For Truth’s Sake: Love Vance |
Monika Potts’s profile in The New Republic suggests that JD Vance does not operate with a single stable identity, but with a set of deployable masks. “Shapeshifter” is a harsh term, yet analytically useful: it points less to “changing one’s mind” and more to treating statements as instruments rather than commitments.
From that angle, Vance’s talk about Jews and Israel is not a separate chapter. It is a stress test: does the same technique still work when the topic is morally charged, geopolitically explosive, and historically saturated with real danger?
Potts highlights a particularly revealing move. Vance frames rising antisemitism in the United States as something imported through immigration and the “ethnic animosities” of the young, then presents the remedy as lowering immigration and enforcing assimilation. In isolation, this can be sold as concern for Jewish safety. In context, it looks like a political technology: a real social pathology is re-labeled so it can be routed into his preferred domestic agenda. Antisemitism becomes not a problem to be confronted on its own terms, but a rhetorical accelerant for an already-existing........