From there, Vance’s speech took on a strange, anachronistic framework as he vaguely referenced a previous administration’s decision to relocate manufacturing jobs and falsely claimed that Harris had supported the reauthorization of NAFTA – and not for the first time.

The reinstatement of NAFTA occurred in 1992, when Harris was a young prosecutor and Vance was just eight years old. Biden was a senator at the time, however, and had supported the reinstatement of NAFTA, so it’s possible that Vance is trying to take an old swipe at a new candidate. In 2020, Harris actually voted against Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA. She was part of a group of Democrats who opposed the new deal because it was too similar to the original—which supposedly amounts to supporting it.

Vance also claimed that a distant government opened the border to immigrants in order to attract “millions of voters to Democratic policies and millions of cheap labor.” Once again he promotes the Great Replacement theory, a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are trying to replace the white population. Vance wasn’t specific enough to say which government he was referring to, but it didn’t matter because his rambling remarks would soon become personal.