Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Episode 41: The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word with Nathan Evans Fox, Part 1
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski, host of Antifascist Dad podcast with episode number 41, The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word with Nathan Evans Fox. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as AntifascistDad and the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. And today it's the second part of my interview with Nathan because we went a little bit long in our discussion of JD Vance's blog boy Catholicism, now memorialized in his memoir Communion, and how he both distorts and weaponizes Appalachian history and American Christianity. Remember, if you can't afford to support the show, those Patreon episodes all eventually get unlocked.
And also, as always, I would ask you to take a look at the link for my book called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. That link is in the show notes along with everything else you need to more fully dive into the stuff that we get into in this episode.
Before I get to my interview with return guest and friend Nathan Evans Fox and his rich analysis of JD Vance, I do have one news update and reflection for you, which is that this past Thursday, Marco Rubio convened a ministerial on the resurgence of political terrorism at the State Department based on the false premise that political violence is rising on the left.
In attendance were representatives from around 65 countries, including peacemaking Canada, where I live. Cash Patel was there, Stephen Miller was there. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar was there to cheerlead.
Now there are many, many studies that expose the lie at the heart of this conference. Not that they care. New America's Terrorism in America After 9/11 is an ongoing tracker of post-9/11 domestic terrorism deaths and it found that far-left violence killed one person since 2001 versus 137 victims of far-right terrorism and 121 victims of jihadist extremism. Here in Canada, the CSIS report called Left Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States analyzed 750 attacks or plots between 1994 and 2025. Right-wing incidents made up 57% of the incidents versus 25% being of the left wing, and they found 112 right-wing linked deaths over the past decade versus 13 deaths linked to leftist political violence. That's a factor of 9 to 1.
Now even the ultra-Zionist ADL isn't that afraid of the left with their Murder and Extremism in the United States study, which tracks extremist-related murders since 1970. Over the last decade the ADL found that right-wing extremism was the cause of 75% of such killings versus 4% attributed to left-wing actors. And between 2022 and 2024 there were zero left-wing attributed murders, with all extremist killings traced to right-wing perpetrators.
Now of course there are right-wing critics of these studies who say that they undercount left-wing violence. And predictably their complaint is based on the equivalence of private property with human life. They say that the studies focus too narrowly on deaths and injuries while excluding property destruction and economic sabotage, arson, vandalism, riot-related burning and looting, attacks on Tesla dealerships, ICE facilities and businesses during unrest in 2020.
Now all of the property damage, they say, is disproportionately left-coded and deliberately excluded from data sets like Cato's murder-only count and CSIS's protest-excluding method. They contend that this creates an apples-to-oranges comparison: that right-wing violence trends toward direct lethality while left-wing violence trends toward property-targeted economic sabotage. So a death-count comparison systematically favors whichever side's violence happens to be less lethal but potentially more frequent or costly in property terms. I don't think that's a great argument, by the way. I don't think it's saying what they want it to say. So yes, they are whining that there's too much attention paid to death.
And I'd argue that the studies don't pay enough attention to death, namely they exclude state violence. So when the time comes, these models won't even look at murders by ICE, which are incidents of right-wing political murder.
What Rubio and Miller are up to is a common fascist tactic for consolidating power. In February of 1933, the Nazis blamed a lone-wolf Dutch ex-communist for the Reichstag arson and then suspended civil liberties and mass-arrested Communist Party members. This led to the Enabling Act in March, which granted Hitler dictatorial power over parliament. And Mussolini pretty much got up to the same thing.
Now this has echoed through the generations. The Greek colonels' coup in 1967 over an imminent Communist conspiracy suspended the constitution, jailed, exiled or tortured thousands of leftists and trade unionists. Pinochet's junta in 1973 falsely claimed that Allende harbored a Marxist plot to assassinate military leaders. And it goes on from there.
So that's the political landscape. But this podcast, as you know, is also about what happens at home and between the generations, between parents and caregivers and young people and how the general zeitgeist of rising fascism impacts these lives. So I want to say a word on that.
