J.D. Vance and the Battle for the Post-Trump Right

The American right wing is in absolute turmoil. Things have played out pretty roughly at the Turning Point convention. Over the last week, J.D. vance has tried to paper over an internal Republican civil war by urging a big tent coalition that avoids moral red lines, even as his party openly fractures over anti Semitism, racism, and conspiracy culture. He clearly refused to condemn extremists. And it's showing a lot of contradictions among the conservative right. So let's look at the players here. J.D. vance wants to be the next president. He started getting endorsements from Erica Kirk last week. He's framing these divides as a distraction, and he's basically trying to make everybody happy. And it's very hard in politics to make everybody happy. A little backstory. I. I brought this to you late last week. A distillation of Ben Shapiro's speech before this conference where Ben Shapiro, one of arguably the top one or two conservative commentators in America today, wildly popular podcast, his Daily Wire, has its fingers in everything, news services, books, popular culture. He went head to head with, with Tucker Carlson, condemned him, essentially, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes for their extremism, their endorsement, their coddling of either extremists like Nick Fuentes or things that Nick Fuentes have said and, and being grifters and putting forth absolute nonsense about conspiracies to kill Charlie Kirk, which is one of Candace Owen's favorite things. So I give Ben Shapiro a lot of credit. I did then and I do now. He's trying to, at least some of the time, inject some moral clarity, intellectual honesty into the conservative debate. This is famously what William F. Buckley did from the time he started national review in 1955 until his passing a decade or so ago. He did all he could to get rid of the John Birchers and the anti Semites, the avowed racist, the clans, from being a part of the modern conservative movement because he wanted to make it respectable for Republicans to embrace conservatism and appear to be mainstream. And it was wildly successful. Ronald Reagan gave William F. Buckley in 1980 credit for creating an intellectual coalition that made it possible for Reagan to get elected. So there's that tradition in history. Well, Buckley is no longer with us. He's been gone for more than a decade, and the right wing has splintered into many, many factions. So Tucker Carlson has become a lightning rod recently because it's not that he just interviewed Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, avowed Hitler lover, someone who openly mocks Jews, non Christians, Indian people, openly mocked J.D. vance's wife and children, for example. And Tucker Carlson Was nice and warm and friendly. Didn't really call him out on anything. And that felt many people, that made many people feel like Tucker Carlson was really guilty of coddling an anti Semite, Vivek Ramaswamy. You may remember him, he ran for president last year. He's running for governor currently. He's there at the conference and he's writing op EDS for the New York Times. So he's outraged, shocked that in the conservative movement people are somehow racist. Who knew? Who would have ever thought that? So there is a, a new body of intellectual thought, if you want to call it that, among certain conservatives that says heritage Americans are really the real Americans. Heritage Americans, that's just sort of a code for white people who have been here a while. They should be the real Americans. They're the higher priority. And that's what American governance should be about, is old white people, or at least people who have parents, grandparents, preferably great, great, great grandparents who came over on the Mayflower, that those are the real Americans. And people who come here now, or their parents or grandparents did, with funny names and darker skin or don't just worship Jesus. They're not really the real deal. That's the basic sort of mindset of the heritage American. And Vivek Ramaswamy is like, this is awful. Where did these people come from? Didn't know any of these were in the Republican Party because he's saying he's routinely attacked vilified people, attack his wife, his children, the children's names, their religion, and he doesn't like that. Okay, I'll speak in a moment as to why he perhaps shouldn't find this surprising. Now, Ben Shapiro is also, you know, Ben, between Ben Shapiro and Vivek Ramaswamy. They both remind me of Claude Rains and Casablanca. I'm shocked, absolutely shocked to find that there's racism or sexism or bigotry or anti Semitism in the Republican Party. You know, Ben Shapiro does strike me as a pretty sharp cookie. You know, he graduated from Harvard Law School near the top of his class. When he, I think it's before he even shaved. He still looks extremely young, but he brings a certain intellectual heft to his argument. So it always surprises me when someone like that is surprised when they see fellow Republicans and conservatives saying anti Semitic things. Now, Ben Shapiro is widely popular among conservatives and the MAGA crowd and Republicans, but he always talks about the Judeo Christian tradition, America. And America is a Judeo Christian America. I got news for you, Ben. I happen to know a lot of conservatives I grew up with conservative. I grew up in the south as a white male. As a white male who grew up in the Christian church, I was a Baptist. I can tell you no conservative white male I've ever met, unless they're running for office, has ever used the phrase Judeo Christian. Sorry, Pan, it's just not a thing. Conservative white men, especially in the south, talk about Christians and all the others. They talk about Christians and people who