Sure, J.D. is plugging his book, but that doesn’t mean he’s desperate enough to let me interview him. If he did, however, it would run something like this:
C: Thanks for coming. It’s been a few years since we did this.
V: It’s always good to answer questions from a global elitist. That’s the lesson I learned from Charlie Kirk. It keeps you on your toes.
C: I’m not going to ask you about Iran, since that’s an ongoing situation. Instead, I’m going to focus on the intersection between morality and politics. It’s a major theme of your book.
V: Works for me.
C: Prior to the 2016 election, you were a critic of Donald Trump. When you changed your mind about him, you said it was largely because he hated the right people. How do you reconcile that statement with your Christian beliefs?
V: Well, first of all, Trump doesn’t really hate anyone.
C: Say what? He even admitted it at Kirk’s funeral. Hating is what he does. It never stops.
V: The president has a way of communicating with people that is designed to get their attention. When he feels strongly about something or someone, he makes that clear. That doesn’t mean he really hates them, regardless of his literal language. He’s a great guy when you get to know him.
C: You can understand why people like me have trouble believing that.
V: You don’t know him as well as I do.
C: What about the part where you approve of him hating the right people? What does that say about you?
V: I don’t hate people, either. I do have a lot of trouble with some left-wing ideas. I express myself forcefully when I am confronted with them. Sometimes I go a little too far. I regret that.
C: Like when you said the Haitian residents of Springfield were eating pets? You knew that was a lie, but you repeated it anyway because it was consistent with your narrative about immigrants.
V: I didn’t know for sure it was a lie. Anyway, the narrative was important, and in a larger sense, the statement was true. The Haitians were taking housing and jobs away from real Americans. It’s just another way of damaging the culture and the country.
C: Whether you and Trump are prodigious haters or not, there are certainly plenty of noisy Republicans who are. You won’t deny that, will you?
V: Maybe. Maybe not. I can’t see into the heart of everyone who voted for Trump and me.
C: When you run for president in 2028, are you going to repudiate the views of people like Bronze Age Pervert and the Tate brothers? They’re pure pagans. Your brand of conservative Christianity is the complete antithesis of their beliefs.
V: The Republican Party is a big tent. We welcome everyone who wants to be part of it. If that means we have a debate, that’s fine.
C: In other words, you view the pagans as a valuable ally in your fight against the left? You would rather associate with them than with people who believe in Christian ethics and vote for Democrats?
V: I’m not God. I’m not the ultimate judge of people. If they want to vote for me, I welcome them into the tent.
C: But you don’t have the same level of tolerance for the left. Are you going to keep the pagans in line by telling them the left is even worse than you are, from their perspective?
V: Of course. It’s important to focus on who the enemy really is. Conservative Christians and pagans believe the same things about the feminizing of the country and the need to accommodate more male swagger. We have to unite to put an end to that state of affairs.
C: Now I’d like to talk about your government and the Godly Society.
V: That’s not a term I recognize.
C: It’s a term I invented. It refers to the belief that America would be a much better place if we had stronger families with just one wage earner–the husband. The wife would stay home and have lots of children.
V: OK, I recognize that.
C: I think you would also agree that the American economy, as it currently exists, won’t permit that to happen. Women are an essential part of the workforce, and most families couldn’t get by if they didn’t work. As a result, we can’t have the Godly Society without major changes to the economy.
V: That’s the point of our tariffs and deportations. We are trying to create a massive shortage of labor, particularly in industrial jobs that have been traditionally done by men. Wages will go up, and women will be able to go back home and take care of their kids. The rest of the labor shortage will be addressed by technological change.
C: You will admit that nothing like that has happened in the last two years, and Trump appears to be declaring a trade truce with China, which is the source of most of our trade issues.
V: It’s too early to tell. We will have trillions of dollars of new investment in manufacturing over the new few years that will push us towards the Godly Society. Not to mention AI.
C: How does AI fit into this vision?
V: AI is the goose that will lay the golden egg. We’ll be so rich, women won’t have to work anymore.
C: Exactly who will be that rich? Will it be a handful of techno-aristocrats and capitalists, or the entire country?
V: The entire country. Everyone will benefit from the improvements in productivity.
C: What about the workers who find themselves unemployed as a result of the massive changes to the economy? Are you proposing a huge increase in the size of the welfare state to deal with them? There are a lot of business owners and Republican politicians who have always opposed that kind of legislation. For his part, Trump has consistently opposed any kind of meaningful AI legislation.
V: We’ll deal with that issue if and when the time comes. For now, the important thing is to win the productivity battle with the Chinese.
C: Thank you for your time.