JD Vance tries to have it both ways on Nick Fuentes and antisemitism

Source: Radio New Zealand

Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNN

Analysis – Vice President JD Vance has never looked more like the presumptive 2028 Republican presidential nominee.

We learned last week that perhaps his most formidable would-be foe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had said he would defer to Vance. Then the vice president landed a major endorsement from Turning Point USA – nearly three full years before Election Day 2028.

But Vance could inherit a conservative movement that is increasingly riven over antisemitism and conspiracy theories in its midst.

It’s the kind of problem that could benefit from a leader like Vance taking the reins and charting a new post-Donald Trump path.

But the Ohio Republican’s approach has been remarkably uncertain. He seems to want to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and hope it goes away – while giving plenty of winks and nods to the fringe.

Sunday was telling in this regard.

In an interview with UnHerd, Vance finally addressed Nick Fuentes, the White nationalist podcaster whose recent friendly interview with Tucker Carlson set off a tempest in the Republican Party.

Fuentes has called Vance a “race traitor” for marrying a woman of Indian descent, but Vance is also close to Carlson politically. Some Republicans have called for their side to more forcefully disown Fuentes and even Carlson, and it was a huge subplot at Turning Point USA’s gathering in Phoenix this weekend

“Let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat s…,” Vance said in the UnHerd interview. “That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States.”

He added that “antisemitism and all forms of ethnic hatred have no place in the conservative movement.”

These are the kinds of comments that sound firm and tough. But they were hard to square with the reset of Vance’s rhetoric this weekend.

For one, the decision to lump Psaki – former President Joe Biden’s press secretary – in with Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, is a conspicuous one. What is the MS NOW host’s offense that is comparable to Fuentes calling Vance a “race traitor” and his wife, Usha, a “j…t,” a slur for Indian people? It’s apparently having suggested in October that Vance’s wife might need to be saved from him.

Secondly, Vance went on in the interview to suggest Fuentes simply isn’t worth spending much time on.

“I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the right, is vastly overstated,” Vance said. “And frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.”

Just to underline: Fuentes didn’t just get an interview with Carlson. He’s also gotten an audience with Trump in recent years, and even GOP members of Congress have flirted with Fuentes’ movement.

And perhaps most notably, Vance spent the rest of Sunday making a very different argument than the ones in the UnHerd interview.

He used his speech at Turning Point USA – by far his biggest platform of the weekend – to argue that the party shouldn’t do much of anything to police the people in its midst.

Indeed, it was the first substantive point he made in the speech. After days of fighting between the likes of Carlson and Steve Bannon on one side and Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro on the other, Vance seemed to land firmly on Carlson’s side.

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests,” Vance said. “He says, ‘Make America great again because every American is invited.’”

Vance said that he didn’t “bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.” He added that “we have far more important work to do than canceling each other.”

His speech went on to serve up a number of lines about identity that seemed tailormade for the extremes of the party.

He called the city of Minneapolis “Mogadishu” – the capital of Somali and a reference to the number of Somali immigrants there. He said of Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Black Democrat from Texas: “Her street girl persona is about as real as her nails.” Shortly thereafter, he made a reference to “Soros DAs” – a reference to prominent Jewish Democratic donor George Soros, who often figures prominently in antisemitic tropes.

So to recap Vance’s message: antisemitism doesn’t have a place in the GOP, but the party also shouldn’t have purity tests or cancel people. And there’s no place in the party for any “forms of ethnic hatred,” but also have you seen how overrun Minneapolis is with Somalis? (Vance also last year baselessly accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio of stealing and eating people’s pets.)

Vance seems to be gambling that this whole internal feud will go away eventually, and that he can get through it without totally alienating anyone.

But that’s certainly a gamble.

It’s been a very long time since we’ve seen a GOP dispute that has divided conservatives against each other in such an animated way.

And it’s not like this is a media construct. We’ve seen a number of examples of prominent conservatives, especially young ones, saying racist and antisemitic things in recent months.

One of the most prominent podcasters on the right, Candace Owens, is saying increasingly provocative things about Jews and Israel, including as regards former Turning Point head Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

This trend has been elevated as an urgent concern by lots of prominent Republicans and conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and, more recently, Ramaswamy. We continue to see fallout to this day at the Heritage Foundation over that organization initially siding with Carlson on the Fuentes interview.

Perhaps some Republicans sense a political opportunity here. The Washington Post reported Monday that Cruz is eyeing a potential run in 2028 that would pit himself against the Vance and Carlson wing of the party.

Still, prominent conservatives have painted antisemitism as a real, growing and urgent issue in the GOP base and seem to genuinely fear where their party is headed.

Vance continues to argue much the opposite. He told NBC News earlier this month that the GOP was “absolutely not” more antisemitic than it had been 10-15 years ago.

“When I talk to young conservatives, I don’t see some simmering antisemitism that’s exploding,” he said.

If he’s right and this is oversold as a problem, perhaps he can emerge from this dispute without having gotten his nose dirty. But antisemitism within the base could be a pretty stubborn problem best dealt with outside of the context of a presidential primary process.

For now, Vance doesn’t seem willing to spend his political capital.

– CNN

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand