JD Vance Explains How to Save Western Civilization

Vice President JD Vance spoke at The Heritage Foundation Tuesday before the private premiere of a new docuseries from Angel Studios based on author Rod Dreher’s book “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents,” which tells the story of Soviet Union-era Christian dissidents.

“I would not be standing here were it not for Rod Dreher,” said the vice president, noting how a viral interview with Dreher helped his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” become a bestseller.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of Vance’s remarks.

Thanks, Kevin [Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation] for that very kind introduction, and of course, for your leadership and stewardship of this incredible organization, which has been such an important part of the conservative conversation—and when we get the opportunity—of conservative governance in the United States of America going back, of course, to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and doing a lot of good work since then.

So, thank you, and thanks to my dear friend, Rod Dreher, who has written a number of important books. But I think, Rod, this is your first time you’ve ever converted a book into a film, is that right?

So, Rod just follows in my footsteps, it turns out. He writes books, they do pretty well, he turns them into movies, and hopefully, you’ll sell some more copies.

But let me say just a couple of words about my friendship with Rod Dreher. He showed me backstage a French interview that he’d done with a guy who wasn’t very kind to Rod when he gave this interview in French. And you look at the subheader on the screen, and it says, “Rod Dreher, Ami de JD Vance.”

I don’t speak especially good French, but I guess what that means is “friend of JD Vance,” which maybe was meant to tarnish you in that country.

But I will say, Rod, that you are a true friend. And I wouldn’t be standing here were it not for Rod Dreher. And I think a lot of people don’t realize how important he was in the formative years of what became this massive bestselling book [Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”], which, of course, launched me into a public career, launched me into a political career from there, and helped me become the vice president of the United States.

And in particular, when the book came out, I think our initial print run was about 10,000 copies. And I remember thinking to myself, if this book sells 10,000 copies, I guess that’s a pretty good outcome for a first-time author, a first-time book.

And the book came out, I did one interview on TV. The book sold a little bit better than we thought it would sell, but it never hit the bestseller list, it was never really a fixture of the mainstream conversation. And then I went to England with my wife, and at the time, we didn’t have any kids and we were sort of driving around the English countryside, and I got an invite from an author that I knew a little bit.

I had read some of what Rod had written before, certainly at his American Conservative blog, but I didn’t know Rod particularly well. And he said, “Hey, I’d like to do a written interview about your book.” It really meant a lot to me.

And so, it actually was one of the nights of the 2016 RNC [Republican National Committee] convention where I typed up the responses that Rod had sent me and I sent them off. And I woke up the next morning, and he had published them. And I thought, you know, that was fun, and hopefully, it leads some more people to the book and some of the ideas that I care about.

And then, the next day after it published, I believe, we hopped on a flight back home to the United States. And back then, you had really bad internet access on international flights.

And I remember I had no way of communicating with the outside world for about sort of a 10-hour block. And when I left the U.K., my book was like No. 1,000 on the Amazon list, and when I arrived back in the United States, the book was like No. 16 on the Amazon list, and I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Something clearly happened.”

And then I had all these emails from Rod Dreher saying the interview has gone so mega-viral that you have crashed the website multiple times. And of course, that launched “Hillbilly Elegy” into the book that became this massive bestseller and really changed my life forever.

I’ll say, of course, I owe that success to Rod, I think more than any person in American media or in American writing. But it’s not just that, because when the book took off, I also needed a friend because, all of a sudden, I was doing TV interviews. I had no idea what I was doing. I was talking about big ideas in front of sometimes very hostile audiences.

Again, I had no idea what I was doing, and it was the friend that I made, the friendship that I made with Rod Dreher, that gave me this sense of confidence that, yeah, I could stand up before audiences like this, speak my mind, and have something worthwhile to say. And so, that entire process really owes so much to the friendship of Rod Dreher.

So, thank you, Rod. Thanks for being a dear friend and a true friend. And now, let me say just a little bit about this book, “Live Not by Lies,” which, I don’t know exactly how many books Rod has written. I have read most of them, but not all of them. But I think this is the most important book that Rod has ever written because it’s the most prophetic—I think the book came out in 2019 or 2020—and it’s the most prophetic about where Western Civilization has gone.

And in particular, some of the very founding ideas of the West—the Christian faith on which all Western nations were in some important respect really based on in their original charter—those very ideas have not just fallen out of favor, and they’re not just less popular than they were 200 years ago or 300 years ago; of course, in the case of our friends in Europe, a thousand years ago—what we’ve seen is that those ideas have become disfavored.

The ruling elite of the societies have become actively hostile to some of the very ideas that those countries were founded on in the first place. And I think Rod’s book was an incredibly prophetic insight into that.

