JD Vance claims that he was profoundly influenced by one particular movie as a kid — and it's probably not a film you'd expect him to love.
Donald Trump's running mate recently sat down for a three-hour interview on Joe Rogan's podcast, and during a conversation about liberals supposedly believing that math is racist, Vance dropped a surprising confession about his film taste.
"There's this movie that's probably like extremely influential to my entire political worldview and I didn't realize until last night," the VP hopeful said, noting that he caught the movie in his hotel in Austin. "I watch this movie Boyz N the Hood — have you ever seen Boyz n the Hood? I watched that movie a ton when I was like 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 went on to explain the specific takeaways he found in John Singleton's seminal film about Black life in South Central Los Angeles. "[Laurence Fishburne's character] Furious Styles, a lot of his stuff about not letting financial institutions buy up all the stuff in your community," the Ohio senator said. "Obviously, he's talking about Black people in L.A. and not, you know, white people in rural small-town America, but I was like 'Oh, that's maybe the first place that I ever heard this idea.'"
The politician also said he was moved by Styles' family values. "He talks about like the importance of fatherhood, the importance of especially young boys having a father in the home — it's like 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 my much of a relationship with my dad."
Vance then connected one of Styles' beliefs with his own views about standardized testing. "He makes this observation, math being racist — he's criticizing the SAT for being culturally biased, but then he says, 'The only part that isn't culturally biased is the math,'" Vance recalled. "And it's like 'Oh, this is like a Black nationalist in the mid-'80s — because that's that's kind of the philosophy of this movie, is what you might call like 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. It's one of the things that's, like, definitively not racist is math and numbers. You guys are losing your damn minds."
This isn’t the first time Vance has offered his two cents on a zeitgeist-capturing film. He weighed in about a divisive Star Wars film a few years ago. "The Last Jedi is a cruel movie not only because it ruined Luke, but because it ruined Yoda too," he wrote in 2021. He later opined, "The Yoda of the original trilogy is just so much more realistic than the one created 30 years later by CGI. It's amazing."
Vance is also a noted fan of Lord of the Rings, which has cultivated widespread popularity among contemporary conservatives. "I'm a big Lord of the Rings guy, and I think, not realizing it at the time, but a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up," he said in 2021.