Man, can you imagine being married to Vice President JD Vance or being one of his children? He spends his days being a professional racist and hard-right Christian while his wife, Usha, is a Hindu woman of Indian descent, and his children are biracial.
But never fear. Vance has a solution: his wife should just convert.
Vance made these remarks at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi after being asked about his wife’s religious background by one of the little gremlins who attend that sort of thing. Rather than say something normal like “That is a private matter for her” or “I support her Hindu faith,” Vance, inevitably, made it uncomfortable.
“JD Vance mic drop” by Mike Luckovich
He started by saying that his wife grew up in “not a particularly religious” Hindu family, as if that makes a demand for conversion to Christianity somehow better. Then, he made it worse: “As I've told her, and I've said publicly, and I'll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends: Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”
Imagine your partner getting up in front of thousands of people and saying this garbage.
It’s clear that, even without a forced conversion for his wife, Vance has already imposed his Christianity on his family. He makes sure to tell everyone that they are raising the children Christian already, and two of the three attend Christian schools, because of course.
And Usha already goes to church with Vance, which he presents as a joyful thing, where his wife is “closer to the priest who baptized me than maybe I am. My attitude is, you figure this stuff out as a family, and you trust in God to have a plan.”
Dunno, buddy. Sounds like your wife is doing everything to accommodate your faith while you do nothing in return, so your only plan is to make her discard her faith.
Vance isn’t just a Christian. He’s a Christian nationalist who believes the nation should be under the thumb of people like him. Gotta be weird to come home to that if you are Usha.
And then there are his biracial kids. At minimum, Vance wants to just disappear the fact that they are indisputably biracial, with the whole “I don’t see color” sort of thing, explaining that he and Usha “were taught to think about people as people and not as whatever artificial, superficial skin color they had.”
Honestly surprised he didn’t deploy the out-of-context Martin Luther King Jr. quote that is a favorite of racist conservatives everywhere: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
While Vance has deployed references to his biracial children when it suits him, he also happily defended President Donald Trump’s attacks on former Vice President Kamala Harris for her biracial identity, saying that Trump’s comments were “totally reasonable.”
Pal, Trump said that Harris “happened to turn Black.” There’s no world where that’s totally reasonable.
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And when fellow Republicans are deeply, disgustingly racist, like the Young Republicans in those leaked chats, Vance defended the racists, of course, saying these were jokes from “kids.” Yeah, kids who are, like, 35 years old.
Or how about when Marko Elez, one of the vicious tweens that comprised the first wave of Department of Government Efficiency employees, was fired for posting things like “I was racist before it was cool” and “normalize Indian hate.” Did Vance call out this racism that was literally directed at people like his wife and his children? Nope. He demanded that Elez be rehired.
He did a mushy little “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts,” but gosh, “stupid social media activity” shouldn’t ruin the kid’s life, right? The real problem, per Vance, was people who wrote about Eloz’s racism: “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.”
Vance is a professional racist and Christian chauvinist, and he’s not going to be happy until he warps his wife and children—and the whole of America, really—into becoming just like him.
