Onlookers astonished by JD Vance's latest attempt to dunk on Pope Leo: 'Excommunicate him'

JD Vance Tried to Outrank the Pope. It Was the Wrong Institution.The TargetVice President JD Vance went on Fox News and took a swipe at Pope Leo, attacking the pope’s immigration stance and recasting deportation politics as a question of “dignity” for the “native born.” The immediate result was ridicule: critics online mocked the move as pretentious, unserious, and exactly the kind of self-importance it was meant to project.Who Holds PowerThis is the part Vance’s performance obscures. The pope is not the one running the state apparatus. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump are. They control immigration policy, enforcement priorities, detention practices, and the machinery that turns rhetoric into forced removal. When Vance talks about “troubling” Vatican comments, he is not speaking from the outside. He is defending the administration doing the damage.The Blame ShuffleVance’s line is classic power rhetoric: elevate the discomfort of the powerful and call it balance. He wraps a crackdown in the language of moral symmetry, as if the state’s obligations to migrants and citizens are competing abstractions rather than a question of who gets protected and who gets targeted. That is misdirection. The issue is not whether the pope understands nationalism. The issue is that the administration he is defending is using the state to punish vulnerable people, then insisting the language of cruelty is actually concern.A Familiar TrickThe “dignity of the native born” formulation is not neutral. It is a political wedge dressed up as ethical seriousness. It turns immigration into a zero-sum contest between people with power and people without it, which is exactly how you launder restriction into moral common sense. If the article wants to frame this as a clash of opinions, that framing is weak. What it really shows is an official trying to make exclusion sound principled.The Real PatternThe ridicule matters because it exposes the weakness of the script. Vance tried to perform authority against a pope and ended up sounding like a man reciting a policy memo with spiritual cosplay attached. But the deeper point is uglier: when institutions with real coercive power feel challenged, they often reach for moral inversion. They cast critics as naive, sanctimonious, or elite while presenting their own enforcement regime as mere realism.Systemic ErrorThis is not a dispute about theology. It is a demonstration of how governing classes talk when they want harsh policy to seem like wisdom. They pick a symbolic enemy, inflate their own virtue, and ask the public to mistake cruelty for seriousness. The pope can be mocked. The machinery of state violence cannot. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe