The Right Can Keep Its Raisins Out Of Our Potato Salad, Thank You

They don't contribute to our culture, they don't get to say what it is.

This week, Vice President JD Vance made an appearance on the New York Post’s podcast that we just found out exists, during which he and host Miranda Devine did their best impressions of completely delusional old-timey racists from the first half of the last century.

I did not watch the whole thing, because I simply do not hate myself that much, but I did catch the part during which they talked about immigration.

Vance started out talking about how Haitians — the same people he previously lied were eating people’s cats — were driving up the price of rent in Springfield, Ohio, by paying $4000 a month for four families to live in a three bedroom house instead of the $1000 that an American family of five might pay for that.

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Aside from the fact that this doesn’t make even a little bit of sense, I checked on both Craigslist and Apartments.com, and I couldn’t find a single home in all of Springfield, Ohio, that is more than around $1800 per month — and there were only three of those. Most of them were, in fact, around $1000. It’s almost like he just pulled that whole story right out of his ass.

Anyway, he and Miranda Devine both agreed that this is what creates the division and hatred in this country, not, you know, the rest of us being repulsed by people like Vance being so full of hatred and insane stories about Haitians. Devine, by the way, is an immigrant herself — hailing originally from Australia. For some reason, Vance does not seem to feel that same “division” with her that he does with other immigrants. Wonder why!

“Let’s say you’re living in a house, and your neighbors move out,” he explained. “And you have, let’s say, a family of five that you’ve known for five years, ten 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 the three-bedroom house. Twenty people from a totally different culture, totally different ways of interacting. Again, we can respect their dignity while also being angry at the Biden administration for letting that situation happen, and recognizing that their next-door-neighbor’s gonna say, ‘Well wait a second! What the heck is going on here! I don’t know these people! They don’t speak the same language that I do, and because there are 20 in the house next door, it’s a little bit rowdier than it was when there was just a family of four, a family of five.’”

Okay, and what if it were a Quiverfull family of 20, like the Duggars? What if the people speaking a different language were the immigrant-hating Germans he wants the United States to take in as refugees? I certainly wouldn’t like to live next door to anyone like that, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live next door to a bigot like JD Vance, but I grew up living next door to an Elvis impersonator, so it does not actually occur to me that I get to be in charge of who my neighbors are.

“It is totally reasonable and acceptable,” he continued, “for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’ And the fact that we had an immigration system that actually promoted that division is a real, real disgrace.”

No, it’s not. People are allowed to speak any language they want here, at least in part because freedom of speech is the very first amendment to the United States Constitution. It is unfathomable to me to be enraged by someone speaking a different language. How could that possibly be any of your business? Why are you listening to other people’s conversations?

The thing that gets me though is this “We don’t share the same culture! They’re changing our culture and we don’t like it!” shit. Aside from just being a vile denunciation of our nation’s history as a cultural salad bowl (or even the older idea of a melting pot), do they actually think that if all of the immigrants disappeared today that they’d have a “shared culture” with the rest of the nation? Because that assumes a whole lot of facts not in evidence. They’d still be hateful and cruel, and the rest of us would still be repulsed by that. That’s the division.

Vance isn’t the only one saying this nonsense. In fact, other conservatives have been far more explicit about it in recent years, openly talking about needing to preserve the country’s “White European” culture and heritage and “Judeo-Christian values” from all of the scary immigrants and other people who are not like them.

The so-called “culture wars” have always been like a potluck to which Republicans bring nothing and then get mad because no one accommodated their 87,000 diet restrictions.

Some groups of people bring art.

Some bring music.

Some bring literature.

Some bring movies and television.

Some bring comedy.

Some bring delicious food (you are welcome for pizza, by the way).

And hell, if we’re talking about Haitian immigrants here, I literally can’t think of a single thing any conservative has done that has been as positive a contribution to our culture as a nation as the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat or The Fugees album The Score. Am I wrong? I am not. You play their cover of “Killing Me Softly” anywhere in America, and almost 30 years later half the room will still bust out with a “One time!” That’s our culture. That’s our unity. Not whatever it is JD Vance thinks he’d have in common with any given white neighbors.

What, exactly, does the Right bring? They bring “demanding people practice (or at least pretend to practice) their religion.” They bring “whining that a transgender person put a transgender character in the show the transgender person created.” They bring “claiming that bands are backmasking music to brainwash their precious children into worshiping Satan.” They bring the One Million Moms. They bring “complaining that other people are not having enough babies.” They bring “complaining about workplaces being too inclusive.” They bring “getting mad that people who aren’t them have a sexual orientation or gender identity they don’t understand.” They bring the ICE agents making our cities scary places to live. They bring “trad wives.” They bring “gushing about how AI slop is going to make it so they can be ‘creative,’ too, without putting any work into it, because of how terribly they are oppressed by the fact that most of the actually creative people are not hateful pieces of shit like them.”

Let’s look at what they consider to be their big cultural victories in recent history. You have their own insistence that it is now socially acceptable to use the “R” word again. You have an American Eagle ad about Sydney Sweeney’s genes that gave them the white supremacist tinglies. You have the Cracker Barrel logo staying the same. You have a beer company cutting ties with a transgender influencer. You have one song that wasn’t even that good of a song.

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Conservatives bring nothing to the party that benefits anyone but themselves, and all they ever do is complain that those who do create culture are making that culture just a little too multicultural for their tastes. Or worry that some other group of people is going to change “the culture” in a way they don’t like.

I’m sorry, but if you contribute nothing of value to a culture — what on earth would make you think you should be in charge of dictating what that culture is and how it is allowed to change and evolve?

Is this mean to say? Yes. It is. Which is why I wouldn’t even bring it up if they weren’t going around trying to claim their bigotry is just a desire to preserve some official American culture or national unity. It’s not. It’s just good, old-fashioned hate. And while that kind of hate may certainly be an unfortunate part of our American culture and history (though, ironically, the part they try to ban children from learning about), none of us are obligated to preserve that for them.