The most striking thing that JD Vance has admitted out loud and in public is that even if Haitians are supposed to be here legally, he's still going to call them "illegal aliens". He knows and knew that the "people eating pets" thing was a lie when he spread it. He could easily bother to check whether crime really was up or whether communicable diseases were up, But the point isn't whether he's being honest--he's not.
It's whether he can induce people to follow up on his story and keep it alive as if it were a big deal. Just like big public lies could induce people to follow up on a land deal in Arkansas, or a lie about a man's honorable service in Viet Nam, or a lie about a fully American man's birth certificate, or an attack on an embassy in Libya by Islamic terrorists, or an email server, or a man's son's laptop, and try to make that into a big deal, whether it really is or not.
But there is something else in Vance's particular set of lies that is revealing--the idea that if a person can wave a wand over someone and declare them citizens, having a particular office means you can "uncitizen" them. Or unperson them.
It's a step beyond the concept Trump has spoken of--"remigration". Consider Mitt Romney's idea that people would "self-deport". Trump is moving on from telling people to go "back where they came from" has he disreputably told the members of "the squad" not so long ago--all legal Americans. He would send people to their various "homes". Mass deportation in amounts he varies in the telling most times. It's a close kin to the idea of doing away with birthright citizenship.
It plays a bit into Vance's ideas of the US being a a "blood and soil" nation. (Yale come get your boy, he's embarrassing.) We aren't. His family isn't. We don't have a single perspective, religion, or experience, except wanting the kind of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness a democratic republic by, for, and of the people can provide--the American experiment that exists as the idea and ideals of our shared citizenship.
If your citizenship is a malleable sleight of tongue--what of your rights or your humanity? What if being declared a "terrorist", a "Palestinian" or a "Communist" removed you from your equal treatment under the Constitution?
What Trump and Vance are slinging aren't little white election year lies--but hardcore white supremacist lies that will hurt us all in the long run. This is what people mean when they talk about Trump undermining democracy and the Constitution. And so will his little mini-me sidekick.
2 comments:
it's apparently an idea floating at the top of the zeitgeist. pro-palestinian protesters have been screaming that jews are manipulative colonists and should move back to poland. not israelis mind you, but american, new york jews living in the city of immigrants.
It sometimes staggers me that in the 21st century, when access to good information on history, politics, religion, culture, are as close as one's phone, we have so many people lazily adopting tribalism, conspiracy theories, and ideologies that should have been trashed by the middle of the last century.
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