Saturday marked the debut episode of The Assignment with Antonia Hylton on MS NOW — the network formerly known as MSNBC before the rebrand nobody asked for. To celebrate the occasion, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude decided to inform America that Vice President JD Vance "is not necessarily tired of being racist."
Said it like he was reading the lunch specials.
The remark came during a panel discussion about a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery. Glaude was responding to comments Vance made two days earlier at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on September 10. The Vice President had told the crowd: "We are tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country, and we were tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous."
Pretty standard border-security language. The kind of thing 70 percent of the country agrees with in every poll taken since 2023.
But Glaude heard something different. He told Hylton that Vance is "tired of being called a racist — he's not necessarily tired of being racist" because "he's trafficking in all sorts of stereotypes." He then added, with the confidence of a man whose salary depends on finding racism in breakfast cereal, that "they want to be white without judgment."
No evidence offered. No specific stereotype identified. No quote where Vance says anything about race at all. The Vice President talked about cartels, crime, and economic decline — and a professor at one of the most expensive universities in the country translated that into a racism diagnosis on live television.
Glaude went further, framing the entire Republican project as a "white nationalist project" and invoking history as proof: "History, of course, offers so much in order to account for our current moment." Which is a sentence that sounds profound until you realize it doesn't actually say anything. History offers a lot. So does a fortune cookie.
The people making this accusation never have to meet a standard of proof. Glaude didn't cite a Vance policy that discriminates by race. He didn't reference a speech where Vance mentioned race. He took a quote about border security, ran it through the Princeton critical-theory translator, and out came "racist." The mechanism is the same every time: redefine ordinary policy language as coded bigotry, then accuse anyone who uses it.
This is the same Eddie Glaude who told MS NOW viewers back on September 1 that Republicans are "white supremacists" — not fringe Republicans, not extremists, but the party itself. When you've already called the whole party white supremacist, calling the Vice President a full-time racist is just Tuesday.
Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, raised by his grandmother in Appalachian poverty. Wrote a bestselling book about it. Married the daughter of Indian immigrants. Ran on an economic populist platform that talked about jobs, trade, and opioids. None of that made it into Glaude's analysis, because none of it fits the template.
The debut episode of The Assignment aired on MS NOW — a network that rebranded because the old name had become synonymous with collapsing ratings and editorial malpractice. New name, same playbook. A Princeton professor calls the Vice President a racist on camera, the host nods along, and the seven people watching feel very informed.
Meanwhile, Vance was in Dallas talking to a packed arena about fentanyl and manufacturing jobs. One of those events will matter in November. The other one had a debut audience that probably lost to local weather.