Why Doesn’t JD Vance Have More to Say About Nick Fuentes?

On one hand, there is no particular reason to pay attention to JD Vance.

Yes, he is the vice president of the United States — a position that carries some prestige — but unlike his recent predecessors, he appears to lack any influence in the Oval Office. The president has neither bestowed him with a special portfolio — think of Al Gore’s effort to streamline government or Dick Cheney’s powerful role shaping the government’s response to 9/11 — nor cultivated the kind of political intimacy that might make him a trusted adviser. And unlike George H.W. Bush or Joe Biden or even Mike Pence, Vance entered office a neophyte with little if anything like an independent political base. He is the product of patrons: a creature of Peter Thiel’s billions and Donald Trump’s powerful hold on the Republican base.

Vance is simultaneously prominent and marginal, a highly visible figure with nothing better to do than idle near the edges of American politics.

Which means, on the other hand, that there is every reason to pay attention to Vance, who has used his ample free time to cultivate and build strong ties to the far right of the Republican Party. Vance, in fact, is in the middle of a conflict between what’s left of the traditional Republican Party and the so-called groypers, a far-right movement of disaffected extremists whose chief representative, Nick Fuentes, is arguably America’s most prominent neo-Nazi. Here is a taste of what you might hear from Fuentes during a typical episode of his show: “Hitler is awesome. Hitler was right. And the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

A few weeks ago, Fuentes sat for a friendly interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned outsized Republican influencer whose independent platform reaches an audience in the millions. During their conversation, Carlson did nothing to push back on Fuentes’s beliefs, which include a vicious and virulent antisemitism. Carlson’s interview caused a splash in conservative circles, bringing particular scrutiny to the Heritage Foundation, which works closely with him. In response to the furor, as I’m sure you’ve heard, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, issued a video statement in which he refused to condemn Carlson, stating that “we will not cancel Tucker Carlson” and that “we are joined at the hip with Tucker Carlson.”

What we’ve seen since is a battle for influence within the conservative movement, as Nick Fuentes makes his bid for the mainstream and other voices on the right, such as Ben Shapiro, insist that there’s no room for Nazism in the Republican Party. As Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said recently, “I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party.”

This raises the obvious question of what constitutes the other wing of the Republican Party.

Enter JD Vance, who, as my colleague Ezra Klein observed this week in an interview with my friend John Ganz, is functionally “groyper adjacent.” As the controversy around Fuentes, Carlson and Heritage grew into a firestorm, Vance stayed quiet. At most, he decried the infighting.

The infighting is stupid. I care about my fellow citizens — particularly young Americans — being able to afford a decent life, I care about immigration and our sovereignty, and I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. If you care about those things too, let’s work together.

Fuentes considers the vice president’s triangulation a victory of sorts.

He’s getting squeezed because the groypers are on the one hand saying, “Hey, listen, fat boy, we want America First. You want to run for president? We want to hear you say America First.” And on the other side, he’s got his donors, and they’re saying, “They’re horrible antisemites. You have to disavow them. You have to forcefully condemn them. Condemn Tucker. Condemn the groypers.”

It is a sign, in other words, that Vance fears the political consequences of an open disavowal, so much so that he won’t act on the pleas of some of his closest associates to challenge the groypers. But while the vice president won’t say where he stands, it is not hard to sense where his sympathies lie. This week, Vance sat for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. Here is how he discussed the housing crisis:

A lot of young people are saying housing is way too expensive. Why is that? Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens.

There aren’t 30 million undocumented immigrants and there’s next-to-no evidence that illegal entry is responsible for the nation’s housing crisis. This is nothing more than anti-immigrant demagogy, a rank nativism meant to malign and dehumanize an entire category of people. It is similar in form and function to the libel he deployed during the campaign falsely accusing the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, of stealing and eating the pets of their neighbors. (Vance repeated these lies in October during an interview with The New York Post.)

Or consider Vance’s insistence that America’s creedal nationalism is misguided — that the only rooted Americans are those who can trace their histories to the 18th and early 19th centuries, and that more recent immigrants are a subordinate class who must earn the right to criticize or critique the nation.

Here’s my question for you: You can parse all the rhetoric you’d like, but what is the actual, practical difference between Vance’s call for the removal and potential expropriation of “illegal” immigrants — defined in terms of ethnic and racial difference — and Fuentes’s vision of a white ethno-state in what is now the United States?

They look about the same to me.

What I Wrote

I wrote about the end of the government shutdown and what it might tell us about the Democratic Party’s view of the political moment.

If they win next year, Democrats will need to treat the next Congress not as a return to the status quo ante, but as the beginning of a new era in which the principal task is to roll back the president’s effort to create and consolidate a personalist dictatorship. They’ll need to fortify the American political system against future attempts to play dictator and lay out a project of genuine democratic renewal. None of this is possible without a willingness to use power rather than just hold it. What we’ve seen this week is that there are still too many Democrats whose instinct is to retreat to normalcy rather than face the conflict at hand.

I was on Slate magazine’s “What Next” podcast with Mary Harris. In the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1997 political satire “Wag the Dog.” I also joined my colleagues Michelle Cottle and David French on “The Opinions” podcast to discuss the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.

Now Reading

Adam Serwer on fantasy and scientific racism for The Atlantic.

Molly Fischer on Costco for The New Yorker.

Zeb Larson on the Trump administration’s war on public health for Liberal Currents.

Dan Kaufman on the regime of Francisco Franco for The New York Review of Books.

Chris Maisano on liberalism and socialism for Dissent magazine.

Photo of the Week

Seen in Mobile, Ala.

Now Eating: Red Lentil Soup

A simple and filling soup that will serve you well as the weather cools down. Serve with flatbreads (preferably homemade). Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking.

Ingredients

• 3 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling

• 1 large onion, chopped

• 2 garlic cloves, minced

• 1 tablespoon tomato paste

• 1 teaspoon ground cumin

• Salt and black pepper

• Pinch of chili powder or ground cayenne, plus more to taste

• 1 quart chicken or vegetable broth

• 1 cup red lentils

• 1 large carrot, peeled and diced

• Juice of ½ lemon, more to taste

• 3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

Directions

In a large pot, heat 3 tablespoons oil over high until hot and shimmering. Add onion and garlic, and sauté until golden, about 4 minutes.

Stir in tomato paste, cumin, ¼ teaspoons each salt and black pepper and the chili powder, and sauté for 2 minutes longer.

Add broth, 2 cups water, lentils and carrot. Bring to a simmer, then partly cover pot and turn heat to medium-low. Simmer until lentils are soft, about 30 minutes. Taste and add salt if necessary.

Using an immersion or regular blender or a food processor, purée half the soup, then add it back to pot. The soup should be somewhat chunky.

Reheat soup if necessary, then stir in lemon juice and cilantro. Serve soup drizzled with good olive oil and dusted lightly with chili powder, if desired.

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