Vance Uses Vile Smear for Protester Who Demands Epstein Files

The Daily Beast - Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images Vice President JD Vance has denigrated a protester who demanded the release of the Epstein files with a racist assumption.

Vance, 42, was interrupted on stage at an event for North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley as he railed against the Biden administration, which he said “subjected this country to woke insanity for years.” The man, standing behind Vance in the crowd, stood up and yelled about releasing the Epstein files, saying, “God bless our children.” Vance turned around to see the man as he was escorted out of the crowd, which had erupted into chants of “U-S-A.” After a moment, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to have to amend something I said earlier: I said that we have had zero illegal border crossings in the United States of America.

But one isn’t bad, right?” Vance’s supporters in the crowd laughed at his distasteful attempt at a joke, which seemed to imply the man was an illegal immigrant because he was not white.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we know what the guy yelling at us behind us stood for,” Vance continued.

“And we know what the far-left Democrats like [Whatley’s opponent] Don Davis stand for.

They stand for the idea that your government exists for fraudsters or criminals or illegal aliens, when we know the American government exists for American citizens.

That’s who it belongs to.” When reached for comment, the White House referred the Daily Beast to Vance’s office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The vice president has been accused of racism before.

In 2024, while he was still a U.S. senator in Ohio, he spread absurd, false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets.

He later admitted on live television that he made the claims up and that he was willing to “ create stories ” to get media attention.

Vance, alongside President Donald Trump, had campaigned on the idea of the federal government releasing the Epstein files in their entirety, but seemed to sour on the idea after the administration’s botched release.

He told podcaster Joe Rogan in July that “we absolutely screwed up the comms” and blamed former Attorney General Pam Bondi for having “overstated what we had and what we didn’t have,” regarding the files.

“But do I think the reason we screwed up the comms is because we were trying to hide something? No,” he told Rogan.

Protesters have made a trend of speaking up at Trump’s rallies lately, with more than a dozen demonstrators interrupting the president’s rhetoric at his San Antonio, Texas, rally earlier this month.