How both Tucker Carlson and JD Vance have 'chosen to play dumb for power': columnist

24 September 2024

During a recent event in Hershey, Pennsylvania, both Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and far-right media personality Tucker Carlson conducted an interview that one columnist described as "cordial." Though she elaborated that the relationship between the two is illuminating in how willing both men are to sacrifice their principles in their efforts to climb the career ladder.

On Tuesday, the Atlantic's Helen Lewis took a closer look at the Vance-Carlson event to illustrate how the political journey of both men means they've "chosen to play dumb for power." She noted that for Carlson, he made a particularly sharp turn from Fox News primetime host to "lone wolf" social media personality.

Lewis wrote that Carlson's makeover as a right-wing renegade eschewing corporate media glosses over the fact he was not only fired from the network in 2023, but that emails released as part of the discovery process in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit found that he frequently expressed contempt for both former President Donald Trump and his most prominent supporters.

“Every news outlet I’ve ever worked at, which is a lot of them, they’re all controlled, obviously,” Carlson said in Hershey, before heaping praise on billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform where the word "cisgender" is banned. “X is the place that free speech lives.”

However, Lewis argued that Vance's pivot from Never Trump conservative to an unabashedly MAGA U.S. senator is the most jarring. She pointed out that in 2017, the Hillbilly Elegy author said "race definitely played a role in the 2016 election," and further argued that there are "definitely some people who voted for Trump [who] are racist, and they voted for him for racist reasons." Now, the Ohio Republican says accusations of racism are being weaponized against Trump supporters to "silence them and shut them up."

She also reminded readers that while Vance is the running mate for a former president who is running on mass deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants, he said in 2012 that the proposal to round up, detain and deport immigrants was a "notion that fails to pass the laugh test."

In her column, Lewis remarked that the GOP as a whole had undergone a massive ideological makeover over the last two decades. She pointed out that both Carlson and Vance — the latter of whom is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq — have expressed opposition to the U.S. engaging in foreign conflicts. Vance even called former President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq a "stupid war." This observed that this was a sharp one-eighty from the Republican Party of the early aughts.

"Anyone younger than Vance, who has just turned 40, might struggle to understand what an incredible statement this is from a would-be Republican vice president," she wrote. "In the 2000s, the GOP clamor for war was so great that anyone who opposed it was painted as a pinko and probably a terrorist sympathizer."

Lewis added that while the Ohio senator "seems to feel very little loyalty to the Republican Party as an institution, or to its long history and traditions," he has nonetheless risen to become "MAGA's leading in-house intellectual." To that end, the columnist wryly observed that Vance's next campaign event was alongside far-right conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Alex Jones.

Click here to read Lewis' full essay in the Atlantic (subscription required).

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