Exclusive — J.D. Vance: Democrats Push ‘Race Essentialism’ — One Race Is ‘Bad,’ Another Is a ‘Victim’

J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, highlighted the centrality of racial agitation to Democrat political messaging and policymaking in an interview on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow.

Democrats and the broader left regularly frame U.S. society as being characterized by an informal racial hierarchy. Their neo-Marxist paradigm holds blacks as an oppressed class subjugated by whites.

Vance said, “If you look at their own rhetoric, it’s pretty clear that the modern Democratic party has made race essentialism the very core of their identity. This idea that if you’re of this race, you’re a bad person, if you’re of that race, you’re a victim, and I think it is just so bizarre. It’s all projection. … Whatever they’re calling you is very often what they actually are when they look in the mirror.”

Vance highlighted Democrats’ and leftists’ reflexive denigration of their political detractors as “racist” on issues of border security, immigration, and national sovereignty.

He said, “They constantly accuse Republicans of being ‘racist’ for pointing out that the flow of illegal immigration is bad for Americans — by the way — it’s bad for Americans of all races.”

Vance argued that lawful Latino immigrants to the U.S. are the racial demographic group most harmed by the status quo of illegal immigration.

He added, “If you look at the evidence, [illegal immigration] hurts everybody, but it disproportionately hurts legal immigrants who are Latinos … because we’re talking about the southern part of the United States, where a disproportionate share of the immigrants are Latinos.”

“And second, it hurts a lot of working-class black people,” he continued, “and the fact that this theft is happening on a mass national scale at the behest of the Democrats — and they turn around and call you a ‘racist’ for daring to want to fight back against it — is just the height of absurdity.”

Widespread Republican fears of being smeared as “racist” on immigration issues embolden Democrats to continually deploy the accusation in bad faith, Vance observed.

“A lot of Republicans … are so terrified of being called that r-word that whenever they do, they sort of shrivel up and get defensive. One of the things I try to counsel my fellow Republicans is, ‘Look, when they go after you, it’s because they’re afraid. Because they know they don’t have a leg to stand on. Don’t get defensive. Go on the offense, and actually call them out for the obvious lies.'”