Because fascism is not just about suppressing political opposition to capitalism. It's also about disciplining children who would otherwise know that the world they are growing into is unjust. The cohort of men leading this charge, I'm going to argue, loathe your children because they cannot control their thoughts, their difference, their appearance. And to make that clear, let's listen to Stephen Miller addressing this international gathering of diplomats.
Stephen Miller: The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with the perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy. And they covet and they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress and to inflict pain and suffering.
Matthew Remski: So let's just pause here to say that for all of the talk about family and children, these are men who do not want children. They want dolls modeled after themselves, reflecting back to them their own compliance, validating their anxieties, and never having thoughts that test the boundaries of authority or identity.
Stephen Miller: It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who were assembled. To be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They're all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that? Why? You look at two photographs and you see a normal American street, you see an antifa protest. Why do the people that are violently demonstrating — why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.
Matthew Remski: Now, all of this talk about appearances is actually about thought crime, because the Thursday conference was basically the operational output of a memo put out by the Trump administration back in September called Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. In that memo, NSPM 7, the administration listed a series of undefined and unfalsifiable thought crimes associated with antifascism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.
Now, let's be clear that he's talking here about young people primarily, if he's talking about the protests of the last two years or those that they're really cracking down on. And he's doing a kind of Nazi physiognomy on appearances. Like if they could have included piercings and hair dye and nonbinary clothing in NSPM 7, they would have, as signs of ideological impurity and thought crime. Also, to use the word disfigured here — it points to the eugenics themes that run throughout this regime.
So I think that as we careen into a fully post-democratic world in which all protest, especially the protest against a genocide that murders children, is criminalized, the question for parents and caregivers becomes: how will children who are not dolls learn about having their own thoughts, let alone about the history of antifascism? How will they learn about standing up for themselves and each other as the arrests increase and the trials continue to return decades-long sentences for possession of things like magazines?
The visible and audible world of grown-up antifascism online and in the street will probably go more quiet. And that means that your kids will be seeing and learning a lot less about resistance from the world outside your home.
I think the opportunity in this malicious condition is to deepen all of the relationships that Stephen Miller would love to control and can't really even fathom. If your online or street activism becomes a vulnerability, that might mean that an offline doorway has been opened. The mealtime conversation, the book discussion, the daily news review, anything that keeps the flame you know you have alive and hidden from the state. Fascists exist in a spiral of aggressive panic because ultimately they know they can't kill everyone nor change who we truly are.
Matthew Remski: So speaking of who we truly are, I'm really happy to invite back to the show Nathan Evans Fox: country musician, seminary graduate, board-certified hospital chaplain, and actual Appalachian, to get his read on JD Vance's new memoir called Communion. We just heard a song called Landlord Bill Lee, et cetera, and it's off of his brand new record called Heirloom. And I think if we think of Stephen Millers and the JD Vances of the world as landlords, the I'm Wishing You a Hard Life chorus fits.
I read JD Vance's memoir last month and my take was that it is a calculated rebranding operation, a kind of second memoir attempt that plays the same narcissistic trick as Hillbilly Elegy by converting just one guy's contingent, patronage-based trajectory into a diagnosis for the entire culture that wasn't so lucky. Hillbilly Elegy launders structural poverty as a kind of cultural pathology. And now we have Communion, which launders his political repositioning within American Christianities as a kind of spiritual conversion. And in that wash a lot of color gets erased: the history of Appalachian labor militancy in the Elegy, and then the racist origins of the Christian right in Communion.
Vance also winds through all of the newly fractured MAGA Christian constituencies with this kind of pastoral, therapeutic register that's vague enough to appeal to everyone while committing to no one. And he finally settles on Catholicism, which functions as a kind of respectable cover for fascism.
But that's all theory on my part. So I texted Nathan and I said, I think you know this terrain in the flesh, and I think you should review this book. I think you're the anti-Vance. And he reluctantly agreed and he wrote it all out in a Substack post that I'll link to. But just to give a sense of his depth and wit, here are some of my favorite quotes.
