Whither J.D. Vance – Mishpacha Magazine

Vance made no effort to explain why the MAGA movement or conservatism do not need borders

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ovelist E.M. Forster famously wrote, “If given the choice between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster’s hope has now become the standard approach among a number of prominent “right-wing” commentators, think tank directors, and politicians.

Popular broadcaster Megyn Kelly, for instance, refuses to take Candace Owens to task for spouting total nonsense, without evidentiary support, on a daily basis, on the grounds that Owens is a friend and the mother of a young baby. On October 30, Kevin Roberts, the executive director of the Heritage Foundation, a premier conservative think tank, created a turmoil within his own organization when he broadcast a statement affirming that the Heritage Foundation would not in any way distance itself from its “close friend” Tucker Carlson, after the latter’s friendly interview with Nick Fuentes.

Of all those refusing to criticize Tucker Carlson’s platforming of Nick Fuentes, by far the most prominent was Vice President J.D. Vance. He told UnHerd interviewer Sohrab Ahmari, “Tucker’s a friend of mine. And do I have substantive disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics…. I’m also a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus.”

He went on to ridicule the proposition that Carlson, who supported President Trump and Vance in 2024, holds views that are “somehow completely anathema to conservatism, and that he has no place in the conservative movement.”

ONE PERSON WILLING to make the case that Carlson’s views ought to be completely anathema to the conservative movement, however, was Ben Shapiro. Remarkably, he did so in a speech at the Heritage Foundation in the presence of Kevin Roberts.

Shapiro made two crucial points in his Heritage Foundation speech. Riffing on President Trump’s frequently repeated statement that a country without borders is no country, Shapiro argued that there can be no conservative movement without borders. In his effort to delineate a border for legitimate conservatism, Shapiro followed in the footsteps of William F. Buckley, generally considered the father of modern American conservatism. Buckley denied any foothold in his magazine, National Review, or in the movement to kooky conspiracists, like the John Birch Society, which called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a Soviet agent, or to anti-Semites or racists. To the latter end, he purged both Patrick Buchanan and Joe Sobran, a one-time protégé, from the pages of National Review.

Getting rid of anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists was both a moral imperative for Buckley and a practical necessity if the conservative movement was going to gain an audience for its ideas and win new adherents.

Shapiro’s second key point at both his Heritage Foundation speech and later the same week at a TPUSA gathering was a rejection of the “friendship trumps everything” position. At the Heritage Foundation, he described “truth” as a fundamental Biblical value and accused Carlson of placing no particular value on truth or on evidence in his hosting of a slew of conspiracy theorists.

At the TPUSA event, he put the matter as one of “duty”: “We owe you the truth. That means we should not mislead you. We should not hide the ball. We should not deliberately obscure what we are telling you [behind smoke screens like, “I’m just asking questions”]. We have an obligation to clarity and honesty.”

That means, inter alia, that if you offer a guest to your public, you have to either ask questions that get to the truth or admit that you agree with him or her. “If you post a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American, piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,” he told Tucker Carlson, take responsibility and either rebut him, as Buckley used to do on Firing Line, or admit that you agree with him. “Personal feeling is not a substitute for moral judgment.”

HAVING FRAMED the debate, Shapiro proceeded to eviscerate Tucker Carlson’s qualifications, at this point in time, as a conservative at all. And he did so using the Heritage Foundation’s own mission statement, which calls for support of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Carlson’s economic views are antithetical to free markets or limited government. He argues that the economy ought to be arranged for the benefit of the people of the country. That, Shapiro pointed out, is what all leftists believe, and inevitably leads to central planning by the government in place of free markets.

Moreover, Carlson frequently expresses his hostility to capitalism or capitalists. He calls venture capitalists “vulture capitalists,” and would ban any merger that resulted in the loss of overall jobs. “The main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose does not come from government anymore, but from the private sector,” according to Carlson.

In furtherance of his anti-American agenda, Carlson traveled to Russia to give Vladimir Putin an interview so fawning that even Putin expressed surprise. For Carlson, Putin is a “traditional leader with traditional values,” meaning he opposes same-gender marriage, which for Carlson has become the measure of all things. And if Putin is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands — well, leadership often involves killing people.

Carlson has also interviewed Alexander Dugan, often described as “Putin’s brain,” who is the chief ideologue of Russian imperialism and its right to Ukraine. While in Russia, Carlson took time to tour a supermarket, where he marveled at the cleanliness and low prices. What he neglected to mention, however, is that Russians pay a far higher percentage of their income for groceries than do Americans.

Rather than celebrating the founding philosophy of the Declaration of Independence or the wisdom of the American constitutional structure, Carlson peddles conspiracy theories about dark forces that have rendered American democracy a “fake.”

“Feudalism is better than what we have now,” says Carlson. “At least feudal lords had an interest in the well-being of the serfs.”

