I’ve written about this before. I don’t enjoy writing about it and I go back and forth on the utility of doing so. Still, I don’t see this perspective expressed often elsewhere, especially in long form, so I feel the need to blast it out into discourse:
Vice President JD Vance faced more questions about his relationship with Tucker Carlson in a recent interview with Sean Spicer. You can read the relevant exchange below:
SPICER: The last thing I wanted to ask you is, when I announced yesterday that I was coming to see you, the number one question I got was ask him about his relationship with Tucker Carlson. I think the way I want to ask it is this: I think it’s extremely admirable your loyalty to friends and family, it’s something I try to live by everyday. I don’t go out and criticize anyone in this administration, even when I think they’re… That’s just not how I think you should live your life. If someone’s a friend of yours, be a friend. But at what point do you find that because of your position as Vice President, you’ve maybe got to call some balls and strikes about anybody, don’t make it specific to tucker or anybody. At what point do you say: ‘Hey, they’re a friend, I appreciate my relationship, but what they’re saying here is not something that’s consistent with my values.’
VANCE: I think you have to do that all the time. And I’ve done that with Tucker I've done that with any number of people. Let me just give you a concrete example: So Tucker obviously one of the reasons he’s very very angry is over the Iran War. He does not like the Iran War. He and I have had that conversation in private, in public, I know how he feels, and I understand.
What I’ve said to Tucker is ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m not going to convince you on the Iran War one way or the other, but aren’t closed borders and ending the ridiculous anti-white discrimination in our university admissions aren’t these things worth actually acknowledging that Donald Trump has done a lot of good, even if you disagree with him on that one issue?’
You can have that disagreement and I think I have had that disagreement. What I don’t like is this idea is ‘Oh this person…’ First of all, I’ve seen this with Donald Trump, I’ve seen it with Tucker, I’ve seen it with any number of people that I’ve spoken to about politics, where some reporter will come and say ‘Well Donald Trump said this terrible thing. Do you disavow it?’ And then I’ll go and look at what he said and I’ll be like ‘Actually, not only do I [not] disavow it… you’re lying about what he said, and what he actually said is totally correct, it’s 100% right.’ So I don’t do the thing where I allow the media to put words into anybody’s mouth.
What I do is I listen to what people say, and when Tucker says for example that Abdul El-Sayed is the America First candidate, what I’d say to Tucker, again, I’ve said this to him privately and I’ll say it publicly: OK Abdul El-Sayed is a guy who you agree with him about the Iran War and I understand that. But, wait a second, this is a guy who says the Iran conflict is problem because it violates international law. How is that America First? A guy who said that a terrorist who tried to kill a bunch of innocent school children, that he empathized not with the innocent families, but with the terrorist himself.
So I think you have a responsibility to have these disagreements, but I’m not going to do the thing where I say ‘Because I disagree with what Tucker has said about Abdul El-Sayed therefore I think he’s a terrible person and I disavow him.’ I am never going to do that. I think it’s disloyal. And I think that anybody who conducts himself like that in order to gain political advantage is not worthy of the Vice Presidency.
I thought this was a bad answer. Spicer’s question even, I think, largely misses the point: The phrasing of a potential objection as “What they’re saying here is not something that’s consistent with my values,” seems to me like an allusion to accusations of antisemitism which are a distraction from the core issue facing Carlson, Vance, and frankly, all the rest of us.
Republican voters might feel demoralized for many valid reasons today: The Iran War, price instability, the fact that problems that were decades in the making cannot be solved in just a few years. Republican voters might also be demoralized because some of the largest figures in conservative media have been lying to them in big ways for a long time. I have noted this behavior and its destructive impact on the rightwing public mind for more than a year at this point.
I want to highlight a few statements from Tucker Carlson that I’ve mentioned several times before. I keep harping on these statements because Tucker Carlson was once the best media figure in the country, perhaps even better on the issues than Trump. The statements, which concern issues that Carlson used to take leadership on, immigration and anti-white discrimination, are objectively not true, and not even plausibly true.
On March 20, 2026, while speaking on a livestream with Blaze commentator Auron MacIntyre, Carlson said:
Trump has not shut down immigration into this country. In fact, it’s accelerated in ways that are really destructive, which is to say through legal means, H1Bs, refugee resettlement. That’s still ongoing. That has not stopped. In other words, the demographic change in the United States is still proceeding apace. And if you tell yourself ‘Well they shut down the border’ they did, and God bless Trump for doing that, but that doesn’t mean that the replacement of the population of the United States has stopped. No, it’s accelerating.
This is a lie. This is the opposite of reality. The Trump administration has actually reduced legal immigration 2.7x more than it has reduced illegal immigration.
Carlson’s comments about population replacement are objectively not true as well. In fact, the Trump administration has managed to drop the United States’ immigrant population for the first time since the 1970s. Carlson’s argument doesn’t even hold up under racial terms that he would probably only allude to: The white fertility rate has increased steadily under the Trump administration, while the fertility rates of virtually all other racial groups have declined.
On June 23, 2026, Tucker Carlson said during interview with Alex Jones:
CARLSON: I want to push an issue out there that I think is of central importance, it’s never mentioned, and that’s the racism against whites, the institutional racism against whites in the United States. Where if you’re a white man it’s harder to get a job, a federal contract, or college admission, and that’s factually true it’s proven, not just statistically proven by disparate impact but proven by document requests delivered in lawsuits and we know for a fact this is happening, and DOJ has basically done nothing to fix it. And so that’s like a core question: Can the US government, can our biggest institutions, commit open racism against the people whose ancestors built this country? And the answer is “Yes they can.”
