Adam Johnson of Citations Needed and Column blog is here for Episode 192, where we’re discussing his great new piece on Republican media strategy in the face of this latest Republican slander campaign. It gives us valuable 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! 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 on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Episode 192 Audio: Adam Johnson