Quote: Contesting JD's theology, the ideas that articulate his Christian belonging, is like arguing about the garish paint color in a shoddily built house in a poorly planned neighborhood in a devastated ecosystem.
Quote: Where JD presents his faith journey as a testimony, I see the insatiable hunger of a man possessed by the logic of accumulation. When accumulating prestige could not sate him, JD turned to money, and when wealth could not satisfy either, he turned to virtue. Each step offered something more abstract, more nuanced, and less obvious in its emptiness. The real revelation of Communion is not the supremacy of Catholic virtue, but how deeply the parasite of American power has eaten into this man's vital spiritual organs. Communion is not a salvation story. It's a case study in addiction and neurosis. The story of JD's coming to faith is the morality tale of a man born in an ivy patch who places faith in the soothing power of the fingernail that scratches the itch but spreads the poison.
And finally, quote: After years as a hospital chaplain helping people sort through the functions and dysfunctions of their cultural scripts, I've learned that all religions help you cope with something. The question is not if your religion is helping you cope, but what it is helping you cope with. And the coping in Communion's theology is the palliation of a man who believes power and privilege should be comforting, but only finds it riddled with imperial anxiety.
So here's the first half of my conversation with Nathan Evans Fox. Nathan, welcome back to Antifascist Dad.
Nathan Evans Fox: It's good to be back. I'm always glad to talk with you.
Matthew Remski: Just to catch up a little bit. I think that Noah was on the way when we first spoke, so how old is he now?
Nathan Evans Fox: He is six months, almost seven months. I now have a three-year-old as well. Let me tell you, the shift from two to three is big. The shift from zero to six months is big.
Matthew Remski: Well, I hope you're getting some sleep. I know you're doing lots of work and gigs and stuff like that. I know too that I think your partner was away for a bit and the toddler had to readjust and try you on as the primary person for a bit. And that was a shift. It's very busy.
Nathan Evans Fox: Well, it's always shifting. We've had so much change in our family life, in our work life. Touring's going better than ever for me with music this year, which is great, but it also means that I am really available or really not. And so it's a lot to try to find a system that works for the family. Because the moment that you get a routine, I'm gone, or my wife's gone for her work. And you're explaining to a toddler, just press pause on your feelings for a little bit. I know this is your first time ever having them, so it's a lot to figure out.
Matthew Remski: And then we have JD Vance publishing a memoir. And then you have to tackle that because I send you a text and I say, hey, you have to do this. And so that messes everything up.
Nathan Evans Fox: I am not mad at you. But it sucked. I had therapy the week that I was reading this book, and I was like, hey, look, I need you to know I'm in a foul mood and it's because I feel like I've had a demon trying to crawl into my body. And I'm pretty good at reading things that are full of horrors. I'm not new to this world. I know how to process things in a way that is empathic and connected and also can keep it moving. But this one just flew all over me. And part of that is he's just like the multiverse. He's one click over from me. And so there's this real — oh — it was all over me. It was like trying to get pulled into a different timeline.
Matthew Remski: Let's go right to that, because I'm aiming to title this episode The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word. When I texted you, I said, I don't know anyone more qualified to understand the depravity of this memoir from the inside than you are. So let's just unpack that a bit. I think I was right.
Nathan Evans Fox: Yeah. Should I just give my resume on why, so people know that it's for real? Well, first of all, and most importantly, I'm actually from Appalachia, unlike JD, who wants to claim a little bit of Appalachian heritage. Where we do have some overlap, though, even on that, is I now live in Nashville, which is not Appalachia. My hometown was wrecked. It's very cute to go back now. But my hometown was run through by the recession. We lost so many jobs and the ways that the state government in North Carolina was going and all that, there weren't many places for people to turn, so I had to leave home. There was no chance of me going home when my mom died. I grew up on family land. My family had to sell that land because the access to medical care where we were was, frankly, not great. And there was no way for me to come back and take over the family land. So we share that sense of being outcast, which I think actually is an unusually big part of where JD's story is. But there's that. I also — I'm a country musician, so I understand the creative task of telling a story. I understand the task of even having a kind of leadership. I understand what it means to get people together and use your story to try to sell people a compelling political vision.
