I come from an evangelical background that the New York Times once called evangelical royalty. I left that world more than forty years ago. Since then, I have warned people about the hypocrisy that now defines evangelical support for MAGA, for Donald Trump, and for all the evils that follow from that allegiance, from Jeffrey Epstein on down.
Among all that hypocrisy, one person stands out. The scale of it. The intimacy of it. The sheer dishonor of it.
That man is JD Vance.
Women who are close to me, my wife, my daughter, my granddaughters, sometimes bristle when men say, “Well, I sympathize with women because I have a daughter.” And they are right to bristle. Women deserve rights and protection simply because they are human beings, not because men happen to love a woman personally.
But JD Vance is not an abstract case.
He is married to a brown woman of the very kind that ICE is rounding up, dragging from parked cars after smashing their windows. In her womb is a brown baby, his fourth child. He has four brown children. A brown wife. And he works for a man who posted a video mocking another brown woman, Michelle Obama, by putting her in a gorilla suit. That video was taken down later without apology.
JD Vance works for this man.
Has he said a word about it?
If I had a wife who fit the racial profile of women being dragged out of cars, profiled in airports, arrested at security lines, hauled out of factories, parking lots, Home Depots, and restaurants, I would resign. I would resign immediately. If I had any honor at all.
I do have some honor.
My son fought in the United States Marine Corps. He served twice in Afghanistan and once in Iraq. JD Vance says he was a Marine too. Marines are taught values about human life, even though they are trained for war. Those values stand in direct opposition to what ICE is doing to civilians, to noncombatants, to children.
The laws of war exist for a reason. And yet we now have people in power who mock those laws, who kill civilians clinging to boats, who treat human life as disposable. JD Vance claims to understand those laws. He claims to have been taught honor.
Then explain this.
JD Vance has a brown wife. He has brown children roughly the same age as a five year old child who was arrested by ICE and thrown into a detention center. A detention center where disease spreads. Where health care is minimal or nonexistent. Where children are brutalized. Where people die.
JD Vance works for a man who kept company with a pedophile and a rapist. He took money from Peter Thiel and then spoke at a pro life conference, even though Thiel is a eugenicist funding genetic selection and embryo destruction on a massive scale. If you are a pro lifer, that is abortion by another name.
JD Vance works alongside Tucker Carlson, who platformed a Holocaust denying Nazi without apology. He watched respected conservatives resign in protest and said nothing.
And still he remains silent.
JD Vance has a brown wife. A wife whose skin color would make her a target for the racism he excuses every day. If she were not his wife, if he were not useful to power, Donald Trump would mock her too. He would humiliate her. He would reduce her to a caricature.
How do you look at yourself in the mirror, JD Vance?
Your wife fits the profile of women dragged from cars in handcuffs. Your children fit the profile of children being arrested. You work for a president who authorizes every one of these actions. Every arrest. Every child taken. Every killing. None of this happens without the man you serve.
And yet you say nothing.
You were booed publicly and the sound was cut by a media company afraid of your master. You travel with ICE as your security detail in foreign countries where ICE is hated for the same reasons it is feared here. You claim faith. You claim conversion. But your god is not the God you name. Your god is power. Your god is racism.
That gorilla suit was meant for your wife. For you. For your children.
And you still work for him.
Every single ICE arrest traces back to Donald Trump’s office. Every single act of cruelty flows from that source. You enable it. You excuse it. You benefit from it.
You are a coward who will not even defend your own family.
