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“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform,” Vice President JD Vance told the crowd at Turning Point USA‘s AmFest conference in Phoenix this week. This was almost surely a shot at Ben Shapiro, who warned earlier in the week about the “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”
One of these malicious voices is Vance’s good friend and benefactor, Tucker Carlson.
Few politicians beat on strawmen with more frequency than Vance. And, in this case, the red herring is the word “deplatform.” It insinuates a form of censorship. But the millionaire podcasters that Vance is shielding have huge audiences, and there’s not a single notable person anywhere who argues they should be censored. They’re being called out.
Speaking out against those who normalize odious lies and indecency, as Carlson does, is a way of exercising free expression. Indeed, the podcasters Vance is white knighting make a living trying to destroy others. Vance is often highly critical of media personalities. Does that mean he wants them “deplatformed?”
Vance had already leaned into this weaselly deflection in 2024 after Carlson interviewed America-hating crank and Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper, “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Asked what he thought about the podcaster, Vance launched into another one of his insincere lectures. If “you see a bad idea,” Vance said, you don’t “censor it,” you attack it with “free speech.”
That’s nice. But no one was censoring Carlson, who never attacks the lies of his deranged guests. Vance was being asked his personal opinions on his friend’s platforming of a Jew-baiting pseudohistorian. We got the answer.
In a recent interview with fellow “postliberal” Sohrab Ahmari, Vance contends that Nick Fuentes’s “influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated.” This is an entirely defensible point. After all, despite all the propaganda and vile conspiracies spread by the Carlson wing of “conservatism,” a strong majority of attendees at the recent TPUSA conference still consider Israel as our ally.
Yet, instead of finishing the remark there, Vance added that the danger was “overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.”
So, you see, the problem wasn’t the elevation of Fuentes, a podcaster whose oeuvre spans from praising Hitler to calling women “whores” and “stupid dirty b****es” who “want to be raped.” Nor was the problem Carlson’s monomaniacal obsession with Zionists and Jews, a topic that dominates most of his episodes in one ugly form or another. That’s all free expression. No, the problem is a group that wants to avoid “foreign policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.”
Who are these “people?” I run across scores of pieces defending Israel every day. If the vice president is having trouble locating these articles, columns, and speeches, or needs a list of intellectuals who would love to debate the topic, I’d be happy to provide them. Perhaps then he could convince Carlson to stop hiding behind the robes of Qatari sheiks and have one of these challenging “conversations” himself.
Now, it’s certainly true that Jews don’t seek out debate over whether the Mossad assassinated Charlie Kirk or whether AIPAC operates space weather lasers or any of the unhinged theories that Candace Owens or Carlson feature on their shows. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has already been debunked, though you might not know it online.
In any event, Vance has never uttered a word of protest about any of these deranged positions, maintaining strict neutrality on speech grounds. Critics of Carlson, on the other hand, aren’t afforded such grace. They are cast as deplatformers and “gatekeepers.” Using Vance’s formulation, only one side is allowed to speak.
In the Unherd interview, Vance offers some perfunctory condemnation of bigotry, before contending “[a]lmost no Americans are antisemitic” — which is definitely a big relief. Only around “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats,” the vice president contends, “do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish.”
However, he adds, there is a “real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy” and “we should be able to say ‘we agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’”
Again, for Vance, Israel supporters are problematic. This talking point is one of the most loathsome because it insinuates that Jews and Christian Zionists control the conversation, rather than stake out positions.
Vance should man up and name the specific issue “we” are allegedly forbidden from debating in this country. Because virtually every major media outlet has been campaigning against Israel for decades. I’ve been in a continuous argument over the issue my entire professional life. Being critical of the Israeli government isn’t antisemitic, and no serious person has ever argued otherwise. Endless attacks on American Jews as having dual loyalties and conspiratorial lies about Israeli bloodlust are a different story.
Indeed, it’s odd that Vance holds people like his boss, Trump, by a considerable margin, the most Israel-friendly president in history, responsible for creating a “backlash” against Jewish people. One wonders what policy Vance believes Israel has engaged in that provokes young “Groypers” to spread age-old anti-Jewish tropes about the Talmud? Who knows, maybe they’re still mad about the breakdown of the Oslo talks.
“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeated purity tests,” Vance told attendees at TPUSA. Notice the modifiers of “endless” and “self-defeating” tacked on to “purity tests.” Of course, there are purity tests. The entire MAGA movement is predicated on loyalty to a single man’s vision. Americans have been divided between pro-Trump and anti-Trump. Vance does not shy away from that split. His New Right coalition relishes purging “neocons” and “libertarians” and “Paul Ryan conservatives,” and others who fail to embrace their statist outlook. The vice president has railed on Reaganism far more than he ever will against the bigoted Right. Politics is the clash of visions.
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Then again, if the vice president is comfortable sharing a movement with people who will refer to his wife as a “jeet,” that’s his prerogative. Most normal people have standards that aren’t based on cynical political or ideological calculations. Most normal people don’t want to be associated with psychos.
We don’t need performative denunciation of podcasters. It’s too late for that anyway. Nor do we need people wringing their hands over the twits, extremists, and modern shock jocks that dominate online conversation. Curiously, Vance feels the need to proactively shield the worst actors. And anyone who points out their vileness will be smeared as authoritarians on speech. In Vance’s worldview, the only protected class consists of his “woke Right” friends. It’s a transparent tactic meant to chill speech while ostensibly defending it.