don't believe in Christ, who they happen to believe or are going to rot in the warm place down under for eternity and be tortured in the bad place in hell for eternity. That's what every conservative Christian white male I ever met happened to think about. Jews and Muslims and everyone. They were all put in this category of not a Christian, therefore not really our kind. And according to their book, people who would be cast into eternal damnation. So Ben, I hate to tell you this, you know, you like to rail against political correctness and wokeism. Any concern. Any time I've been around, you know, two or more white conservative males in the south talking about religion and politics, nobody uses the phrase Judeo Christian. They say it's Christians and other people. And Ben, you're not a Christian based on your own admission. And that's okay. I'm not asking you to convert. I don't think your religion is any worse than any other religion. Okay. I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist and I'm not pushing any religion. But it's shocking and surprising to me that people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro are just shocked that the modern Republican Party is embracing people who avowedly can't stand non Christians and non white people. Because that's what conservatism has been about. You want to conserve the way things have been. Dwight Eisenhower didn't have an Indian wife. Okay, not saying. I'm not saying there's anything bad with having an Indian wife. But apparently there are a lot of people now in the Republican Party who are not particularly excited about the van. The fact that J.D. vance has an Indian wife and his wife doesn't practice the same religion as the so called heritage Americans. Now, a little more of the backstory here. So Ben Shapiro, again to his credit, is saying we got a real problem in the Republican Party. We have all these grifters like Alex Jones pushing conspiracy theories that are not based in fact. We have people like Nick Fuentes openly and invalidly saying nasty things about Jews, about Indians, about anyone who does not appear to be white and which is it's always the people who are not that thing themselves who are trying to be pure. Fuentes doesn't sound like a Mayflower name. Okay. I believe his grandparents came from Mexico. So I'm not kicking him out or I'm not saying Nick Fuentes is less American than anyone else, but it sure seems like he's very happy to say someone like, with a last name like Ramaswamy isn't real American. And that Fuentes is, which seems odd. Now, the one thing we hear again and again from the Ben Shapiro's other conservatives is that somehow the modern Republican Party and conservatism has always been about Martin Luther King Jr's nostrum. That you should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Their reworking, their rewriting of history is that conservatism has always been colorblind and that they've always had a soft spot in their heart for Martin Luther King Jr. Who is held in high esteem, high esteem by most Americans. But here's the part that you've not been told that you've been lied about. And it is this, that when Martin Luther King Jr. Was saying, let's judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We want to be your brothers, not your brother in law. When he was actually alive, before he was assassinated, saying these things, he was in fact embraced by centrists, by liberals, by progressives of the time and conservatives. You know what they did? They denounced him. Don't take my word for it. Let's just go to the records. Here's from Jesse Helms. Martin Luther King is, quote, a communist. He said some things even worse than that, but I won't repeat them here. He did not want to support a Martin Luther King holiday, which is okay. I'm not saying you're a racist. If you don't want to give somebody a national holiday, okay, you can think someone was great and not want another national holiday. But his reason was he was a man who consorted with communists. So let's not kid ourselves. Conservatism for most of American history was about conserving things the way they were. We had slavery, let's conserve slavery. We had it where, you know, white men owned all the property and no one else did. We want to conserve that. So when Martin Luther King Jr. Was making the radical far left, at the time, it was considered far left to say that black people should be able to eat at a lunch counter, to say that black people shouldn't sit in the back of the bus. That was considered a lunatic left idea by conservatives back in the 60s. So it's a rewriting of history to suggest that the modern conservative movement somehow was always in favor of race neutrality. Again, Jesse Helm saying we're not going to honor a man who was a communist dupe to suggest that black people should be treated as equal human beings, have civil rights in America, be able to drink from a water fountain. That in the eyes of one of the leading conservative lights, Ronald Jesse Helms, was to make you a communist. And I hope you're seeing a pattern here when, when people offer sensible moral positions in America, quite often there's often a 20, 30, 40 year period where they are denounced as being a part of the lunatic left or as a communist, a communist dupe. Ronald Reagan said that Martin Luther King had communist sympathies and predicted the truth would come out one day. Strong Thurman said that Martin Luther King was basically lawless, that if you give him a holiday, it will promote lawlessness. So giving a national holiday to a man who fought for civil rights for black people was promoting lawlessness. John Ashcraft, former senator and Attorney General, said, basically, Martin Luther King Jr. No good bunch of communists. Trent Lott, not a fan of Martin