J. D. Vance Fails a Simple Moral Test

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The vice president welcomes anti-Semites into the Republican coalition.

On Sunday, J. D. Vance was presented with the simplest moral test: denounce commentators who traffic in medieval blood libels, who deny the Holocaust, and who endlessly harp on evil Jewish cabals.

The test was forced on the vice president. By the time he addressed the Turning Point USA conference this past weekend, it had turned into a referendum on latter-day Father Coughlins who have acquired substantial and growing audiences on the right. Among them is Candace Owens, whose YouTube channel has 5.7 million followers. She argues that there is a powerful, secret sect within Judaism practicing pedophilia. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, who has 16.8 million followers on X, has shared his microphone with an unabashed fan of Adolf Hitler and with historians who minimize the Nazi dictator's evil.

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Their noxious theories about Jews became the defining question of the Turning Point confab. The podcaster Ben Shapiro denounced the anti-Semites. That prompted Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Donald Trump, to cast Shapiro as a "cancer." By conducting their argument in public, the two sides"those who criticize anti-Semitism and those who tolerate it"were essentially begging Vance, the headliner of the event, to render a verdict.

When presented with the simplest moral test, Vance failed. "We have far more important work to do than canceling each other," he said, as if anti-Semitism were just one more woke fixation.

Noah Rothman - JD Vance Picks a Side

Vance has made a choice here, and it's a clarifying one. His allies are telling us straight that this is all about JD Vance - his political ambitions, his position as Donald Trump's most likely successor, and, by extension, their own prospects when Trump is gone. Those voices claim that if you object to the rehabilitation of outright antisemitism on behalf of actual Nazis - not some tortured Democratic metaphor for fascism but the actual NSDAP circa 1920 to 1945 - you're the paranoiac here.

Vance will pretend as though he is disinterestedly arbitrating a political dispute on the right, but he's not. He has intervened in it on behalf of his allies and their revisionist historical project. If Vance's contention is that the figures like Shapiro, who aren't nobly attempting to talk sense to the talker class, are maliciously bifurcating the conservative movement and sowing division, the vice president's implicit outlook is that interventions like Shapiro's are the problem. That is an effort to shackle the interveners and arrest the rehabilitative process. Whatever else that is, it is not a neutral disposition.

#4 'Tis true, you know.

The Reverand Jim Jones, late of Guyana, left no designated successor.

What a short-sighted individual.

Where's his "Peoples Temple" today?

#11 Why should you "...give a s**t what this person I've never heard of has to say"???

Indeed.

You gave such a little a s**t that you actually commented.

#11 Are you always so willing to humiliate yourself in public?

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future and World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. He was previously the editor of The New Republic and a staff writer at Slate and New York magazine. His other books include How Soccer Explains the World and Jewish Jocks (co-edited with Marc Tracy), which won a National Jewish Book Award.