White Supremacy and a Narcissistic Administration
J.D. Vance Uses the DARVO Technique to Avoid Responsibility
J.D. Vance “Don’t Apologize for Being White”
At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, this past December, J.D. Vance framed cultural criticism of whiteness as an unjust moral attack, asserting that people should not apologize for being “white.”
Yes, those poor white folks. How abused they are.
Specifically, he stated, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore”.
The line came midway through a speech in front of an overwhelmingly white crowd that included mentions of mass deportations and dismantling diversity programs.
Vance presented this sentiment as part of a push for meritocracy and colorblind governance, celebrating the end of federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs during the Trump administration’s second term.
The remark drew significant applause from the audience and generated considerable commentary and debate afterward.
Dr. Stacey Patton commented on Vance’s speech, pointing out the real motive:
“You don’t have to apologize for being white” functioned like a benediction. A cleansing ritual. A collective release of shame and moral disinhibition. This is how racial movements restore and sustain themselves. If the Ku Klux Klan once offered white Americans racial belonging through terror, today’s version offers it through policy, grievance, and applause. The goal is the same: to tell white audiences they are under siege and morally justified in pushing back without apology.
Vance Is Playing the “DARVO” Game
As Dr. Patton clearly suggests, Vance is playing a rhetorical and psychological game common among narcissists. First, no one is asking individuals to apologize for their race. Not one Black, Hispanic, or Asian leader has asked white people to apologize for the color of their skin.
Vance’s comment serves as a deflection or misdirection.
Second, the critique against whiteness is structural, ideological, and historical, not personal. Vance only defines racism as something an individual does, not how a system is designed. He completely denies the structural/historical nature of racism.
Third, the audience was already primed around grievance politics and identity threat. They were easily manipulated into accepting his misdirection. Vance, along with MAGA and many conservative leaders, would have them, and all of us, believe that white people are the real victims. In the parlance of conservative language, he played the race card in reverse.
This technique makes his speech an ideal candidate for a DARVO analysis. J.D. Vance’s “don’t apologize for being white” rhetoric functions as a textbook example of DARVO:
deny structural harm
attack those who name it
reverse victimhood and offender
DARVO transforms racial accountability into an act of persecution and avoids accountability
This inversion is not accidental—it is the emotional foundation of contemporary right-wing identity politics and the foundation of Trump’s tactics. It undergirds the colorblind ideology that conservatives love to preach. In reality, it is a game played by narcissists all the time to avoid responsibility and accountability.
DARVO In Trauma Research
DARVO is not just a pithy little acronym, but is a well-founded psychological principle used in trauma therapy. Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon and Founder and President of the Center for Institutional Courage, has provided the theory and underlying empirical foundation for DARVO.
Originally, DARVO referred to a reaction that perpetrators of wrongdoing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. Helping victims understand the process by which perpetrators manipulate them helps in their healing process.
The process is well established. A perpetrator or offender may deny the behavior, attack the individual doing the confronting, and reverse the roles of victim and offender, such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the actual victim—or the whistleblower—into an alleged offender.
Not only can DARVO help to explain the gaslighting-abusive behavior of individuals as they inflict harm on one person, but institutions can also engage in this process. Institutional DARVO occurs when it is committed by an institution (or with institutional complicity), as when police charge rape victims with lying. Institutional DARVO is a pernicious form of institutional betrayal.
Breaking Vance’s Comment Down Using DARVO
Applying this framework to J.D. Vance’s comments is straightforward. First, Vance is denying that institutional racism even exists. Telling a group of people with white skin that they no longer need to apologize for being white denies the societal harm that “whiteness” has caused people of color for generations.
The idea of whiteness was created to establish a hierarchy within society and to justify inhuman treatment. The economic motive was a crucial aspect of the hierarchy. Those with white skin could own property, sue in court, bear arms, establish businesses, and prosper. Those with Black skin could not.
J.D. Vance next attacks those who are trying to obtain the same status and equality as those who are white. By implication, Vance is attacking anyone who seems to be holding white people accountable for personal or systemic racism. In DARVO, the wrongdoer launches a full broadside against those who are making any accusation. They are persecuting you and me. They are unfairly calling us racist. In other words, “they” are the real perpetrator and the real racists.
This leads to step three in the process: the reversal of roles between victim and perpetrator. Vance’s comments, and other modes of conservative argument such as “colorblindness,” reverse the role. Those who are doing the calling out are discriminating against us; those who point out the systemic nature of racism are the real perpetrators. By extension, white people are being unfairly targeted and discriminated against.
It is classic gaslighting and victim-blaming. This technique is used by narcissists and those who want to control others. DARVO has become a core rhetorical engine of modern right-wing populism, especially where dominant groups face demographic or cultural change and historical narratives are being reexamined.
What makes Vance’s remarks significant is how cleanly they illustrate the pattern—and how openly they deploy grievance without naming any actual policy harm being imposed on white Americans. There is no evidence that white people are being discriminated against or harmed by the call for accountability for the historical racism inherent within US history, such as enslavement, Jim Crow, and the colorblindness ideology of the 1970s to today.