I also — and I really don't like to talk about this because it gets really squirrely really quick and people get a lot of misconceptions about it, and it was also a different phase of my life — but I have a Master's of Divinity. I've been to seminary for the full three years. I was trained as a hospital chaplain. I was a board-certified hospital chaplain, which takes years and years of extra training and extra work. I've worked with folks from all kinds of religious and non-religious backgrounds on the ways that their cultural scripts, their norms, their religious languages, whatever matters to them, impact their coping with loss and trauma and illness. So in all of this I really culturally — and there's other just random connections I have to him that just kept popping up throughout the book. So yeah, you call me the anti-Vance — it hurts a little bit, but it's true.
Matthew Remski: One of the things that you hint at, especially while you accuse him of this self-serving duplicity in cosplaying Appalachian identity, is that you're personally aware of how that can go, how people do that and how they wind up doing that. So you're at a show and you have this line where you say JD Vance could have turned out to be me. And is part of what you're getting at that you could have turned out to be him with a different turn of the screw?
Nathan Evans Fox: I want to be very clear. I could have never turned out to be that demon. And I also want to say — part of the level of bullshit that I just refuse to buy about him is the ways that he just acts like he's an everyman. Like no — he's not actually from Appalachia. And that extra generation or two away from being from Appalachia — which we could get into, like what all that could even mean, and the ways that Appalachia is so complicated in the ways that it sits in the North American and American imagination, the ways that it's used to be the Eden of white suffering, and then we don't have to think about Black and indigenous folks — there's so much about the way that Appalachia gets bandied about. Setting all that aside, even that generation difference of being removed from that, that's a significant shift in power and access to capital and all of that. So even the way that he narrates himself in that line, there's a kind of glibness and a disingenuousness to it that means he's either selling you bullshit or he's not taking stock of what he's actually got available to him.
So there's that. But at my shows I say he should have been me. It's not just that he could have been me. I say he should have been me. There's something that I find, frankly, very — I have a lot of disgust for JD Vance. That is the word on the feelings wheel. I feel a lot of disgust for him because part of being where we're from is that all of us knew better than that. That's not to say that we're all commies. I am, by a long shot. But at best, you become a cop, dude. At best, you become a bootlicker. At best, you maybe run for state senate, and I for sure have a lot of enmity with you. But you don't go and cozy up to Peter Thiel, and you certainly don't go be vice president, sopping up all of the horrors of the Trump administration. And even more than that — dude, I don't think you have a sense of pride. And pride is one of the things that has been instilled in us, which is that you're just going to go and let somebody trot you out? You're just going to be a dog and pony show for people who don't care about where you say you're from? It's like, he should have been me or even five clicks away from me, but he's about a thousand away.
Matthew Remski: It's so interesting that you invoke pride — that somehow if he were to have it, that he would — I mean, what's the step between, at worst you become a cop or you go to the state senate. What's the step between that and Peter Thiel? Is it that the guy who becomes a cop, at least he's staying at home, at least he's maintaining some sort of connection with his people, even if it's adversarial, even if it's authoritarian, even if he's licking the boot?
Nathan Evans Fox: Yeah, I think so. At least he's not too big for his britches. That's the colloquialism that gets passed around a lot, but I think it holds a lot of water. I think of JD Vance as someone who has actively betrayed the culture that he says that he's from. Whereas a cop is a possible permutation that's certainly not helpful to the future of it. But they are in the community. You can get there. You can be a good egg at the beginning and end up just being swept up into a system through propaganda and through being initiated into the fraternity of locker room cop culture. And you can end up just being a person who perpetuates awful things in society. But you do it because you started at the root, being a member of your community, or just needing a job that takes a couple of weeks of training. I know people that have become cops from back home, and I definitely don't agree with the choice at all. But I don't think they're horrible people — at least they weren't at the beginning.
