JD Vance has turned obsessive racial commentary into a political personality, returning to it with the predictability of a pundit who knows exactly which buttons generate clicks, cash, and cable bookings. Rather than offering solutions to wages, healthcare, or the material struggles he once claimed to understand, he now prefers to narrate America through a permanent culture-war lens, flattening complex realities into a grievance script he can perform on command. Race, for Vance, is no longer a subject to be approached with care or humility; it is a prop, endlessly recycled to signal allegiance to an audience that rewards outrage over governance.

What makes this fixation especially hollow is the studied selectivity of it. Vance rarely discusses race when it intersects with policy failures, structural inequality, or economic exploitation, topics that would require actual work. Instead, he frames race as an abstract threat, a rhetorical weapon aimed downward, never upward, and always conveniently detached from the power structures he now serves. It is grievance politics stripped of responsibility, a performance designed to inflame rather than improve, and to distract from the absence of serious legislative ambition.

At this point, Vance should probably stop pretending he’s conflicted about any of this. He has fully committed to the race-grift economy, and there’s no sense maintaining the fiction that he’s something else. He might as well make it official, abandon the pretense of reluctant participation, and politically “marry” a fellow race-grifter like Erika Kirk, forming a tidy, on-brand union devoted entirely to monetizing resentment. At least then voters would get the honesty they deserve: a politician no longer interested in governing, only in cultivating outrage as a career path. His path is clear, divorce his wife, of whom he is clearly ashamed for not being wife (he said as much during the 2024 campaign), disown his biracial kids, and marry fellow race grifter Erika Kirk.