I’m back. Did I miss anything? As you might know, I had major back surgery two weeks ago. It seems to have gone well. But a bum spine did prevent me from attending the Republican convention, and I was in an opioid-caused daze for much of that shindig. When I came out of surgery, I apparently was in such a fog that I did not recognize my wife. But when she told me that Donald Trump had picked JD Vance to be his running mate, I roused and said, “That’s a terrible choice.” I don’t know what I had in mind, for I have no recollection of this conversation. But I do have something to say about Vance...

When JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, he lauded the people of eastern Kentucky, his family’s ancestral home. Though it’s one of the poorest regions in the United States, he said, its residents are “very hardworking” and “good” people: “They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.” He then added, “And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.”

Privileged? Who refers to the low-income families of Appalachia as privileged? Vance did not explain and moved on to talk about “American greatness.” But this sentence was something of a dog whistle and a callback to a demagogic rhetoric that Vance has been slinging for years.

During his convention speech, Vance repeated the message that has led the political press to label him a populist: The ruling elites have screwed over Middle America by pushing economic policies that benefit the well-off and harm working-class families. (His support for Donald Trump, who implemented a tax cut that heavily favored the wealthy, has not undercut his standing as a populist.) But Vance’s populism has a dark underside that has largely gone unnoticed: racism.

Vance has blended working-class resentment and white racial grievance. In various venues, he has charged that plutocrats (whom he doesn’t name) are conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they are) to silence Middle America. According to Vance, these powerful interests deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face. This is how Vance put it in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham:  

Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback from the real people.

As I noted over a year ago, this is deft demagoguery. Vance conflates legitimate concerns about economic power with racist paranoia. It’s much more sophisticated than the usual GOP playing of the race card. Instead, Vance fuses toxic culture wars to bread-and-butter issues. Look at how he weaved all this together when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, last year and sparked a chemical fire. Vance blamed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his Department of Transportation’s racial equity initiatives for the catastrophe: “I’ve got to say, the Secretary of Transportation…talking about how we have too many white male construction workers instead of the fact that our trains are crashing…This guy needs to do his job.” So the good (white) folk of East Palestine were victimized supposedly because Buttigieg was spending too much time trying to help Black people.

This is what Vance meant when he groused about the media calling his people “privileged.” It was code for “white privileged.” And he was insinuating that such labeling—a.k.a. wokeness—is used to repress these working-class Americans.

In Milwaukee, Vance did not spell out his racism-shaped populism. He hinted at it, and there’s no telling whether he’s going to be more explicit as he campaigns as Trump’s running mate. But Vance—who only a few years ago was a Never Trumper who compared Trump to Adolf Hitler and who then appeared to be positioning himself as a public intellectual with center-right politics—has demonstrated that he is willing to ally himself with the extremism that has thoroughly infected Trump’s GOP. As I reported last week, Vance recently endorsed a book co-written by an alt-right extremist (who promoted the crazy Pizzagate conspiracy theory) that contends that progressives are part of a group of “unhumans” who for centuries have been trying to destroy civilization. The book says that conservatives must not abide by the rules in countering the left and describes January 6 rioters as “patriots.”

Moreover, Vance has promoted a paranoid and Manichean view of American politics. Here’s what he said at a conservative conference in 2021:

We have lost every single major cultural institution in this country—Big Finance, Big Tech, Wall Street, the biggest corporations, the universities, the media, and the government. There is not a single institution in this country that conservatives currently control. But there’s one of them, just one that we might have a chance of actually controlling in the future, and that’s the constitutional republic that our founders gave us. We are never going to take Facebook, Amazon, Apple and turn them into conservative institutions. We are never going take the universities and turn them into conservative institutions…We might just be able to control the democratic institutions in this country…This is a raw fact of cynical politics. If we’re not willing to use the power given to us in the American constitutional republic, we’re going to lose this country.

In his convention speech, Vance praised Trump’s call for national unity. But that was camouflage. He is not aiming for unity. He has enthusiastically adopted the stance of a far-right culture warrior and has shown he’s willing to exploit racism to advance his form of populism.

