Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Vice President JD Vance had an opportunity to establish some boundaries at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest. He specifically chose not to.
Perhaps at a different moment in time, the headlines about Vice President JD Vance’s concluding speech at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference last weekend in Phoenix, Ariz., would have centered on his avowal that “We have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be, a Christian nation.”But that wasn’t the case.
Not even the most critical liberal outlets like The New York Times or The Washington Post, both of which could be expected to trash anything he said, led their coverage with reporting about that aspect of his remarks. Perhaps readers were outraged about him using the phrase “Christian nation”; still, however off-putting it may be for many Jews, I don’t feel that’s a threat to minority religious groups. Either way, the media outlets were right to highlight something else.
That’s because the truly significant aspect of the vice president’s address wasn’t about elements of its core, in which he spoke about his beliefs on conservative, religious and family values, and the flawed, amoral vision of the political left that he opposes.
The most newsworthy aspect concerned his belief that the conservative coalition that he and President Donald Trump lead is one that should draw no lines in the sand about antisemitism or any other form of pathological extremism.
And that is something that should worry not just Jewish Republicans or conservatives, but everyone who cares about the future of America.
The context was crucial. Until Vance’s remarks closed out the conference, the TPUSA event was, as columnist Jim Geraghty put it, “WrestleMania with podcasters.”
Rather than a fake show with cartoonish good guys and villains, it was a contest in which advocates, like commentator Ben Shapiro, for a conservative movement that set boundaries to exclude hate-mongers and Jew-baiters, were arrayed against their opponents. Shapiro was given his say in one session. But the following day, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now articulates anti-Jewish tropes and platforms internet stars like the neo-Nazi “groyper” Nick Fuentes and other Holocaust deniers, was allowed to answer him.
Political commentator Megyn Kelly also had her time in the spotlight when she, too, criticized Shapiro. Kelly refused to go along with any approach that might set some limits or boundaries on discourse within mainstream conservatism, such as those that might consign mad conspiracy theorists and antisemites like Candace Owens to the fever swamps of either the far right or far left.
