JD Vance and Gangs of New York

Noted Deep Thinker™️ and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has come under fire (again) for yet more bonedheaded beliefs seemingly pulled from the stratosphere. In a 2001 Skype interview, Vance advanced the following: "You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish and German immigration and that had its problems, its consequences. You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that before."

Now I don’t know what’s more amusing: Vance’s lack of intellectual prowess or the fact that he was using Skype in 2021.

But Vance is clearly pulling here from Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. We covered this on the pod just over a year ago with Tyler Anbinder, who served as a consultant on the film. And one thing ran true—that movie is a lot of things but it is not a documentary.

Here Tyler speaks to the “real” Bill the Butcher in a clip from the episode:

Vance’s assumption of Gangs’ historical accuracy demonstrates two things: 1) his lack of critical thought, and 2) that many people understand the past through consumption of pop culture. Hence the need to engaging both film and history as a way of understanding the past, its memory, and how we think about ourselves today.

J.D. Vance might not be able to tease out the lessons of Gangs of New York, but don’t worry, we can. Episode below.

And if you want to read more of Tyler’s work, do so here:

Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York https://a.co/d/552c5rF

Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum https://a.co/d/hT8kSaW