JD Vance Told the Convention He's Tired of Being Called Racist for "Noticing"

The Republican outreach continues! The party wants you to know it is sick and tired of being called racist. Really sick of it. So tired that the Vice President of the United States made it a centerpiece of his convention speech.

On Thursday, September 10, at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, JD Vance gave his closing argument for the midterms. This is the line:

Read that again, slowly, and ask the obvious question. Noticing what, exactly?

Nobody ever got called racist for saying crime went up, or wages went down, or a street needs sweeping. You get called racist when you say who made it dirty, poor and dangerous. The sentence only makes sense if the thing being noticed is people. Vance left that part blank and let the arena fill it in.

I. THE WORD

"Noticing" is not a neutral word anymore, and a man as online as JD Vance knows it. For years it has been the in-group wink of the race-realist internet: "I'm just noticing," "you're not allowed to notice," "noticing" as shorthand for the claim that certain groups of people are the problem and everyone is too scared to say so. It lets you say the thing without saying the thing.

That is what a dog whistle is. Most listeners hear a complaint about potholes and crime. The people it's meant for hear something else, and they know they were meant to.

And the list he chose, "dirtier," is the tell. It is the oldest word in the nativist vocabulary. It's what they said about the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Mexicans and the Haitians, each in turn. A country doesn't get "dirtier" on its own. Somebody has to be doing it.

II. THE SAME WEEK, THE SAME STATE

Want to see what "noticing" looks like in practice? Three days later, in the same state, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner looked at a photo of South Asian students cheering at a UT football game and noticed they were "foreigners." He didn't know their names or where they were born. He noticed.

That's the product. The Vice President supplies the permission slip from the podium, and the rank and file fill in the names.

III. THE REST OF THE SPEECH

Vance went on to call Democrats "the party of hatred" and "the party that despises America and the people who built it."

The people who built it. Also doing a lot of work. Ask who he pictures when he says it. Then ask who actually laid the rail, picked the cotton, and poured the concrete.

Then: "Because the Democrats have become such a nightmare, we can never, we will never, never let them win."

Never let them win. Not "beat them." Never let them. File that one away for November.

No clarification has followed, and none will. There's nothing to walk back when you never said the word out loud. That's the whole design.

He's tired of being called a racist for noticing. We're tired of noticing. No dogwhistle needed here... well, one, but everybody heard it.