By Noah Rothman
Friday, January 30, 2026
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is picking a lot of
fights these days.
The governor is going after Kamala Harris’s campaign, which snubbed him for the vice
presidential nod, in part, because the governor would not “apologize” to the
nebulous collection of anti-Israel student demonstrators he (inarguably) accused of antisemitism and violence.
Shapiro has trained his sights
on the Biden administration, too, and all its enablers among the Democratic
Party’s establishmentarians. The governor is is genuinely courageous in his
willingness to criticize the former president not only for his intransigence
and advanced age — which the Democratic National Committee seems to think
voters won’t remember if they refuse to acknowledge it — but also for policy
that many of the party’s leading lights still celebrate.
And yet, Shapiro can’t spend every moment of his book
tour slamming Democrats, lest he undermine the book’s value as a platform for
launching his possible 2028 presidential bid. This means that the governor has
singled out Vice President JD Vance for criticism, and Shapiro’s critique is getting a lot of attention.
“Remember that the reason why we memorialize the
Holocaust on this day, really, essentially, is to never forget,” Shapiro said
in response to a statement in which Vance commemorated International Holocaust
Day but did not name the Holocaust’s primary victims: Jews. “Part of never
forgetting is making sure that the facts of what happened are recited, are
remembered. The fact that JD Vance couldn’t bring himself to acknowledging [sic]
that 6 million Jews were killed by Hitler and by the Nazis speaks volumes.”
The statement led Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier to
confront the governor. “You’re essentially calling JD Vance a neo-Nazi or an
antisemite,” the Special Report anchor said. “I’m not essentially
calling him anything,” Shapiro replied. “I’m saying what I said, and I stand by
that.” He added that it’s his view that antisemitism is “a problem on the
political left” as well as “the political right.” After all, the governor said,
if he can call out and condemn his nominal co-partisans, it should not be hard
for Vance to do the same.
Shapiro has a point. The vice president’s failure to
state that the whole point of the Holocaust was to engineer a “Final Solution”
to the “Jewish Question” — an omission familiar to those who follow
the far-left and its institutions — has caused much-deserved consternation.
Moreover, it has become increasingly hard to ignore a disquieting pattern of
behavior.
I’m perfectly comfortable associating myself with the analysis
of Commentary senior editor Abe Greenwald as he looks at the choices
(and they are choices) that Vance is making in his quest to succeed Donald
Trump at the top of the Republican hierarchy. “Vance is sending a clear message
to Tucker Carlson and his other Jew-hating friends,” Greenwald wrote. “The
message is: Don’t worry, guys. I’m with you.” Even if you think that goes too
far, there can be no question that Vance has bent over backward to preserve his
relationship with figures like Carlson, most of whom have no love lost for the
GOP or, for that matter, America as it is presently constituted. “This issue is
not going to go away on its own,” Fox News Channel’s Brit
Hume observed of the vice president’s maladroit maneuvering. “Vance, at
some point, will have to deal with it.”
True enough. And because of his willingness to condemn
those in the ranks of his own party who demonstrate on a near-daily basis why
the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is without a difference,
Shapiro does have some leverage to attack the right’s accommodationist
elements. But the fight for the presidential nomination that the governor is
about to wage will set him against progressives, not right-wing, populists. And
that cohort has proven far more aggressive and far more dangerous than its right-wing variant, which has little purchase outside the right-wing alternative-podcast
universe.
It wasn’t a right-winger who tried to burn down the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion
with Shapiro and his family inside it. It’s not the populist right that is
attempting to shut down events (to
this day) hosted by speakers whose only offense is to have been born with a
Jewish-sounding surname. It wasn’t the Republican Party that tried and failed to condemn blatant antisemitism from its
own elected officials, cowed by the popular backlash to calling that hate by its
name. We didn’t see conservatives shutting down bridges and airport
tarmacs, attacking students on campuses, or assaulting police in the vain
attempt to get their hands on Democratic lawmakers — what designs they had for
the objects of their hatred, we will fortunately never know.
And it won’t be JD Vance who denies Shapiro his party’s
nomination, should it come to that. The whisper campaign that cost the governor
a spot on the Democratic ticket in 2024 will begin again in 2028. None should
deny that the right’s “racially conscious” agitators are a problem, even if
their political relevance is often overstated. But they’re not Shapiro’s
problem — not yet. His problem is much closer to home.
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