Republican hypocrisy is nothing new; attacking it has been a staple of my writing since I joined First Draft in 2009. Of all the GOP hypocrites I’ve mocked over the years, JD Vance may be the biggest phony of them all. His hypocrisy on the issues surrounding immigration and citizenship is breathtaking.

The featured image is of Vance and his family on a state visit to India in March. The family of a man who attacks DEI programs is, well, diverse. His wife, Usha, is Indian and his children are half-Indian and half-Hillbilly. Does this look like the family of a nativist? Vance sees no contradiction between his family’s diversity and his attack on programs that encourage diversity. V is for Vance. H is for hypocrisy.

Vance’s views on citizenship are even worse than his views on diversity. He gave what passes for a policy speech in MAGA world at the Claremont Institute, an extremist right-wing think tank that’s been pushing an attack on birthright citizenship for years.

TPM’s Josh Kovensky wrote about the speech. The article’s title is chilling, JD Vance: Some Americans Are More American Than Others.

“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.

He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation.”

By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.

“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.”

Fought on which side, JD? Civil War veterans aren’t all created equal: some fought to preserve the union while others fought to preserve slavery. Team MAGA has given Lost Causers a string of symbolic victories. Vance’s speech is the latest effort to blur the line between patriots and traitors. Those who fought for the Confederacy were traitors. Those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were insurrectionists. The line is clear. Vance is clearly wrong.

Thanks to the post-Civil War amendments, an American citizen is an American citizen regardless of how their forebears came to this country. My paternal grandfather came to America on a ship that landed at Ellis Island. That makes me a second generation American. My citizenship is just as valid as that of the members of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) or the UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy.) Does that still hold true with Team MAGA?

Discussing degrees of citizenship is perilous. It’s what America did in what Vance, Trump, and their ilk think of as the good old days when Black people were property, and women were second class citizens. Good old days, my ass. Only a reactionary hypocrite like JD Vance would believe that. Vance is the worst sort of hypocrite applying one standard to his family and another to everyone else. I know a slippery slope when I see one. The hypocrisy, it burns.

Why did I put a question mark after Citizen Vance in the post title? I don’t question his citizenship, but he questions mine and the citizenship of everyone whose family came to America after the War of the Rebellion. Vance believes that people who agree with him are better Americans than those who do not. The nation was founded on protest and the toleration of divergent viewpoints. That’s called Americanism. The views advanced by Vance are rooted in intolerance and submission to authority. That’s called Fascism.

When I saw the title of Josh Kovensky’s article, I had an instant earworm, a Squeeze song that contains this line: “Some Americans scare me.” That’s truer now than when the song was recorded in 1987.

The last word goes to Squeeze: