JD Vance curiously linked his worldview to John Singleton’s classic film Boyz N the Hood on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. The vice presidential candidate, who helped spread a racist conspiracy theory about Haitians eating pets in Ohio, said the movie influenced his brand of populism.
“I watch the movie a ton when I was 8, 9 years old and I didn’t realize how much that movie has had an influence on me until I watched it last night,” Vance told Rogan. “So, Furious Styles [portrayed by Laurence Fishburne], a lot of his stuff about not letting financial institutions buy up all the stuff in your communities – obviously, he’s talking about Black people in L.A. and not white people in rural, small town America – but I was like, ‘Oh! That’s maybe the first place that I ever heard this idea.’ Or he talks about the importance of fatherhood, the importance of – especially young boys – having a father in the home. I got that from Boyz N the Hood! And obviously, it spoke to me when I was a kid because I grew up at the time and I didn’t have much of a relationship with my dad.”
Vance used the movie to attack liberals in a culture war over math.
“[Styles] makes this observation [about] math being racist,” Vance said. “He’s criticizing the SAT for being culturally biased but then he says the only part that isn’t culturally biased is the math. And it’s like, ‘Oh, this is like a Black nationalist in the mid ‘80s.’ ‘Cause that’s kind of the philosophy of this movie. [It’s] what you might call old school Black leftism. This movie in the 1980s is saying something that I wish a lot of white liberals would hear today which is actually math is not racist … You guys are losing your damn minds.”
Boyz N the Hood hit theaters in 1991. The film starred Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Morris Chestnut.