I don't want to fully psychologize JD, frankly, because I don't think he's worth it, and I don't think even he could give an accurate report of where he's at. But I do want to say, insofar as people have decided that JD Vance speaks for me, I want people to know that he's a traitor. He is someone who isn't just wrong. He is evil. He's an evil influence for hillbillies and for hillbilly culture. I mean, you can't sidle up to Peter Thiel and the ways that he's a part of this big tech movement right now, and then act like you care about hillbillies when they're bowling over everybody's hollers to put data centers in. He's actively a traitor. And I think that's the thing I want people to know.
Matthew Remski: Well, I'm going to come back to the evil part in the end because you end this incredible review with a kind of a curse, right? Or perhaps it's an exorcism. But maybe the test really is that — speaking of cops — the cop probably doesn't make everybody uncomfortable when they go to the donut shop, but JD Vance manages to do that, right? Like, you can still go to the donut shop and not make everybody feel like they want to crawl out of their skin because they don't know why you're there. And you don't either.
Nathan Evans Fox: Yeah. And the thing is, I don't normally rag on people like this because I'm pretty capacious. My general rule is you're allowed to be as annoying as you want. You're just not allowed to be harmful. I don't care if you're annoying. I don't prefer it. But you're allowed to be weird, you're allowed to be a little bit of a loser, whatever. Just don't hurt people. You'll find your people, I'll find my people, we'll go our separate ways, and no one's going to try to make anybody's life harder just because we're not a good fit personality-wise.
I think part of the reason that JD Vance being so off-putting is important is because of the ways that he has been wrapped up in this propaganda machine and the ways that he has tried to self-style and message himself to get more power. He is trying to present himself as an everyman. He's in this cadre of people like Pete Hegseth who are doing all of these push-ups with the troops and they're nothing more than a glorified youth pastor doing programming for the American military. But these people are trying to present themselves as very cool, and they really are not. And I hate it because the Democrats — I don't love the Democrats, okay, but I'm getting really worked up here — the Democrats did try to really message us: these are weirdos. And they were right. Like broken clocks. The Democrats were right to say they are weirdos. JD Vance is not a likable person. He's actually pretty pathetic and he's pretty pitiable, which would be fine except he's chosen to not just be a loser. He should have been an anime kid. He should have been somebody who was a realtor back home. He could have been anything. And instead he decided to lie about who he is, cut against the cut of his grain. And it's cost thousands of people their lives. Literally. Not to mention the ways that it's compromised the future.
Matthew Remski: We probably both have some kind of reticence around the ad hominem format. But I think the point that you're making is that if you are selling your persona, if you're selling yourself as a person, as a man, then that has to be evaluated. That's the primary value proposition. And it's like, okay, well, what's actually there?
Nathan Evans Fox: Yeah. JD chose to be evaluated for his vibes, and they suck.
Matthew Remski: So I've been writing for a very long time, and when I went through this review, I just felt like it was really a work of art. I told you this by voice message. And I think it's one of those things that sort of comes around just every once in a while for a writer because they're really matched to the task. You pack so much into it that I'm not going to be able to do it justice just in our interview. But I can share my own points of assessment and where they come together with yours first. And then I want to talk about where you take it to a totally different planet that is new to me, but it feels familiar as well. And the first point of overlap is that I think we both see Communion, as a sequel to Hillbilly Elegy, as a memoir that's dressed up as a national diagnosis. And you go further, though, and you see this autobiography as a form of apologetics. But this is a theological term that I have a little bit of a grasp on. What is it a form of apologetics for?