But I don’t take pessimism or sadness or a sense of despair from that. One of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned from a dear friend of mine who helped me return to my own faith, was that despair is a sin. And I think that the way to survive, the way to thrive when many of these ideas are attacked, when many of our most important values are criticized or even become justification for being thrown in prison—the way to respond to it is not to conform. And that’s the most important lesson of Rod’s book.

The way to deal with this, the way to deal with being attacked by the ruling elites of a given society is to speak the truth, is to live not by lies. The incentives, the financial rewards, the social benefits of living by lies is too often very great, but Rod’s lesson is important: that you’re going to sacrifice your soul, you’re going to sacrifice your civilization, you’re going to sacrifice your family, you’re going to sacrifice your country if you give into the easy pathway.

And one of the things that makes me most proud of our administration—not that we’ve won every battle or win every battle. Some of these battles are going to take 20, 30, 40 years for us to see through to ultimate victory. But the president, I am very proud to say, is not a person who is afraid by criticism from those in power.

And I think if there’s anything that sort of ties the first Trump administration to the second Trump administration and the president’s entire political career is that this is a guy with incredible courage. He just doesn’t care what other people say about him. He doesn’t care what the media writes about him. He’s going to do what he thinks is right.

And I think in so many important ways, that leadership and that example is something that Rod previewed in many ways in this book. And of course, now that book is an important documentary.

I haven’t seen the episode myself. I guess we’re going to watch it for the first time, right? It’s premiering tonight. So, congratulations on that.

But I guess the point that I would make to you is, we are not going to reclaim our civilization; we’re not going to rebuild prosperity and opportunity; we’re not going to rebuild the kind of society where we teach children the important virtues and skills to thrive—as opposed to trying to tear our kids down, which is what I think our education system does all too often; we’re not going to rebuild a foreign policy that’s rooted in our shared interests rather than in liberal values that were invented 20 or 30 years ago but have become the animating concept of the foreign policy of too many Western leaders and too many Western nations; we’re not going to solve any of these problems unless we have the courage to speak the truth, unless we have the courage to live the truth.

And I will say that one thing I think is true of Rod, and I think it’s true of much of the conservative movement in 2020: Sometimes, we are so good at pointing out, or sometimes, we were so good at pointing out some very obvious problems that we would sometimes give in to this despair, this idea that because things were not going great in 2020 because things weren’t always going our way electorally, we would give in to this sense that the countries that we love, the civilization that we love, was always on a negative trajectory.

And I say that as not a criticism of Rod, because I myself have sometimes felt, in the lowest moments of American politics, that, you know what, maybe this country is just not going in the right direction. But I think that what we’ve learned over the last few months is that the American people, and I think Western peoples, are a hell of a lot more resilient than our elites give them credit for.

Now, that’s not to say, again, that this is easy or that it’s ever going to be easy. But I think if we speak the truth, if we refuse to live by lies, then I think we can redeliver on the promise of Western civilization. We can rebuild the kind of society where virtue and freedom and our ancient liberties are preserved and enforced and facilitated by our government rather than torn down by our government.

And that’s ultimately what this is all about. Yes, there are bad things happening. You see in Europe people arrested for praying, and you have the police asking them, well what are you praying about? As if it was any of the police’s business. Yes, you see people who are thrown in prison or have their jobs destroyed because they don’t believe the right things or they don’t say the right things according to the liberal intelligentsia that rules some of these societies.

But at the same time you have that happening, you have people of incredible courage speaking up and saying, “No, we’re not going to live by lies. We’re going to speak the truth.” You have Western peoples calling out their governments, pushing back on issues like migration and religious freedom in a way that we haven’t seen in 20 or 30 years, if we’ve ever seen it.

So, I guess my point is that part of living not by lies is to continue to maintain the optimism that I think is really at the root of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the United States of America and in the West. It’s the promise—I’m a devout Christian, I know many of you are—the promise of the Christian faith is not that we’re always going to win on a short-term horizon, but that ultimately God calls the shots. He is in control. And if we keep on fighting and we keep on working and we keep on having faith and we keep on pursuing the values that we know are right, I really do believe that we are going to see great things happen.

Great things happen in the United States of America, and great things happen all across the West. I know the president knows this. The president believes this. I think if you just look in the past two months in this administration, we’ve gone from a country where we would harass and threaten and investigate and even arrest pro-life protesters to one where we’re encouraging pro-life activists to do what they can to persuade their fellow Americans.

A couple of months ago, we had social media censorship run amok. We were threatening people’s right of free expression for not saying the things that Silicon Valley technology companies told them to say. Now, I believe that we have more free speech on the internet today than we’ve probably had in 10 or 15 years.

So, we’re making progress. We’re making steady progress, we’re making solid progress, and we’d all do a lot better if we remembered Rod’s advice to live not by lies. So, I hope that you learn something from this incredible documentary. I hope that this book means as much to you as it did to me.