The episode was scandalous. But one thing was very clear.

This is Quite normal today’s quotea feature that highlights a statement from the news that exemplifies just that how very normal everything has come to be.

“Have you seen all these studies basically linking testosterone levels in young men to conservative politics?” — JD Vance, in his three-hour interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, published Thursday

The Trump-Vance campaign has, in a last-ditch push, gone all the way into the bro-podcast space, hoping to strike a chord with the base. To that end, in an episode released Thursday, JD Vance appeared for three hours on the mother of all bro podcasts, The Joe Rogan Experience. Vance and Rogan covered a wide range of topics, but the most notable theme – given the particular gendered nature of this campaign tactic—was Vance’s effort to define the GOP as the party of masculinity.

For example, when Rogan argued that there were “very few things that will make you a conservative more than martial arts,” Vance jumped at the chance to link support for Donald Trump to higher testosterone levels. Rogan made another argument – that martial arts encourage a conservative worldview because they emphasize the importance of hard work. But Vance went further with the implication that testosterone makes one a Trump voter.

“Maybe that’s why the Democrats want us all to be in poor health and overweight,” Vance said, without clarifying how Democrats were planning on public health. “It means we are becoming more liberal.” It’s possible that Vance is referring to the body positivity movement, but it’s hard to know exactly what he meant.

Vance’s most heated points about gender did not dwell on hormones, but on LGBTQ+ issues. He guessed, for example, that Trump would win the “normal gay guy vote” because these men were tired of being thrown into gender-related debates. “Now you have all these crazy things on top of that that they’re like, ‘No, no, we didn’t want to give pharmaceuticals to 9-year-olds who are transgender,'” Vance said. The Trump campaign embraced gay men, said he, as long as these men also embraced conventional ideas about gender and masculinity.

Transgender women, the other big boogeyman in the Trump campaign’s fear-mongering (immigrants always come first), repeatedly came up as reminders of the threat to societal masculinity. Vance claimed that transgender women forced children to see their genitalia by wearing short skirts in public. (“If that’s what you do, you’re a pervert.”) He claimed that Big Pharma was pushing hormones on children. He dismissed the idea of ​​transgender children by talking about his 4-year-old son identifying as a dinosaur. (“I take him to, say, the dinosaur transition clinic and put weight on him?”) He expressed concern that his daughter would be injured when he competed against transgender girls in sports. (“I’m terrified she’s going to get shot to death because we’re allowing a 6-foot-1 male to compete with her.”)

On the surface, Vance might not seem like the best Trump surrogate on the subject of toxic masculinity: He, unlike Trump, has only been married once and has none of Trump’s flashy-rich-man, reality-TV, grab-them -town. -the-you-know-the-swindler. But Vance is also a Yale Law-educated intellectual, so he knows how to intellectually frame Trump’s emotional outbursts.*

So it is fitting that his most bizarre argument about gender had to do with elite institutions. It came down to a wild theory: that white parents are encouraged to encourage their children to identify as transgender in order to get them into Ivy League schools. Vance said:

If you’re a middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent and all you care about is whether your kid goes to Harvard or Yale, that path has obviously gotten a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids. But the only way those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans, and is there a dynamic that goes on where if you become trans, that’s the way to reject your white privilege.

It is a patently absurd theory. There is no evidence that anyone has ever encouraged their child to come out as transgender for college admissions. And yet, if you look past the novelty of the argument, you can see how this claim fits into the worldview Vance promotes: Social order liberals want disadvantages for white people, in Vance’s mind. In an unjust system where oppression is necessary to gain esteem, white people are forced to seek out twisted ways of identifying with oppressed groups, creating a twisted and tiresome game of identity fraud.

It’s a petty mindset that doesn’t recognize the downsides of actually be suppressed. But too many of them 14.5 million followers on Spotify and 17.6 million subscribers on YouTube, who want to spend three hours of their day with Joe Rogan, it can make a difference. Many of these listeners want to be told that they no longer have to feel obligated to challenge old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and gender—and JD Vance is happy to deliver.