it came so close to his head that it busted his eardrum. He fell to his knees and he started worshiping the Lord. He got radically born again during this time frame.

Matthew D. Taylor: Biggs also claimed in the prophecy that Trump would win the election and then we would have a huge economic downturn on the scale of the Great Depression. Now, of course, that part is not getting much play, but the fact that he references Trump’s ear and a bullet has just skyrocketed. Brandon Biggs, he has gone from literal obscurity to being written about in Newsweek this week because of this prophecy.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, you don’t think people are actually making this stuff up. There’s sincerity here.

Matthew D. Taylor: These folks really believe that this is what is going on. Once you believe that God can speak through prophets, you’re primed to look for confirmations within what they’re saying.

Brooke Gladstone: Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes, even a false prophet is going to get it right occasionally.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, somebody you can’t call onto the carpet when they’re wrong because he’s dead is Kim Clement. You say that posthumously he’s become one of the most important prophets going.

Matthew D. Taylor: Kim Clement is a South African prophet. He died in 2016, in November 2016, right around the time of the 2016 election. In 2007, at one of these churches, he made a statement that--

Kim Clement: Trump shall become a trumpet. I will raise up the Trump to become the trumpet and Bill Gates to open up the gate of a financial realm.

Brooke Gladstone: He talks about a gatekeeper, unnamed, who would take the mantle of Ronald Reagan.

Matthew D. Taylor: This is the new Kim Clement prophecy that everyone is talking about, not new, it happened in 2005, but the newly resourced one because it was a reference to an assassination attempt.

Brooke Gladstone: Here, Clement's daughter reads the prophecy.

Donné Clement Petruska: What about the gatekeeper of this nation? What about him? He prays and took the mantle of Ronald Reagan so that this nation may experience great revival.

Matthew D. Taylor: If you read the prophecy in context, it sure sounds like it's actually about George W. Bush. It sure sounds like it's talking about the president at the time but because Kim Clement has been invested with all of this kind of Trumpy belief, many people look back to this prophecy and say, “No, this was really about Trump. Ironclad prediction of this attempted assassin." Roger Stone, the political dirty trickster, has claimed that he has found a Kim Clement prophecy that's about him. It’s a prophecy about a small stone that will kill a giant, very clearly a reference to the David and Goliath story, but Roger Stone says, “My last name is Stone, and here's a prophecy about a little stone, and it must be about me."

Brooke Gladstone: There’s a stone in my name too.

Matthew D. Taylor: Well, maybe you need to look into the catalog there, Brooke, there might even be a Brooke in there too.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump was once likened by Christian supporters to Cyrus, an imperfect vessel of God's will. He may not be godly, but God has chosen him. Has anything happened since the shooting or anything else that changed that narrative?

Matthew D. Taylor: The Cyrus prophecy is, in many ways, a rationalization of Trump's immorality, to say he doesn't have to be a virtuous Christian for God to use him. Over time, there's become more and more of a religious attachment to Trump, to the point where many Christians see him as almost a parallel to Jesus in that he suffers on their behalf.

Brooke Gladstone: He’s been playing that up whenever he left a courtroom. You’ve suggested that the assassination attempt was the principal piece of evidence that Trump is anointed. He may be persecuted, but he is always saved by God.

Matthew D. Taylor: That’s the narrative. Just objectively, if you look at what has happened in the political career of Donald Trump, he is a lucky son of a gun, at the very least. He manages to get through two impeachment trials without actually being convicted. He stokes an insurrection to try to overturn a democratic election, and his party puts him back as the nominee in the next presidential election. He has four prosecutions for felonies, a raid against him, and they all seem to fall one by one. If you are primed to believe that this is the hand of God, then every new victory of Trump confirms and vindicates that narrative.

Brooke Gladstone: How consequential are the beliefs of an influential but not enormous subset of Evangelical Christians?

Matthew D. Taylor: Evangelical Christians are a diverse group, and not all of them believe in modern-day prophecy. What we have observed over the course of the Trump presidency is that as those fringe ideas and many of these fringe leaders, like these prophets, have been on the frontlines of defending and arguing and apologizing for Donald Trump, those ideas and those theologies have also become popular.

Matthew D. Taylor: What we're experiencing right now in American Evangelical Christianity is a sort of tectonic shift. I grew up evangelical. I grew up in what we would today call a Christian nationalist circles. I did not hear this stuff growing up. I did not hear about modern prophets. I did not hear about spiritual warfare campaigns to displace high-level demons. These are the ideas that have now been drawn into the mainstream. Many of these ideas, they get more than 50% support among American evangelicals.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you have numbers?

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. A colleague of mine and I, Paul Djupe, he's a political scientist at Denison University, we ran a survey earlier this year trying to test some of these beliefs, and frankly, it was shocking. In our survey, we did a sample of American Christians, half evangelical, half not. We narrowed down seven different statements of theology that come out of this independent charismatic sector about spiritual warfare campaigns, about demons that control literal territory and human institutions. We found six out of the seven statements had more than 50% of self-identified American evangelicals agreed with those statements or strongly agreed with them.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that the overtly messianic messages promoted at the RNC or Trump rallies is unprecedented in American history.

Matthew D. Taylor: I cannot think of a single other example of such a religious fervor around a presidential candidate as what we're seeing around Donald Trump right now. There were a lot of Christians, especially Evangelical Christians, who were very excited about George W. Bush. They did not attribute to him divine anointing, they saw him as an Evangelical like them.

Matthew D. Taylor: To me, this is extremely dangerous because we fought an entire revolution to get away from the divine right of kings, and yet now we have one of our political parties and an entire religious movement that is attaching that narrative to a presidential candidate. That God wants to see Donald Trump elected, that the future of America rests upon the election of Donald Trump. The passion, the intensity that you bring into your political activism is going to be that much greater. The problem is the rhetoric in this arena is very apocalyptic. If it doesn't work, then America is over. You can hear this in Trump's rhetoric as well. He said this on January 6th, "If you don't fight, we won't have a country anymore."

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, but the country you will have if you do fight is a monarchy, essentially.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. If Donald Trump wins this election, he can turn to his followers and say, "Not I have a democratic mandate to govern, but I have a divine mandate to restructure American society," and many of these people will go along with things like Project 2025, some of these deeply authoritarian plans that are out there in the open. If Trump loses, these prophecy believers are primed to deny the results of this election and to fight to overturn it again.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew, thank you so much.

Matthew D. Taylor: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is the author of the forthcoming book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

[MUSIC - Ensemble Aeolus: Ad summam missam: Sanctus II]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Pamela Apia.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

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