Nathan Evans Fox: Apologetics are when you already have a kind of preconceived conclusion instead of principles that you are fully committed to, and all of your intellectual work is to try to justify and undergird those conclusions. So you're finding ways of using what should be open thought, open consideration, open discourse, to funnel people towards something that you're like a supremacist about. Really it's a kind of polemical work. It's there as a rhetorical strategy. It's not there as a kind of open-ended intellectual task where the premises end up leading to the conclusion rather than the conclusion being put before the premises. You put the cart before the horse and then whatever.
So one thing is that this is really a book about Catholicism. And I also want to say this very plainly: I had a Catholic wedding. So this is another touch point. I had a Catholic wedding. I'm not Catholic. I married a Catholic. Yes. I married a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. For years and years we were going to every mass and every feast day. I've been to more masses than most. I know the Catholic world, not as well as a priest, but pretty damn well.
When I say Catholicism and I'm talking about JD Vance, I'm not talking about your mom-and-pop parish. I'm talking about specific movements that he's a part of. And I don't want people to feel like this is representing all of the Catholic world. This is representing the little camp that he's in. This book is really a way of selling people on the supremacy and the superiority of his camp of Catholicism and the family of religious traditions that are around it. And they're primarily right-wing religious traditions. A lot of them are evangelical. I would be curious if there's also a link with Hindu nationalism and other right-wing non-Christian traditions.
Matthew Remski: I mean, I have looked a little bit into the sort of public profile and statements of Usha Vance and her connections, and there isn't really anything concrete. There's that meeting in India with Modi and the retinue and so on, but nothing well-formed. And he doesn't, as we can tell from the memoir, take any interest in Hinduism at all.
Nathan Evans Fox: No, he interestingly completely skirts it, which I find fascinating. But yeah, so this is a work of apologetics in the sense that if you've read Mere Christianity, which is probably the most famous work of apologetics, it's CS Lewis making a couple of intellectual arguments about why you should be a Christian, why you should believe that Jesus is the Christ. But like mainline Protestants, CS Lewis — being intellectual was like the point of a good church meeting: to get a very intellectually rigorous and productive sermon. Like that was the kind of main avenue to get you into faith.
For Catholicism, especially for JD Vance's version, virtue is really important. And so you have to tell the story of your life. You have to tell the story of the people that you belong to. Because virtue doesn't happen in the intellect. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a lived thing. It's something that happens in autobiography. It's something that happens in the story of your community, because it's about how you belong to other people, how you build character in relationship to other people, how you go through struggle and work through reconciliation.
The thing that I really want people to understand about this is that the testimony is really the biggest evangelical sacrament. The testimony being a narrative that you share publicly that has been dramatized to fit a kind of Christian arc of Eden, struggle, wandering, reconciliation. You can see this arc repeated in the ways that people will tell an addiction story or a coming-to-faith story. And this is something that is deeply ingrained in American culture because of the ways that this narrative form has been secularized into American culture, which is just so indebted to Protestantism.
So it's interesting to me — one of the tells that JD is not dyed-in-the-wool Catholic is that the way that he even does his apologetics is leading to Catholic conclusions, like a Catholic destination, via a completely American Protestant pathway. So this, as a literary form, tells on him quite deeply.
But the other thing is that I mostly think about country music. And so thinking through the lens of where country music has been in the last 20 years — we had the era of bro country, which was really about sending people off in the Bush era to go fight wars. And right now, we're experiencing this nativist era of come home, build attachments, share some vulnerability. Music and culture don't have to be this thing that gets you amped up for war and deadens your empathy. It's something that connects you to people, but it does it in a way that makes you feel like you're the true inheritor of the American homeland. It's the Yellowstone of it all. The Duttons are the ones who really belong to America.
And so in this world where to be an American man in this era is to be someone who has social attachments, who has an interesting story, a story that's more compelling than other stories on the American continent, autobiography takes on more than just the story of virtue. This is also the story of a politician who is trying to say that he has found his way to the heart of the American home. He belongs here most and belongs here more than others.
