Senator JD Vance unleashed a slew of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric during a long conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan that aired on Thursday, saying it was “common sense” to exclude people with certain backgrounds from the United States.
Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, spoke with Rogan for more than three hours, talking at length about the Trump campaign’s plans for the southern US border while criticising the Biden administration. At one point, Rogan described a “worst-case scenario” for people fearful of a state falling under Islamic law, pointing to a recent law in Minneapolis that allows mosques to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer.
“That starts getting real weird,” Rogan told Vance. “When you have people openly saying our goal is … to outbreed everyone who is not Muslim.”
“Scares the hell out of me,” Vance replied. “That’s what to me is so crazy … about some of the hyper left-wing reaction. Where you see actual religious tyranny is increasingly in Western societies where you’ve had a large influx of immigrants who don’t necessarily assimilate into western values but try to create, I think, a religious tyranny at the local level.”
“And if you think that will happen at a national level, you’re [called] crazy.”
Vance then lamented that those who want to exclude people from some nations — referencing the Trump travel ban on people from some majority-Muslim nations, an order that he has pledged to restore — were called racist.
“Somehow it’s fundamentally racist to say, well, we don’t want certain people of certain backgrounds to be in the United States of America,” the senator from Ohio said. “No, it’s just common sense.”
Vance went on to say that there is “something in the modern liberal mind that doesn’t even allow” people to ask how certain immigrants would benefit the country.
“If the answer is we don’t benefit,” he said, “then why would we bring them into the country?”
Trump has continued to fill his campaign rallies with striking anti-immigration rhetoric, stoking fears of an incursion along the southern border and blasting the Biden administration for what he describes as inaction on a migrant crisis.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, however, has pointed to Trump’s insistence earlier this year that Republicans block a bipartisan border deal that the White House had touted as an effective fix for border enforcement.