Vice President JD Vance Makes Midwest Trip To Missouri And Kansas
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Every once in a while, Vice President JD Vance seems to get a bit sensitive about him and his ilk being called racist, but he can never seem to express that frustration without ultimately proving his accusers to be absolutely correct.

So, last week, on the second day of President Donald Trump’s desperate bid to make Republicans bearable again, referred to as “Trumpapalooza,” Vance appealed to his overwhelmingly Caucasian audience by declaring, “We were tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.”

OK, well, to be fair, two out of four of Vance’s claims were probably correct. U.S. citizens are likely getting “poorer” and “less prosperous.” The racism, of course, comes in when he implies Black and brown immigrants, or non-white people in general, are the reason for this great lack of prosperity, as opposed to Trump’s war in Iran and weaponization of tariffs causing prices to rise, coupled with his administration’s underperforming jobs numbers.

But let’s focus on Vance’s other two claims, starting with the nation being “less safe.”

As you know, much of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was focused on rising crime in the U.S. — which is to say, Trump ran on outright lies about rising crime in the U.S.

Over the last decade, crime databases, including the FBI’s, have consistently shown that violent crime in major cities has done nothing but decline since the early 1990s and is roughly half what it was in 1991. Those reports — again, including that of the FBI — prove Trump and his cohorts have been taking credit for greatly reducing crime that was already trending downward long before his second term began. 

So, Vance, Trump, and their ilk have been conjuring up a fictitious version of the U.S. that is overrun with crime just so they can point their white nationalist fingers at non-white foreigners as the cause of that non-existent rise in crime — and they seem to be dumbfounded as to why people have concluded that they are, indeed, racist.

As for Vance’s claim that the country has become “dirtier” due to the increased presence of non-white people among its populace, well, that’s not even coded racism; that’s just good old-fashioned Klan rally rhetoric.

Mind you, what Vance said Thursday was just a rerun of exactly what he said when he and Trump were campaigning two years ago.

“So, I think our message to Kamala Harris ought to be very simple,” Vance said in 2024. “Stop calling us racist for saying that we’ve got to close down that southern border!”

“Stop accusing us of being bad people because we have the audacity to say to Kamala Harris that she ought to do her damn job,” he continued. “She needs to look in the mirror and stop attacking the citizens of her own country. And I think that is what has led to the divisiveness in our country.”

Here’s what I wrote about that at the time:

Vance has to know he and his people are not being called racist simply because they are calling for border security. Vance is being called racist because he spread lies about Haitian migrants abducting and eating pets and Springfield, Ohio, and continued to double down on disparaging an entire ethnic group even after the city’s planners, its police department, its Republican mayor and the state’s Republican governor said repeatedly that there haven’t been any credible reports or 911 calls about immigrants eating pets. Vance is being called racist because he spread the falsehood that Haitian migrants are responsible for a steep increase in HIV cases in Ohio while the data on HIV stats in Ohio shows that is also untrue. Vance is being called racist because he keeps referring to the Haitians in Ohio as “illegal” immigrants knowing the bulk of them are in the country legally.

Likewise, Trump is being called racist, not because he has leaned on the border security issue throughout his campaign, but because he hasn’t managed to do so without spreading hate speech about migrants. Trump is racist because he compares South American migrants to Hannibal Lecter, and calls them “animals” who are “not human.” He’s racist because he dabbled in eugenics-style scientific racism by suggesting migrants have “bad genes” that predispose them to commit violent crimes. Trump is a Nazi-esque racist because he lied about migrants bringing “tremendous infectious disease” to the U.S. and said they are “poisoning the blood” of the country. He’s racist because he wishes the U.S. received more white immigrants from “nice” European countries. Trump and Vance are racist because they continue to lie about migrants causing a surge in violent crime in America, an assertion that is not remotely supported by violent crime data from any reputable database.

So, “the more things change,” amirite?

Last year, during a Turning Point USA convention in Phoenix, Vance declared that “in the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” before invoking anti-Black stereotypes in attacking Rep. Jasmine Crockett, saying, “She wants to be a senator, though her street girl persona is about as real as her nails.”

So, if Vance isn’t racist, and his voter base isn’t racist, then why is he so consistently aware of how being racist on stage galvanizes MAGA voters?

If his party isn’t racist, why are so many Republican leaders so sure that doubling and tripling down on anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamophobic fearmongering is what will lead them to victory in the midterms?

Republicans like Bo French, the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, feel that showing a crowd of happy brown people speaks for itself in explaining why, in the U.S., “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

Who is French speaking to or for if not the same people Vance is defending from allegations of racism?

Of course, this is the same JD Vance who went to bat for a group of Young Republican “kids” in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, who were caught in a group chat being Nazi-loving racists. He knows what he is. He knows what the MAGA movement is. They all do.

They just want us to stop saying it out loud. But we won’t.

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