DARVO As a Tool for Right-Wing Propaganda
This psychological inversion is not just a fanciful theory. It has a real impact on how citizens, especially Euro-Americans, see themselves as being victims of discrimination. A May 2025 Pew survey found that 45% of white Americans believe white people in general experience “some” or “a lot” of discrimination. Without denying the lived experience of any individual, it would be hard to build the case that the “discrimination” that a white person might experience is remotely similar or equivalent to that experienced by people of color in a white-dominated culture.
Breaking the Pew survey down by political affiliation shows that Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to believe white people are the victims of discrimination. The conservative narrative has been very successful.
Historical Precedents
But we can’t just blame poor J.D. Vance for promoting this gaslighting tool. He has learned from history and his benefactor, Donald Trump, how effective it can be. The DARVO methodology has been used in racial conflict and social change for decades. Here is a classic example:
The primary historical example is the segregationists’ response to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s–1960s. This is one of the clearest, most effective uses of DARVO in modern political history.
Even President Trump has recently commented that “I think that a lot of people were very badly treated. White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university or a college. So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”
Trump was echoing the DARVO technique used at the time.
Recall that the Civil Rights Movement challenged legal segregation, voter suppression, racial terror, and unequal citizenship. The claims were concrete, evidence-based, and rooted in constitutional promises and the lived experience of millions of people of color.
Segregationists denied that racial injustice existed as a systemic problem. Their common claims included statements such as, “Blacks are already equal under the law,” “The South treats its Negro citizens well,” and “Outside agitators exaggerate problems.” There was never an acceptance of culpability or wrongdoing…it was denial, denial, denial.
This denial did not require disproving lynching, poll taxes, or segregated schools. Instead, it redefined injustice as isolated incidents or misunderstandings. DARVO works by narrowing the definition of harm until it disappears.
Next, segregationists attacked civil rights activists and organizations like the NAACP. They also attacked those they believed were allies, such as northern journalists and the federal courts. They were called “Outside agitators” and “communists.”
Martin Luther King Jr. was excoriated as a criminal, a threat to social order, and a dupe of foreign ideology. Segregationists worked hard to reframe constitutional protests as aggression. They were the peaceful ones being assailed by civil rights protesters and liberal courts.
The third step was to reverse roles. Segregationists reversed the victim and offender. This is where the rhetoric became emotionally powerful. White Southerners were portrayed as victims of federal tyranny, of forced integration, of cultural annihilation, and most importantly, of “reverse discrimination.”
Meanwhile, Black citizens facing violence and exclusion disappeared from the narrative. State power enforcing segregation was cast as defensive, and George Wallace’s famous line—“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—was framed as protecting freedom, not denying it. The group enforcing racial hierarchy cast itself as the last defender of liberty.
DARVO In Action Today
Today, white supremacists routinely utilize DARVO tactics. The “All Lives Matter” slogan is often cited as a DARVO-related deflection tactic used to divert attention from the specific issue of Black victims of police brutality raised by the “Black Lives Matter” movement. It creates a false equivalence and shifts the focus away from targeted systemic inequality while relieving white supremacists from any accountability.
The organized political backlash against Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education has been described by researchers as a form of "Institutional DARVO". Efforts to ban books and restrict teaching about systemic racism involve denying racism's ongoing impact, attacking the theory's proponents, and claiming that white children are the victims of indoctrination and stereotyping are examples of role reversal.
When peaceful Black protesters point out systemic racism, they are sometimes criminalized as "thugs" by the white establishment, forcing them to defend themselves against false accusations of being the problem, rather than addressing the core issue of inequality they raised. White supremacists are keenly aware of the effectiveness of the tactic and use it regularly.
Trump, the DARVO Master
Observing how DARVO plays out in the conversations around race and racism in America, it isn’t hard to see how the Trump Administration utilizes this technique continually to gaslight and try to control the narrative. From Trump’s campaign against his accusers, such as Jack Smith and others, he clearly is denying their charges, and then attacking them and reversing the role, turning himself into a victim of unfair persecution.
He is using this technique in the Epstein files strategy, claiming Democrats had a "sustained pattern of misconduct" to fabricate a "politically motivated hoax" while ignoring the actual content of the files.
The intent behind these tactics is to confuse the public, silence critics, shift the conversation away from the original issue, and evade accountability. Awareness of this pattern is considered the first step in resisting its manipulative influence.
Trauma therapists will advise victims that narcissists who use this technique cannot be convinced through logic or evidence. By addressing their deflections, you follow them down a rabbit hole from which there is only a circular argument. That is where they want you to go.
The best response is not to argue but to call out the technique, letting the abuser (that is what Trump is) know that their method will not work on you because you are aware of what they are trying to do. You expose their subterfuge.
Resistance is truth-telling…and the truth in most of these cases is that they are manipulating the narrative to try to manipulate you. Resistance means letting them know it will not work.
This is the same technique that Kristi Noem is now using to try to convince the American public that the ICE officer was the victim, not Renee Good. That is the subject of my next column.
DARVO will not work…if we don’t let it work. Understanding the strategy, calling it out, and not falling prey to it is how we resist.
Thank you for giving me more knowledge to counter the manipulative role reversal of perpetrator and victim.
Appreciate the insight on this tactic.