JD Vance’s Rebuke of Ben Shapiro Was Disingenuous — And Evil

In a much-touted moment from his speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance declared, “We have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be a Christian nation.”

It was an applause line seemingly designed in a lab to appeal to this Christian conservative.

And yet, it rang emptily; because while Vance paid lip service to Christian values at AmFest, he abandoned them in practice.

The cold civil war between traditional conservatives and their nihilistic cousins on the far right turned hot at the conference when a representative of the former group, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, denounced the latter.

While devoting special attention to Candace Owens and the deranged conspiracy theories she’s advanced in the wake of Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Shapiro resolved not to let her enablers, namely Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, off the hook.

“Erika Kirk and TPUSA never, never should have been put in the position to have to defend themselves against such specious and evil attacks, particularly in a time of mourning, and the people who refuse to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks – and some of them are speaking here – are guilty of cowardice. Yes, cowardice. The fact that they have said nothing while Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years is just as cowardly,” argued Shapiro.

His address set the tone for the rest of the event. Carlson and Kelly both ignored the substance of Shapiro’s case, instead insisting that his criticism of them was a reaction to their criticism of Israel. Shapiro’s speech, mind you, made no mention of the world’s only Jewish-majority state.

Carlson and Kelly have, of course, done much more than run cover for the loathsome Owens. The former has emerged as not just a monomaniacal, slanderous critic of Israel, but a promoter of Holocaust revisionism, and a propogandist for radical Islamist regimes in Tehran and Doha who describes one of the world’s other most prominent Jewish leaders, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, as “sweaty and rat-like.” Shortly after Hamas’ mass kidnapping, rape, and slaughter of Jews on October 7, he cited Shapiro’s reaction to the massacre as evidence he didn’t care about own country. He also, in a particularly stunning moment, drew a comparison between Kirk and Jesus Christ by implying that they were both killed by Jews in a less-than-subtle nod at one of Owens’s most infamous fabrications. And that’s to say nothing of his chummy chat with Nick Fuentes, America’s most famous open bigot.

Through it all, he’s been able to count on Kelly — an attention-craving shapeshifter — to defend him to the hilt by pretending that his years-long campaign to profit off hatred as a feud with the “neocons” about foreign policy.

It is in this context — a veritable war between Jew haters and their enablers, and those standing up to them — that Vance, behind the seal of his office, took the podium at AmFest and threw his considerable weight behind the former.

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” he submitted.

“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform, and I don’t really care if some people out there — I’m sure we’ll have the fake news media denounce me after this speech. But let me just say, the best way to honor Charlie is that none of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he himself refused to do in life,” continued Vance in a clear shot at Shapiro.

Never mind that Shapiro hadn’t called for anyone to be de-platformed in his speech at AmFest, or even during his takedown of Carlson at the Heritage Foundation earlier that week. He had simply responded to bad arguments, made in bad-faith by bad actors.

No one with any critical thinking ability at all could survey Owens, Carlson, and Kelly’s actions, or Shapiro’s rebuke of them, and honestly endorse Vance’s summary of each.

James David Vance — Yale Law graduate, venture capitalist, U.S. senator, and vice president — is no fool.

Which he means he lied, and in defense of a spiritual sickness that has left millions dead and continues to claim victims — at the Nova music festival, at Bondi Beach, and even in Washington, D.C. — to this day.

There is no other word for that but evil. And it’s all the more so for having been cloaked by what is so obviously a performative appeal to Christian ideals.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.