Usually, an ambitious politician has to choose between political popularity and universal personal loathing. This is not the case with J. Divan Vance, vice president of the United States. He’s hit the parlay in what has to be record time.
He went on a New York Post podcast and really let his freak flag fly. The man was born a couple of decades too late to sign the Southern Manifesto and over a century too late to have voted for the Chinese Exclusion Act. I mean… yikes.
“It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people I have something in common with.’” And, believe it or not, he’s still running this riff.
“If you remember all of the migrants who came in from Haiti. You blink and literally a third of your town is Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs.”
This sudden appearance of the Ghost of Bullshit Past would have been jarring enough had it not been preceded by Vance’s opening the interview with a Catholic convert hoedown, which consisted of, among other things, blatant lies about Joe Biden and abortion and an attempt to attach “Catholic teaching” to the administration’s publicly brutal immigration policies. I swear, adult Catholic converts are going to be the death of me.
But it’s when Vance starts talking about “culture” that the ancient alarm bells begin ringing.
“So you’re a landlord, and you’re renting, let’s say, a three-bedroom house to a family of four, family of five. Okay. They’re paying, let’s say, $1,000 a month a couple of years ago in Springfield, Ohio, to rent that house. Now, all of a sudden, four families of Haitian migrants come in, each of them getting $1,000 per family, and they’re willing to put 20 people into a three-bedroom house. So what does that do?”
That prices all of the American citizens out of those houses. That drives up the rents for everybody because now you have a three-bedroom house that you can rent for $4,000 a month or $3,000 a month instead of $1,000 a month. That completely destroys the ability of Americans to live the American dream. And that’s what those open borders did.
I mean, let’s say you’re living in a house and your neighbors move out. Let’s say, a family of five that you’ve known for five years, 10 years, moves out of the house, is actually evicted from the house because there are people who are going to pay more for rent. And then what happens is 20 people move into a three-bedroom house. Twenty people from a totally different culture, totally different ways of interacting.
I live in a very diverse neighborhood in a very diverse city in an increasingly diverse state. (Heavens to Jim Curley, Boston has a popular female Asian-American mayor!) I don’t have any trouble “interacting” with any of the people I meet in my everyday comings and goings, except for that whole soccer thing, which I’m nonetheless learning about.
But, more to the point, Vance’s horror story about 20 people to an apartment is a nativist trope that’s been used on every migrant group since the beginning of the nation — the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Puerto Ricans in the East Coast tenements, Eastern Europeans in the Back of the Yards in Chicago, and the Chinese on the West Coast.
“Look at how those people live,” is as traditional a piece of American rhetoric as “land of the free, home of the brave.”
Eventually, Vance got around to talking about UFOs and the important issue of whether they might involve space aliens or guardian angels. I have to admit that was kind of a relief.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a69217911/jd-vance-housing-neighborhoods/
