JD Vance Picks a Side

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 22, 2025

 

At long last, the battle over the moral trajectory of the American right is engaged.

 

The fusillade that inaugurated a new phase of this ongoing “civil war” among conservative personalities was delivered by Ben Shapiro. “The conservative movement is in serious danger,” he told the attendees of Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest. It is beset by “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

 

And Shapiro named names. He took particular aim at Tucker Carlson and the band of misfit toys with whom the onetime Fox broadcaster has surrounded himself, but Shapiro also singled out “PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein” Steve Bannon and the certifiable Candace Owens. “If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,” Shapiro observed, “you ought to own it.”

 

Predictably, the targets of Shapiro’s criticism spent the remainder of the conference issuing frothy, emotive denunciations of the conservative broadcaster and anyone else who dares to scrutinize their behavior. Carlson condemned antisemitism, but also anyone who “calls to deplatform” even the most poisonous influencers. “Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads,” Bannon declared. “Ben only cares about Israel’s interests,” Owens added. “So,” she continued, deferring to her all-consuming mania, “Israel is involved.”

 

But within these expressions of unbridled, egocentric id, Shapiro’s caustic critics divulged a revelatory truth. “This is a proxy on ’28,” Bannon admitted. It’s the champions of the U.S.-Israeli partnership who are perverting Charlie Kirk’s legacy by advancing “this concept of greater Israel and Israel first,” Bannon claimed. “There are people who are mad at JD Vance,” Carlson added, “and they’re stirring up a lot of this in order to make sure he doesn’t get the nomination.”

 

What a welcome admission. It puts the lie to the notion that the right-wing talker class is only exploring intellectual taboos and advocating a dispassionate Buchananite foreign policy. Rather, what they’re engaged in is an exercise in political positioning on the vice president’s behalf. And when the vice president himself had the opportunity to weigh in on this proxy fight over who will succeed Donald Trump, he put his thumb on the scale for himself.

 

Of course, Vance pretended as though he was merely a neutral observer of this squabble from the Obama-like Olympian heights he presumes to occupy. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” Vance declared. “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform,” he added.

 

The vice president’s performative neutrality didn’t last long. What the right should be focused on is “why is Nick Fuentes gaining popularity or gaining notoriety?” Even if the racist podcaster’s popularity is “vastly overstated,” he said, it is being “overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.”

 

In sum, it is those who object to the promotion of a bigot who are the problem here. Vance later issued a searing rebuke of Fuentes (as well as former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in the same breath), but foremost for insulting his wife and children. The bigotry itself and those who are forever shoving microphones into Fuentes’s face are treated as though they’re acts of God — entirely organic phenomena about which no one can do anything. Indeed, “the Hitler‐praising Groyper king functions as a useful foil for pro-Israel hard-liners in the Right’s raucous internal debate over America’s alliance with the Jewish state.”

 

Vance has made a choice here, and it’s a clarifying one. His allies are telling us straight that this is all about JD Vance — his political ambitions, his position as Donald Trump’s most likely successor, and, by extension, their own prospects when Trump is gone. Those voices claim that if you object to the rehabilitation of outright antisemitism on behalf of actual Nazis — not some tortured Democratic metaphor for fascism but the actual NSDAP circa 1920 to 1945 — you’re the paranoiac here.

 

Vance will pretend as though he is disinterestedly arbitrating a political dispute on the right, but he’s not. He has intervened in it on behalf of his allies and their revisionist historical project. If Vance’s contention is that the figures like Shapiro, who aren’t nobly attempting to talk sense to the talker class, are maliciously bifurcating the conservative movement and sowing division, the vice president’s implicit outlook is that interventions like Shapiro’s are the problem. That is an effort to shackle the interveners and arrest the rehabilitative process. Whatever else that is, it is not a neutral disposition.

 

Vance can read the writing on the wall as well as anyone. So many of the talkers on TPUSA’s stage this weekend leaned heavily into the cult of youth — subordinating their better judgment to the intellectual fashions bubbling up from the social media algorithms. And as one recent Manhattan Institute focus group of Gen Z conservatives in and around Nashville recently illustrated, a form of unselfconscious Hitlerian Caesarism is all the rage.

 

That should terrify responsible actors in American public life. Instead, far too many see instrumental political utility in this metastatic intellectual perversion.