{"id":1364,"date":"2026-07-16T21:43:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T21:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1364"},"modified":"2026-07-16T21:43:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T21:43:54","slug":"j-d-vance-wants-someone-to-find-out-what-the-government-is-doing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1364","title":{"rendered":"J. D. Vance Wants Someone to Find Out What the Government Is Doing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Well, thank you very<\/i> much,<\/span> J. D. Vance. Because of the vice president\u2019s appearance on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast this week, I found myself googling photos of Joe Biden licking an ice-cream cone to pass judgment on whether, as Vance claimed, they look \u201csuggestive.\u201d I will save my final ruling for the end of this article, to keep you in suspense.<\/p>\n

Read more The Lessons About Ebola the U.S. Wants to Forget<\/a><\/p>\n

Watching Vance\u2019s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss\u2019s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither. And that\u2019s before we get to the awkwardness of knowing that Vance\u2014a Yale Law School graduate\u2014has voluntarily lobotomized himself in the pursuit of power and attention. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his dignity to be Donald Trump\u2019s lackey.<\/p>\n

Vance was allegedly on The Joe Rogan Experience<\/i> to promote his second memoir, Communion<\/i>, which I haven\u2019t read. (He fooled me once by presenting Hillbilly Elegy <\/i>as the sincere output of a thoughtful writer, and I won\u2019t be fooled again.) Luckily, that doesn\u2019t matter, because the two men spent most of their time on weightier matters, such as alien abductions and which foodstuffs risk making you look gay. When Jesse Watters of Fox did the latter bit a few years ago, his suggestions were at least excitingly left-field\u2014soup, plus anything drunk through a straw\u2014but Vance and Rogan just went with the obvious corn dogs and bananas. \u201cAnything that looks like a dick,\u201d Rogan helpfully explained.<\/p>\n

Vance then spent a lot of time defending his negotiations to end the war with Iran\u2014which, as you might have noticed, have not turned out particularly well. The people criticizing his efforts, he said, want America \u201cto bomb and bomb and bomb. And the honest view, Joe, is that they do not actually have a solution.\u201d He added: \u201cThey\u2019ll say things like, \u2018Well, just bomb them to oblivion.\u2019\u201d Madness! Who are these idiots? Vance blamed Mike Pence, his very own Ghost of Christmas Past, but inexplicably failed to mention President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who began the war by promising to bomb Iran \u201cback to the Stone Age.\u201d Perhaps Vance\u2019s amnesia is political genius: He simply picks his favorite of the nine conflicting opinions that Trump has expressed on any given subject, and enthusiastically agrees with it.<\/p>\n

The Iran discussion was one of several stretches in which Vance, who sits near the top of the government of the world\u2019s most powerful country, affected the demeanor of a guy spitballing at the bar: Someone should really look into this. <\/i>\u201cYou know, I will go to my deathbed believing there\u2019s a story there, but I can\u2019t prove it,\u201d he told Rogan about the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation. He also suggested that Epstein had caused wokeness in academia. Really. \u201cHe was funding a ton of scientists, but like when he died it\u2019s almost like the era of censorship started to break,\u201d he observed. Yes, as if Epstein\u2019s pedophilia were not horrifying enough, Vance seemed to hold him responsible for land acknowledgments.<\/p>\n

The other explanation<\/span> for this hey-I-wonder<\/i> approach is that Vance is dealing with the cognitive dissonance between his own self-image as a smart guy and the constant requirement to defend dumb and inconsistent actions by hallucinating that he is not really part of this administration, but instead a mere interested bystander. Vance treats the vice presidency the way that Instagram influencers approach a vacation in the Maldives: It only truly exists when converted into content. In one telling exchange, Vance said that he felt like he had \u201cmade it\u201d when he was satirized on South Park<\/i>, rather than at his inauguration.<\/p>\n

Rogan was, by his usual collegiate standards, pretty tough on Vance over U.S. support for Israel, probing whether Trump would have gone to war in Iran without Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s lobbying. But then the podcaster swerved into suggesting Trump had been blackmailed over the Epstein files, a connection that made no sense until he asked whether Jeffrey Epstein was a CIA or Mossad agent. In the interview\u2019s most viral moment, Vance joined Rogan in a kind of shrugging speculation, suggesting that the disgraced financier \u201cclearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.\u201d Vance had asked for any relevant documents and came up with nothing, he said, \u201cbut if that shit existed, it wouldn\u2019t exist in 2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more What Ancient Greek Is Good For<\/a><\/p>\n

Vance played the same card when talking about the possibility of a vast alien conspiracy, one of Rogan\u2019s animating obsessions: \u201cI\u2019ve said that I\u2019m going to, like, I\u2019m going to look into the UFO thing,\u201d the vice president said, \u201cand I\u2019ve been saying for a year and a half, and I haven\u2019t done it yet because I haven\u2019t had the time.\u201d Sir, you had time to fill in as host of Charlie Kirk\u2019s podcast after he died. You can take five minutes to send Kash Patel a memo with the words: Roswell fake Y\/N?<\/span><\/p>\n

Vance often feigns ignorance<\/span> for strategic reasons, because the pose gets him out of all kinds of trouble. He pretended not to understand what he called the \u201coverreaction\u201d to the fighter Josh Hokit taking the mic at the White House UFC event to shout that Michelle Obama was a man. Vance left it to Rogan to explain that it might be bad form to visit the official residence of every president since John Adams and make baseless insinuations about a former first lady for attention. \u201cIf he said Michelle Obama\u2019s a man at the T-Mobile Arena in Vegas, it\u2019s like, okay, less of a story,\u201d said Rogan, adding: \u201cNot the best thing to say at the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vance took a similar wide-eyed approach with his criticisms of California Governor Gavin Newsom, whom he disdained as a populist, before suddenly remembering that Republicans now like that word. \u201cThere\u2019s a real populism that I\u2019m very much a fan of because I think you should be responsive to people,\u201d he said, recovering, \u201cbut there\u2019s like a faux populism of: The way that I\u2019m going to appeal to people is by assuming that they\u2019re idiots and acting like they\u2019re idiots.<\/em>\u201d Again, Mr. Vice President, are you aware that you are saying these things out loud?<\/p>\n

Two hours in, Vance and Rogan began to talk about whether there\u2019s \u201ca meaningful difference between an angel or a demon and a space alien with super technology.\u201d Rogan suggested that his guest should hurry up with Iran-war negotiations and get on with the real business of the government, such as finding out whether the government is secretly hoarding extraterrestrial corpses. \u201cI\u2019m skeptical that it\u2019s true that we have the physical remains,\u201d Vance said, before promising that he would take a photograph of them if he found them. Show it to the \u201cladies of The View<\/i>,\u201d suggested Rogan\u2014\u201cthe intellectual leaders of our world.\u201d The ABC show\u2019s hosts may look like philistines to Rogan, but when Vance appeared on their show last month, they asked him tough questions about deaths in ICE custody, not Area 51.<\/p>\n

The final half hour of Rogan\u2019s interview dealt with Vance\u2019s book, his surprising support of labor unions, and the effect of immigration on wages. But I know what you\u2019re thinking: Joe Biden. A waffle cone. Maybe some rainbow sprinkles. Could that really be as unbearably erotic as J. D. Vance made out? The answer is no. As is the answer to the question, \u201cDoes J. D. Vance have the capacity to feel shame?\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Nobody Is Getting the Data-Center Water Question Right<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The vice president has been replaced with a guy who\u2019s just asking questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nJ. D. Vance Wants Someone to Find Out What the Government Is Doing - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1364\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"J. D. 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