JD Vance cant outrun his Tucker Carlson problem

Vice President JD Vance keeps trying to straddle a bright moral line — with predictably disastrous results.The veep’s appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas on Monday was highly anticipated because of his increasingly tenuous relationships with both the group’s direct constituency and the pro-Israel, evangelical GOP base.Vance’s troubles with both these key communities stem from both his seemingly unbreakable bond with Tucker Carlson — the country’s leading antisemitic advocate — and his indulgence of a wide range of injurious conspiracy theories and tropes.In one particularly notable moment from his December speech before Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference, Vance stuck his neck out for Carlson and rebuked Jewish-American commentator Ben Shapiro for calling him out.“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform,” Vance boasted at the time, repeating Carlson’s mischaracterization of Shapiro’s case for moral clarity.He doubled down in an eyebrow-raising interview that same week, downplaying the rising tide of antisemitism on the right and submitting that it’s “absurd” to suggest Carlson “has no place in the conservative movement.”More recently, Vance joined Joe Rogan for a sweeping conversation in which he accused the Israeli government of carrying out a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign” to “manipulate American public opinion,” and breathed life into the unfounded idea that Jeffrey Epstein worked for the Mossad.All this to say: Vance had his work cut out for him on Monday.It didn’t quite go as he planned.In a jaw-dropping faux pas, Vance confused blood libels — antisemitic smears, including the medieval lie that Jews used the blood of Christian children in religious rituals — with blood guilt, or “the idea that ..

.because of your blood, because of your ancestry, you are guilty of a crime that you never committed.”The flub not only betrayed a s...