We’re thrilled to have Adam Johnson, co-host of Citations Needed podcast and co-founder of Column blog, on the show to dig into what he’s calling JD Vance’s “blood libel media campaign” (and he’s right! that’s what it is!) against Haitian immigrants. How has the press handled Vance until now as a Yale-educated, heartland-loyal candidate, and how is this changing his perception? Why did it take this long?? All these questions, and more, below:

Surely some of us remember how Vance’s book Hilbilly Elegy, sweeping an embittered but resigned eye over Appalachian poverty without demanding structural redress, made him a strange favorite in liberal reading circles. Now he’s exiled himself from many of those circles with comments about Democrats drawing their votes from childless cat ladies, the anti-family leanings of prominent Democrats, and more. But the vilest, most dangerous comments he’s made (and it’s getting hard to keep track) are the stoking of fear over a racist rumor about Haitian immigrants eating pets. Since Trump hit this message hard on the debate stage somehow only a week ago, the rumor has spiraled and taken root in Republican rhetoric. Vance is repeating it, and it poses a real, extremely obvious threat to the safety of immigrants and Black people across the country.

Adam Johnson’s great new piece on Republican media strategy in the face of this latest Republican slander campaign gives us insight into what Vance adds to the far-right playbook. As he points out, Trump doubles down when he’s called out for crazy stories like this! Memed on both the left and the right for his famous, practically patented “many are saying” cadence, Trump will nod to a fictionalized audience parroting his talking points, but Trump, as Adam correctly notes, has never been one to back down from absolute delusion, even when he’s presented with the facts. However, “slick former Yale law student and liberal media darling” Vance has a different strategy: appealing to standpoint theory, which Adam explains in the piece. His “smol beans” rural-Ohio whisperer schtick, dressed up in the Yale law degree, has always been a real and dangerous weapon the Trump campaign now gets to wield. After getting his flowers for seeming to expose a world that, yes, is wrongly reviled by liberal elites, Vance is just running with the strategy he’s developed, now using that authority to speak for an entire part of the nation he claims liberals just don’t understand. Will it be enough to win Trump and Vance an election? What long-term damage will it do to actually marginalized people in this country?

It’s a serious topic, and we’re glad to have the singularly insightful Adam Johnson on to talk about it. You can listen to this episode as a podcast when it’s released tomorrow on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.