While speaking on the final night of the GOP midterm convention, Vice President JD Vance said the country was “poorer” and “dirtier” before President Donald Trump was reelected for a second term.
“We were tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer, and less safe and less prosperous,” Vance said on the final day of the two-day convention in Dallas, Texas.
His sentiment appeared to reflect the administration’s efforts to combat rising immigration rates in the U.S., a key campaign point during the 2024 election. Vance himself promoted unsubstantiated claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, in September 2024, spreading misinformation about the community abducting and eating pets.
I think exceptions and tokens play an important role in permitting the followers of fascists to deny the general principles of the people they follow, even in their own minds. For example, if Vance’s wife is brown, then Trump can’t hate all brown people, right? Then he must be rounding up those other brown people for some reason other than their being brown. The news keeps saying they’re rounding up criminals, many of whom happen to be brown, and the Left keeps screeching that Republicans hate all brown people, but his wife is brown… so the Left must be lying. The evidence to the contrary is right in front of your eyes.
And so on. Tokens are kept around by Republicans because they provide the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability to people who are afraid of non-whites but don’t want to think of themselves as racists. It’s a convenient off-ramp from a road that would otherwise tempt them to think difficult thoughts about themselves and the policies they approve of or at least willfully ignore.