‘Moral Cowardice’: Erick Erickson Torches JD Vance for Entertaining Anti-Semitism

Conservative radio star Erick Erickson took Vice President JD Vance to task on Friday over his response to a question from an anti-Semitic student at Turning Point USA’s Wednesday evening event at Ole Miss.

After the student suggested, over the course of a question directed at Vance, that Israel’s “religion… openly supports the prosecution (sic) of ours,” Vance left that incendiary claim uncorrected while pouring the gasoline on the fire.

“When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the President of the United States, they’re not controlling this President of the United States, which is one of the reasons why we’ve been able to have some of the success that we’ve had in the Middle East,” boasted Vance.

In a lengthy Substack post about the rising specter of Jew hatred, Erickson slammed Vance — and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — for continuing to entertain anti-Semitism in the Republican Party:

There was peace. Then there was war on October 7, 2023.

I know the Vice President of the United States was repulsed by this. I know Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation was repulsed by this. But I also know that after it happened, Tucker Carlson suggested Hamas had been mischaracterized and really was not a terrorist organization. I know Nick Fuentes joked about the barbarism. I know Tucker Carlson has elevated and attempted to normalize people sympathetic to Hitler’s case for World War II. I know a progressive trans-activist murdered Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes mocked Kirk’s death and blamed the Jews. So did others in Tucker Carlson’s orbit. Only a short time after a trans activist locked children in a church to gun them down and a trans activist murdered Kirk, suddenly some loud voices on the right, including Fuentes, were blaming Jews instead.

I also know what Kevin Roberts, J.D. Vance, and others are doing as they dance around some of these guys. They want to attract young zoomers to their side, many of them male, and they think the way to do that is to punch back hard at critics, refuse to fold to criticism, and show a high tolerance for inflammatory positions that rile up the left. If they have to accommodate a few closeted gay guys with a Nazi fetish who blame the Jews for everything, they’ll do it and reason that, once they win, they can clean up. But they want to win first.

That is, of course, exactly what the Left did with the transgender militants. They canceled dissent. They used cultural forces to punch back hard. They allowed inflammatory positions that riled the right and the Christians. And they thought they won, until the whole thing collapsed in on itself because it turns out it is hard to police the Chase Strangios of the world once you put them in power.

Roberts, Vance, etc. have adopted the Left’s playbook of no enemies on their side because they think the Left was successful with that strategy. It got eight years of Obama, four years of Biden, and billionaires investing in the cause, heavy emphasis on that last one.

The Vice President, when confronted by a young man in a MAGA cap, about Israel controlling Presidents, did not dispute the presupposition. He just said Trump is different. He let the presupposition that the Jews control other presidents slide.

That is moral cowardice. It’s a large language model processing what the questioner wants to hear without offending.

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