Matthew Remski: It's a huge journey that he takes there. And the story of the memoir is exactly that. And I think we both, in our understandings of his Catholicism, understand the political instrumentality, we understand that it's vibes-based. I saw it as part of this kind of political roadmap for a kind of reunification of a fragmented MAGA Christian coalition at this point. You call it blogboy theology. You're saying that the loyalty it expresses is to kind of a men's club rather than to the church itself. But blog boys don't really go to church, do they?
Nathan Evans Fox: Some of them do, some of them don't. But when he talks about Rod Dreher, some of the people he mentions are like blogboy Catholics. They come out of a kind of outrageous fear. They can have a critical distance from Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. But at the end of the day it still complements what they're doing politically. It still works in coalition with them. It's almost like a different tendency within right-wing masculinity.
I think the blogboy of it is that honestly a lot of them don't go to church. A lot of them do. And what I've seen more is that it follows where men feel like they're getting most power or most — honestly, when we say power for men, for really shitty men, we're mostly talking about reassurance. We're talking about where they feel like somebody sees them and will comfort them and they can have their expectations of sitting on top of an American hierarchy met. So where they set up the ladder, whether it's in the church or it's in politics or wherever they may move the ladder around — they'll go wherever they get to climb up it.
And so you see a lot of folks right now who were atheists during the Bush era coming home to Christianity, but they do it in Catholicism because there's a more masculinist rigor to joining a tradition, to joining something that has straight ethnic connections to Europe, to Rome. Or you'll also see the grosser one right now, which is the ways that folks have taken over the Eastern Orthodox Church so they can be Russian or Greek, and it ends up being a kind of supremacist ideology, because those traditions have real ties to imperial violence in the past and also contemporarily. People in the Orthodox Church still feel like they're fighting Muslims. And you have the history of the Crusades. One of the things that's bubbling up in the right-wing blogosphere is these crusader memes: Christ is king, meaning we get our AR-15s and we reenact these crusader histories, which, by the way, were so pathetic. That's the other thing that people miss who don't know the history: they were so pathetic, but they were also so gross that they spilled over into colonization.
Matthew Remski: Well, it's cool. But I guess one of the things with regard to the anchoring that he suggests Catholicism gives him, there are aesthetic issues involved with that as well. And I know that you'll be very familiar with that aesthetic tour that he takes through the various churches of the States. There's folk hymns, there's megachurch music. But then what do you think the liturgical and aesthetic cohesiveness of Catholicism offers the blogboy theologian?
Nathan Evans Fox: Well, there's so many answers to this, and they all complement one another. The first is that white culture in general — and I say this as a country musician who has observed every — I need to do some apologetics for country music really quick. Everybody in the US who thinks that they're not on the right decides they're too good for NASCAR, they're too good for flea markets, they're too good for religion, they're too good for country music. And what has been completely seeded to the right and been the seedbed for all these things, all these little trash Dollar General spaces — you gotta show up to it. And also they tell a real tale on America. But you gotta be humble enough to know that America is not a prestige institution.
And that ties me into — I've seen enough of these debates in country music of like, oh, well, we don't like trap beats in our country music. So we want this nostalgic thing that feels like it's not a part of mainstream culture. Or you'll see people just completely push towards trap beats but won't listen to actual trap music. Because so much of white culture is about a kind of reactionary aversion to and rejection of Blackness, a fear of Blackness and how you assimilate to it or don't. Because Black culture is such a foundational part of the US: it's in our food, it's in our music, it's in our religion, it's in our language, it's in our storytelling, it's in our movies. Everywhere that there is culture, if it hasn't completely come from Black folks, they've been instrumental in the creation of our cultural institutions and our traditions.
So I think part of the cohesion, the aesthetic cohesion of the church, is that it is — and once again, this is a profound misrepresentation, but it is an easier lie to tell because there aren't as many barriers — the church is something that ties you to Rome. It's something that ties you to Europe. It's something that has a kind of Western ethnic tie to it. The masses before Vatican 2, which is fairly recent, in the last hundred years, were spoken in Latin, understanding that very few people even spoke Latin. And you also see the rise of folks who only go to Latin Mass now. These kind of trad bros are fully coming back in the Catholic Church.
