U.S. Vice President JD Vance gestures during a signing ceremony for the "Genius Act", which will develop regulatory framework for stablecoin cryptocurrencies and expand oversight of the industry, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 18, 2025. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
Author Katherine Stewart says Vice President JD Vance is “polishing ideas from the far-right gutters with an Ivy League sheen,” particularly when it comes to smearing a pretty face over the racist Great Replacement Theory.
President Donald Trump is expelling asylum seekers, abusing foreign visitors and deporting and incarcerating people who have never been accused of any crime, Stewart said. Meanwhile, Vance is in the wings, pushing a "thoughtful" version of the "Great Replacement Theory" that’s sure to appease nativists who embrace the idea that immigration is part of a deliberate plot to destroy the United States by replacing “real” or “true” Americans with aliens.
Stewart notes how Vance recently argued that America’s founders understood “that our shared qualities, our heritage, our values, our manners and customs confer a special and indispensable advantage. … Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church.”
“Vance is using a sleight of hand here,” said Stewart, agreeing that social bonds do form when people share things in common, but she adds that a nation’s people who “define themselves according to the church their grandparents attended … [is] not the America that Lincoln and Jefferson … established.”
“We the people have agreed to promote the general welfare not by conducting a survey of the views of some subset of ancestors who happened to be present at the Civil War, but by making laws through representative government based on the idea that all people are free and equal before the law.”
Versions of the Vance ideology haunt American history, Stewart argues, and always with the same malicious intent: to divide “real” Americans from the ones who “don’t belong.”
“The intent becomes clear the moment you ask the speaker who the ‘real’ Americans are,” Stewart said. “Are they the descendants of the Mayflower? That’s just silly. … Are the real Americans white? That’s not just racist but stupid; most Black Americans today have ancestors that lived in America significantly longer, on average, than white Americans.”
But the argument serves the purpose of putting a lot of money in the hands of a few, said Stewart, whether it’s letting slaveholders get rich while their white neighbors get outcompeted by slave labor or funneling money to “the establishment of a grifty concentration camp on American soil.” (Research shows contractors affiliated with the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” have “lost” tens of millions of dollars, while others have forced states to pay for detention centers it never built.)
“We can’t know what’s in JD Vance’s heart,” Stewart argued, but “he seems to believe that, to keep himself and his associates in power, the U.S. government needs to ship asylum seekers off to random islands and engage in an ever-expanding menu of sadistic acts. Meanwhile, none of our actual immigration issues are resolved and the rest of us are simply forced to pay the price.”
Read the full New Republic report at this link.