Instead of proposing solutions for the very real challenges facing America, Carlson engages in endless conspiracy theories. Those theories, Shapiro told his young TPUSA audience, “are seeding distrust in the world around you and enervating you.” They destroy the traditional American initiative and can-do spirit. “If you come to believe nothing in your life is in your control, you cannot even take control of your own life,” Shapiro said. “You despair of your ability to change your own circumstances, and you will fail.”

THE RESPONSES to Shapiro were intellectually flimsy at best and deeply worrying at worst. Without mentioning Shapiro by name, J.D. Vance clearly had him in mind when he spoke at TPUSA. He began, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform. President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in history by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.”

Contained within that statement are two claims. One, that Shapiro is engaged in cancel culture. That is a total red herring. Shapiro never called for the cancelation of Nick Fuentes’s or Tucker Carlson’s podcasts. He argued that their views are despicable and should be condemned as anathema by all principled conservatives.

The second claim is that Shapiro was splitting the MAGA movement. Yes, precisely. But Vance made no effort to explain why the MAGA movement or conservatism do not need borders, no matter how large the tent it wishes to maintain. That was picked up on by some of our most acute commentators: “Vance Wants Open Border in the MAGA Coalition” (Eli Lake); “Like the left, the conservative big tent won’t exclude anti-Semites” (Jonathan Tobin); “At AmFest, Vance Sides with the Nutjobs” (Park Macdougald).

Another tactic was diversionary. In his UnHerd interview, Vance attacked Fuentes, who had called him a “race-mixer” for marrying a woman of Indian descent, with relish. But Fuentes was never the main issue, as both Shapiro and Vance understood. The issue was the status of one of the most-listened-to podcasters in America amplifying the reach of Fuentes’s views by providing him with a larger platform and making no effort to refute his noxious views.

Vance made clear in his UnHerd interview that he views anti-Semitism, or any form of hatred based on immutable traits, to be unacceptable. But he then went on to downplay anti-Semitism as a serious problem in the Republican Party, and to suggest that it is being “overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign policy conversation about Israel.”

With respect to the prevalence and growth of anti-Semitism in certain precincts of the right, his claim flies in the face of the testimony of Senator Ted Cruz, who described it as “an existential problem for our party and our country,” and Rod Dreher, who estimates that it infects 30 percent of the young conservative staffers he has met in D.C.

If one wanted an example of the anti-Semitism infecting young conservative staffers, Kevin Roberts’s statement refusing to distance the Heritage Foundation from Tucker Carlson is a good place to start. According to Roberts, it was drafted by his young chief of staff, and it is filled with disdain for Israel and her supporters: “When it does not serve the interest of the US, we owe nothing to Israel, no matter how much pressure from the globalist class or their mouthpieces in Washington.”

The statement goes on to say that Heritage will always defend good friends, like Tucker, from “the slander of bad actors, who serve someone else’s agenda,” and accuses a “venomous coalition attacking [Carlson] of sowing division.” One does not have to be Inspector Clouseau to know who else’s agenda the criticism of Carlson is meant to serve.

In his interview with Sohrab Ahmari, Vance avers that Israel is “an important ally” of the United States, before quickly adding that Israel’s and America’s interests could well diverge — something to which all agree. When asked at an earlier TPUSA event why America should be supporting Israel and Jews, whose religion teaches them to persecute Christians, Vance did not deny the premise. And he pointed to the need to guard Christian holy places in Israel as a place where American and Israeli interests might diverge, even though Israel has always rigorously done so. (Interestingly, one of Carlson’s favorite slanders of Israel is that it persecutes its Christian population.)

POLITICAL CALCULATION lies behind Vance’s stance vis-à-vis Tucker Carlson to date, though based on his statements emphasizing the need to rethink the American-Israeli relationship, I would guess he shares Carlson’s isolationist inclinations. While not openly embracing the Groyper wing of the MAGA movement, he does not want to lose it either, should he face a serious challenge for the 2028 nomination.

It is a bad calculation on two grounds. First, it is more likely to engender a primary challenge than to scare all opponents away. Senator Ted Cruz has already denounced those who nod approvingly as Nick Fuentes spews his venom, most notably Tucker Carlson, as cowards.

Second, Vance will face a familiar problem: The more you pander to the most extreme parts of your base, the harder it is to tack back to the center in the general election. And when he attempts to do so, he may find that the association with Carlson is an albatross around his neck.

In any event, Tucker’s antics, it appears, may soon force Vance’s hand. Carlson has long sung the praises of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, during whose reign eight million have fled the country to date, on the grounds that he is a strong opponent of same-gender marriage. After the seizure of Maduro by American forces, Carlson went on air to argue that it is not implausible to think that the American raid was for the express purpose of instituting same-gender marriage in Venezuela.

In truth, nothing could be more implausible than to think that President Trump committed American troops for such a purpose. But the mere suggestion is highly insulting to Trump. And if Vance does not wish to appear disloyal to President Trump, which he assuredly does not, he may have no choice but to disavow “kooky Tucker,” whose antics have finally gone one step too far. Stay tuned.

 

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1095. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)