So the kind of aesthetic cohesion, I think, on the one hand is a real rejection of Blackness and a real desperate need to hold onto your whiteness at the same time. And I think this is deeply related. When you've really been about it, pride and humility go deeply together. There's a difference between being arrogant and knowing the floor of dignity that you always have to maintain with someone else because the world won't give it to you. So you have to be vigilant about it yourself.
And I think that JD Vance and a lot of his peers and a lot of the very lost young men who are finding their ways into these traditions really cannot — and I mean this meanly for JD, and I mean this halfway compassionately for guys in their 20s who are trying to figure stuff out — there's a lack of humility, a lack of understanding. America just ain't. If you want to be white in America, you really just have to accept that you're white trash. There is no prestige to it. There's no great place to occupy. America is about taking away everyone's roots, whether it's the ethnic cleansing of indigenous folks, the cultural erasure and trauma of chattel slavery and of the Middle Passage, the ways that whiteness has meant that folks aren't Polish or Irish or whatever anymore, even though they say they are. A lot of Irish people will be cops, which is the whitest thing you could do. But there has to be a humility that you have about your place in the pecking order here. Because America — I travel the country for a living — America is not the four blocks of Manhattan that everybody loves, and it's not the four blocks in Boston everybody loves. It's strip malls and it's Buc-ee's, and it's gas stations and it's suburbs and it's cul-de-sacs. And that is the country that we have as a reflection of the kinds of white culture we have.
And so part of the aesthetic cohesion to me is also this really desperate attempt to gussy up the ultimate trashiness of our whiteness. It's this very desperate way to be like, no, we are prestige whites, we have real things to be proud of and things that we've contributed to the world, when that's just not true. And there's a kind of humility you've got to have about it. I just ain't it. I'm not too good for anybody, including myself.
Matthew Remski: We want a history. We have a history. We need to have a history. I mean, the irony of gravitating towards Catholicism is that it's an incredibly diverse church at this point, right? You'd have to find a parish that really wore its whiteness on its sleeve in order to have all of those gifts work for you. And I think that's going to be hard. But as you say, there is this rise. We'll get to it in a bit. But there's this rise of tradcath culture that is tied in with a kind of romanticized — where do we come from? We have to reinvent our history.
Nathan Evans Fox: And you see it in every Christian movement right now. You see stories of the saints and liturgy being introduced into evangelical churches. You see a kind of Catholic movement within Methodism. You see the Anglican split off of Episcopalianism — of the Episcopal Church, which, by the way, was completely just about queer folks and women. That's the only reason for it. But there's this kind of second generation of guys who are in it now because they like how steady and measured the Anglican Church is. But for some reason they trust the Anglican Church but not the Episcopal Church. And it's clearly just the conditioning of affinity — who you know, and who you've come to trust because you've been conditioned to trust other men and to think that other men have more authority on spiritual issues than queer folks and women. And that the appearance of tradition and the appearance of authority is the same thing as actually possessing authority and tradition.
Matthew: In part 2 we get deeper into the psychological and theological architecture of what Vance is actually doing, and what it costs him to do it.
We talk about Communion as a work of apologetics — intellectual work that starts from a predetermined conclusion and reverse-engineers its justifications. Vance reaches Catholic conclusions, or aesthetics, or vibes, through a Protestant testimony arc, and Nathan predicted Vance won't be Catholic in fifteen years — he'll have moved on to whatever gives him the next rung on the ladder of hoarding.
The accumulation logic is the throughline Nathan keeps returning to. He reads Vance as someone who has emptied out his soul in successive stages — given up his working-class roots, his feminist debts to Mamaw and Usha, his solidarity with people like him — in pursuit of whiteness and its thin prestige.
So that’s up now @antifascistdadpatreon, so I’ll see you over there, or you can catch it here in a few weeks. Because as you know, everything gets let loose to the wild. Until then, take care of each other.
