The Media is Ignoring the Biggest Story of the Year

Vance announces who qualifies as a real American

Jul 10, 2025

We need to wake the hell up quickly.

The United States under Donald Trump is beyond the dress rehearsal stage for fascism. It is here.

Two events this week confirm it. The first is the military operation in Los Angeles, where 90 National Guard troops, along with ICE and CBP agents, descended on MacArthur Park. They apparently failed to arrest any undocumented migrants but they did put the fear of God into children playing in the park on a sunny summer Monday.

They also recorded footage to release on social media or on Fox News or wherever brutality against fellow human beings is shown to titillate the base. Just watch the video below to see a cameraman running alongside the law enforcement agents to understand how carefully curated the whole event was.

When I saw photos of men on horseback perched atop a little hill, ready to ride upon the innocent people below, the first thing I thought was, “This looks like a pogrom.”

(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Pogroms were fairly routine in late imperial Russia. Every time the Tsar, the military or the Russian Orthodox Church needed a scapegoat or the locals just needed to let off some steam, they would ride out on horseback through the Pale of Settlement, raping and killing Jews, destroying or absconding with their belongings and generally making life completely unstable for the survivors, who never knew when the next attack would come.

No one was raped and killed in MacArthur Park but the images, more than one hundred years later, were not dissimilar. Uniformed men on horseback surveying their target location. Masked men on foot running toward vulnerable people with blood lust best left to the battle field. All simply to sow fear and then normalize it.

And that’s the point. If the American people get used to masked, armed men running roughshod through American cities, they will become complacent. And once they are complacent, Trump can run for a third term, impose martial law or do whatever else was unthinkable just a few short months ago.

The second event this week proved the point. Vice President JD Vance, who is one McDonalds order away from the presidency, deliver a speech last Saturday to the right-wing Claremont Institute in San Diego. His words were full of the empty jingoism that is typical of MAGA, including a big nod to the Great Replacement Theory that used to be politically repellent to anyone living outside Tucker Carlson’s small intestine. He also went on a diatribe against legal immigration and promised “that the people we serve have a better life in the country that their parents and grandparents built.” (Are you a first generation American? The Vice President is not interested in serving you. Sorry, Usha.)

But Vance went much further. He said something out loud that underscores the dangerous moment in which we find ourselves. In posing the question of what an American is, he explicitly rejected the notion of the United States as an idea, as the shining city on the hill that is built around a set of values defined in our foundational documents.

“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance told the audience.

In other words, subscribing to the doctrine that built this nation — the very “textual originalism” to which conservatives have long subscribed — is not particularly American. If it were, too many undesirables could call themselves American. As Vance said, it “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with principles upon which this nation was built.

Vance scoffs at this as “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation, American purely as an idea.”

But it wouldn’t be a right-winger making his point if he didn’t slam Jews or some other minority group in making it.

So, Vance chose to make an example of the ADL, whose mission is to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.”

The ADL, says Vance, labels people as domestic extremists “even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd — and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this — to saying ‘you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025.’”

The ADL, of course, has never said any such thing. The organization is not even particularly progressive or liberal, unless you consider the fight against antisemitism and other discrimination to be progressive or liberal. In the wake of January 6th, however, the ADL did serve as co-counsel in the District of Columbia’s civil lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two hate groups whose leaders were convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy and other crimes.

This is, apparently, enough to have triggered Vance. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he told the Claremont Institute of the Jews who run the ADL.

Vance’s beliefs are nothing new. They are practically identical to the creed that Nazis called “Blut und Boden,” or “Blood and Soil.”

Blut und Boden linked racial purity (“blood”) with territorial rootedness (“soil”), asserting that the German people had an inherent connection to the land based on racial descent. True national identity came from hereditary bloodlines, not ideas or citizenship. That’s why German Jews — no matter how deeply German they considered themselves to be, no matter how patriotically they had fought for the Kaiser during World War I — could never really be German, according to the Nazis.

Now, those same beliefs have taken root in the White House. For the man a heartbeat away from the presidency, true American identity lies in the bloodlines of those who have lived on American soil since at least the Civil War. (It bears mentioning that neither Donald Trump nor four of his five children would be considered real Americans under this scenario.)

Your citizenship, your allegiance to the flag and the nation’s founding documents mean nothing at all. Those are just an “idea.” What really matters is blood.

Just last Thursday, Trump told a rally in Iowa that he hates Democrats because “they hate our country.” On Saturday, Vance decided to one-up him. It is no longer enough to target someone for espousing a particular ideology, as Trump suggests. Now, you are a target if your blood has not flowed through the veins of ancestors living on American soil when hoop skirts were all the rage.

What is the next logical step for someone who subscribes to Vance’s world view? It is surely to cleanse the country of the fake Americans who arrived here long after the Battle of Antietam — especially of the Black or brown or Jewish variety.

(And yes, I know that the vast majority of Black people in this country came here in chains well before the Civil War but do we really believe that Vance is talking about their descendants when he speaks of real Americans?)

How that cleansing takes place remains to be determined, but rest assured, it is being called for at the highest levels of our government.

Nothing in the last since six months has been as disturbing as Vance’s speech. It spells out quite clearly that American fascism sits atop our government. Yet, it has gotten virtually no attention from corporate media, which will continue to whistle past the graveyard until their own newspapers and networks are eventually shut down.

Has anyone in the press corps asked Vance why he believes that a civil rights group combatting antisemitism is less American than members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who marched at the antisemitic Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville? Have any members of Congress said much about this at all, or even bothered to send a sternly worded letter to the White House to inquire?

The press and Democrats on Capitol Hill are not alone in ignoring what is happening. So are the many MAGA supporters who think they will be immunized from what is coming because they subscribe to a particular set of beliefs. If their ties to American soil go back just a generation or two, or even five, none of that will matter. No amount of Make America Great Again swag will save them if Vance has his way.

Fascists always start with Jews and people of color. But they never stop just with them.

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The Media is Ignoring the Biggest Story of the Year

Vance announces who qualifies as a real American

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