Vice President JD Vance said that online influencers, allegedly paid to criticize his efforts to negotiate peace with Iran, should “go to hell.”
Vance sat for an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Tuesday, just days after President Donald Trump reinstated coordinated airstrikes against Iran.
During the interview, the vice president, tasked by Trump with leading the negotiations with Tehran, pointed to a Time magazine article from earlier in the week, outlining what he referred to as a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal.”
The article claimed that, for months, former Trump campaign adviser Brad Parscale had been paid millions by the Israeli government to astroturf opposition to Trump’s attempts at peace among online influencers.
“They’re attacking me obsessively, saying that we should not be negotiating with Iran. We should just keep the military campaign going indefinitely, and that is their explicit position,” he stated. “People have come after me and say that I’m influenced by Qatar, that I’m influenced by foreign governments, that I take my marching orders from Tucker Carlson, and there’s just so much bulls*** out there.”
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Vance claimed not to be bothered by Israel’s efforts to influence popular opinion, stating it’s “just the nature of the beast.” Still, he appeared frustrated that, in hindsight, “American leadership” was swayed by those efforts.
“People are always going to try to influence the United States of America, whether they’re allies of ours or whether they’re enemies of ours, but again, when I open up the pages of Time magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and oh by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, you know, my response to that is, ‘Well, go to hell,’” he concluded.