Vance got into hot water a few days ago when a video emerged of him referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as one of a group of “childless cat ladies.” And Democrats have taken to calling him and Trump “weird” to cast the Republican ticket as outside the norms of American life. I’m not sure that label will stick and hurt Trump and Vance. But it’s clear that Vance deserves to be tagged as extreme. Throughout his short political career, he has been a chameleon, changing his colors to match his ambitions—that includes aligning with radical conservatives. This offers Democrats much material to show voters that Vance is not a champion of the heartland but a friend of the fringe right.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

Problemista. In Problemista, a young Salvadoran immigrant named Alejandro living in New York City has a dream: to become a toy designer for Hasbro. But he doesn’t want to be an ordinary toy designer. His ideas include a Slinky that doesn’t slink down the stairs. Why? Because children need to learn that not everything goes as planned. The same reasoning underlies his proposed toy truck with a flat tire. He also wants Cabbage Patch Dolls to have smartphones with disturbing text messages. This running gag in the film, written and directed by Julio Torres, who also stars as Alejandro, sets the surrealist tone for this absurdist comedy about Alejandro’s effort to remain a legal resident of the United States after he loses his job at a cryogenics firm that freezes people with life-threatening diseases without knowing whether a future thawing will work.

Torres, a Salvadoran immigrant himself and a former writer for Saturday Night Live, draws from his own life to cast a light on the crazy immigration system. After being fired, Alejandro has 30 days to find a new sponsor, but he’s not allowed to work for pay in this period, and, thus, cannot retain the lawyer he needs to navigate the Escher-esque process. Fortunately, he hooks up with the wild and nutty Elizabeth, whose husband’s frozen body Alejandro had overseen. Elizabeth, played to extremes by Tilda Swinton, wants to put on an exhibit celebrating her cryo’ed hubby’s artwork—he painted pictures of eggs—and she agrees to sponsor Alejandro if he helps her.

Alejandro is caught between Elizabeth’s wackiness and the aggravating immigration bureaucracy. Dealing with both requires the skills of a diplomat and conniver. Torres deftly turns Alejandro’s travails into delightful episodes, as Alejandro copes with the challenges posed by Elizabeth and the government. It’s a cracked American Dream story, with our protagonist ensnared in not one but two mazes. There’s not a lot of preaching in Problemista. But the film addresses the immigration debate in a simple manner: Alejandro is a good guy who just wants to stay in the United States and play a productive role. He deserves a shot—and the toy industry can certainly use a fellow who wants to design a version of Barbie with her fingers crossed behind her. (Because sometimes even Barbie can’t be trusted.) With this film, Torres, a hot commodity in showbiz right now, shows off a large toolbox of talent and reminds us how immigrants can appreciate the benefits of American citizenship more than its native-born citizens.

Bodkin. I soured on true-crime shows a while ago. Of course, I listened to the first season of Serial (and was disappointed the show didn’t resolve the questions that remained in the case of the murder of high school student Hae Min Lee). I was intrigued by I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the HBO series that chronicled amateur sleuth Michelle McNamara’s pursuit of the Golden State Killer. And there were a few other true-crime tales that caught my fancy. But eventually I came to feel this popular and profitable genre had become creepy and exploitative—a notion explored for laughs in Hulu’s excellent dram-com Only Murders in the Building. I was glad to have my bias confirmed by Bodkin, a black comedy thriller Netflix released in May.

In this seven-episode series, successful American podcaster Gilbert Power (Will Forte) travels to a quaint, small, and fictitious town in Ireland called Bodkin to investigate an infamous cold case: 25 years earlier three residents disappeared during a celebration for Samhain, the Gaelic festival held on November 1 to mark the end of the harvest season and the coming of winter. He teams up with Dove Maloney (Siobhán Cullen), a cynical investigative reporter for the Guardian who’s in deep trouble because a source who helped her write a blockbuster story about a data breach at the National Health Service has killed himself. Along for the ride as well is a young researcher named Emmy Sizergh (Robyn Cara).

At first it seems like this show is mostly going to be about the hapless American interacting with the quirky inhabitants of Bodkin. Think Local Hero. But…no. There are some rather dark and well-hidden secrets in this town. So much so that Maloney, who at first scoffed at this assignment, gets revved up about the possibility of exposing a notorious smuggler who went missing years ago. And as the trio excavate the past, the show deftly shifts between ha-ha amusement and suspenseful mysteries. Everything is wonderfully knit together by creator Jez Scharf. Moreover, Bodkin pokes at the clichés of true-crime podcasts and highlights the dilemmas of the genre. Power confronts one ethical conundrum after another, as he forges friendships with his subjects—or targets. And in the end, he ponders whether he’s taking advantage of folks and wonders just how important it is to tell a story that could cause harm to these people. He questions the whole notion of digging in the muck just to titillate an audience. And you might too.