Ian Ward

The term that gets thrown around a lot is like giving up a scalp.

And I think Vance and others agree.

are trying to effectuate a kind of broader cultural shift where they're going to say, no matter how offensive a comment was, we're not going to give up one of our own and we fight back against our enemies and our perceived enemies in the media.

Yeah, he stayed sort of conspicuously quiet in that whole controversy.

At the same time, I think he's doing some coalitional management here.

I think he rightly recognizes that Fuentes, despite his very odious views, has a very real and very mobilized following of young men that MAGA needs desperately to keep in its electoral coalition.

He's called Fuentes some names, but he's made no real effort to actually banish him from the conservative coalition.

There's a term that gets thrown around a lot on the right.

called Heritage America or Heritage Americans.

And these are Americans whose ancestry stretches back to the colonial period or the founding period.

They tend to be white, Protestant.

These people form the cultural core of America and their ethos and values should inform the political culture of the country.

And so long as immigrants respect that ethos

cultural ethos and immigrate legally to the United States, he's okay with having them there.

The Trump administration's crusade against illegal immigration, but also to some degree, legal immigration has just unleashed a lot of xenophobia that Vance is now having to contend with, directed at his own family.

I think it's

very hard to stake out a sort of principled anti-immigrant position without tapping into some very, very nasty undercurrents of xenophobia and emboldening those.

And once the cat's out of the bag, there's really nothing to stop it from being deployed against his own family.

I think you're starting to see a subtle tension emerge between two of the movement's slogans and the ideas they represent.

One of them is America First, and then the other idea is MAGA, right?