Luther King, certainly didn't want a holiday. So there's a long, long tradition of conservatives saying something that most decent people would consider obvious morality. Human beings deserve to be treated equally. Where they spent about 40 extra years denouncing that as lunatic left. That's communist thinking. And now it's almost comical to see that someone like a Ben Shapiro, Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance are shocked and surprised that people are saying negative things about Jews and Indians and people with darker skin. So this is ugly business, folks. But Nick Fuentes, I won't even tell you the terms he is. He used derogatory ethnic slurs aimed at South Asians to describe Usha Vance, the second lady, I guess you would call her. It's J.D. vance's wife. Fuentes mocked J.D. vance for having an Indian wife and made insinuations about the children's names and identity and basically portrayed Vance as a disgrace to his race. Okay, clearly I'm not endorsing these views, but these are the views of Nick Vndt Fuentes, whom Tucker Carlson, the leading conservative white, played footsie with on his podcast for hours, acted like they were just great, friendly, buddy, buddy, buddy buddies didn't call him out on this at all. So Fuentes basically is saying JD Vance is a race Traitor. Again, not my words. Fuentes labeled Vivek with not really American doesn't belong here kind of rhetoric. Now, Vivek Ramaswamy was born in the United States. He's lived in the United States his whole life. And apparently he gets just constant abuse online with people saying, you know, go back to India, go back to India. Fuentes has sort of positioned the argument of saying he was an anchor baby. You may recall debates about that, and has less legitimate claim to the United States because of his ancestry. Now, multiple, multiple watchdog groups have labeled Nick Fuentes as being openly anti Semitic. He's denied the Holocaust. He said he loves Hitler. He has said things that they're not intimating. Anti Semitism. They're about as clear cut as it possibly gets. So here are some of the other things. Again, you can't dismiss Nick Fuentes because he's apparently wildly unpopular among conservative Republican staffers on Capitol Hill. Fuentes went out, this is according to the Daily Beast. Fuentes went after Usha Vance with a South Asian slur and treated Vance as interracial proof that he is a race traitor. And it's the same ecosystem that traffics and anti Semitic conspiracy narratives. Exactly the stuff that some conservatives say must be pushed out. This is according to the Washington Post. So here's why this is fascinating. At some point, Donald Trump's not going to be around anymore. I personally am not convinced he will leave the White House ever while he's alive, and I'm not wishing anyone ill health. But Trump does occasionally speak the truth, and he did say his only regret from his first term was leaving office. So the tide, especially in the last couple of months, has shifted in the sense that more and more people think Trump is kind of a done deal. His approval ratings are so low, I'm not so convinced he cares or that he will leave office. But putting all that aside, there's absolutely no doubt that he will no longer be with us. At some point, the Republicans will have to face other leadership choices. And so there's a lot of jockeying for position right now. So again, you have Ben Shapiro saying we got to get rid of these cooks, these grifters like Steve Bannon who make a lot of money doing PR for Jeffrey Epstein, which is true. These grifters and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones who embarrass us. That's true. And these racists and anti Semites like Nick Puentes. And we got to get rid of the people who coddled them, like Tucker Carlson. So that's clearly one major Strand of thought with a lot of appeal in the Republican Party. And now we have JD Vance trying to straddle that. That's a tough thing to straddle. JD Vance yesterday speaking at the Turning Point conference, like, let's all get along. I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way, J.D. you can't say you love your wife and your children and respect them and then say, yeah, and I want to be in a party where everyone just openly embraces Nick Fuentes, who's calling my family nasty names and calling me a race traitor. And being a part of a party where the Tucker Carlson's of the world seem to have absolutely no standards as long as you're a racist and anti Semite saying despicable things. Now if you want to question capitalism or if you want to say something that in any way suggests, oh, let's have a, a city run grocery store, well then you can condemn all day long, but you can't condemn someone because they say nasty, vile, racist, anti Semitic things. That's the Tucker Carlson position. J.D. vance seems to want to have it all different ways. It's going to be interesting to see how this battle plays out because there are a number of formidable players here. And Tucker Carlson is a gifted, skilled communicator and so is Ben Shapiro. And for that matter, J.D. vance isn't bad either. And Nick Fuentes is an incredibly good communicator. I'm not going to have him on my show. I don't want to give him more attention. But I did watch him the other day when he was condemning Donald Trump for being too extremist and too hateful in his comments about the murder of the Reiner family. So there's a lot of compelling characters here, all of them jockeying for position, all of them with ideological positioning that is very much against each other. I don't think J.D. vance is going to just be able to say, let's all get together. It's not quite that simple. Politics quite often is about making hard choices. If it were easy, we'd all be president.