This is a lie. This is the opposite of reality. The Trump administration has made combatting anti-white discrimination a major priority at the DOJ and other agencies previously used to implement discrimination against white people, particularly young white men. A few months ago when I first wrote about this quote, I provided a list of actions the DOJ specifically had taken before Carlson’s interview with Jones. Since then, the Trump administration has continued to take aggressive action to combat anti-white discrimination. Rather than having “basically done nothing” about the problem, as Carlson claimed, the Trump administration has been unusually energetic in dealing with this topic in particular. It’s one of Trump’s most significant achievements.
Finally, we have an August 28, 2026, interview with former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino. Carlson said in his opening monologue:
The true betrayal of the second Trump term, may not be foreign policy. That’s the most damaging thing Trump or any American president has ever done. Beginning a fruitless war with Iran and thereby destroying our empire and probably our dollar but in terms of a political betrayal, what Trump has not done on immigration is more profound, because you probably won’t find a single Trump voter who disagreed with Trump’s views on immigration, and again this is why Trump was able to move from the private sector as a branding guy to the White House as an American President was on the basis of his promises on immigration so for him to betray those promises is profound.
. . .
No one has pointed this out. Democrats have no incentive to point it out, of course. ICE shot a couple of protestors last year and so the emphasis has been on that “They’re murderous thugs!” OK, we can debate that, obviously shooting unarmed people is bad, never defend it. But that’s not the whole story, the whole story is that immigration enforcement in the United States has stopped. Has stopped! And this fact, which is a central fact, which will define what our country is like going forward, or even if it exists as a coherent country, has been completely ignored.
Aside from my objections to the characterization of the liberal activists famously shot by ICE in Minneapolis as unarmed protestors, one was armed with a car that she had used to block traffic and was being rammed into an ICE agent shortly before she was shot, the other literally had a gun on his waist as he was following ICE agents around trying to interfere with their work before he was shot in a confused physical altercation that he provoked, what Carlson is saying here is a lie. This is the opposite of reality. Immigration enforcement in the United States has not stopped. In fact, when Carlson said this, enforcement was surging. The issue has not been completely ignored. It is not even worth trying to engage with this claim; it’s just a lie. We are beyond hyperbole here. No one could say what Carlson is saying in good faith.
The issue with Tucker Carlson is not that he is taking too principled a stand over US overseas interventions or that he has lost perspective on the relative importance of this or that matter of public interest. Both of these things might be true, but they’re kind of beside the point. The issue is that Carlson is telling lies about the Trump administration's policy and record. I think the only and obvious conclusion that someone would reach from this behavior (it’s not hard at all to disprove these claims), is that Carlson is attempting to deceive his audience and convince them to not support Republicans in the upcoming elections, in effect working to make our political position weaker and put our enemies in power. He is lying to try to make us lose.
I think Vance is focusing on his “disagreement” with Tucker over the Iran issue so that he can present himself as a kind of synthesis between the Carlson and Trump positions: Vance is obviously an Iran intervention skeptic, yet he remains a supporter of the Trump administration. You can do both, that’s very true. I don’t like the Iran intervention either and think it was a big mistake. I would say that this is probably a majority view among Republicans, even if only unconsciously.
However, if Vance is attempting to craft a middle path here, it is a doomed effort.
The best moment of Tucker Carlson’s career was his heroic early coverage of the George Floyd Riots. At the time Republicans, even President Trump, were responding with passivity and accommodation to unacceptable behavior. Carlson famously began his monologue: “When the mobs came, they abandoned us.”
Rightwing politics today are overrun with people who think they can get what they want by trying to make us lose. Outgoing establishment Senator Thom Tillis relished the thought of a “bloodbath” for Republicans in the upcoming midterms. There is a legion of mainstream and fringe populist figures smaller than Tucker who repeat many of the same lies that he does and tell Republicans that either they have no reason to vote or, in fact, that they should vote for Democrats. Lies were allowed to become common knowledge. These people even openly collaborate with the enemy now; it doesn’t faze anyone anymore. Although these figures often have bitter rivalries and cannot agree among themselves about any number of topics, they all agree that the solution to their problems is real world political defeat for us.
Vice President Vance has shown passivity and accommodation in the face of this epidemic internal dysfunction. His statements on Tucker Carlson are ground zero for this behavior. No, this is not just a disagreement about policy.
Of course, the failure is not unique to Vance. Many of the most prominent leaders in conservatism seem confused when dealing with obvious threats and liabilities. Someone takes a shit on the floor and people will talk about everything but the smell. Even President Trump himself should be doing far more to crack down, though he at least has the excuse of being 80 years old and the President of the United States with countless other world-shaping responsibilities and preoccupations.
The popularity of many self-destructive strains of thought in rightwing circles today is not due to the unusual strength or timeliness of these arguments, but rather to the present unusual weakness of conservative leaders, especially after the murder of Charlie Kirk. All this online stuff is new to them and they have no idea how to handle it so they don’t handle it at all. A lot of these people are just waiting to surrender to or cut a deal with bad actors so they can stop thinking about it.
The biggest challenge facing Republicans is a lack of internal discipline. When someone is trying to engineer defeat for us, everyone needs to know that their leaders can recognize this behavior and will aggressively oppose it. This is important if you want to be President. The public follows strength. As Carlson wrote in the caption to his Floyd Riot monologue: “People will not forgive weakness. That’s not a partisan point, it’s human nature.”
The biggest risk for Vance’s political future is not that people won’t think he’s “based” enough if he pushes back against former allies who have turned on the President, it’s that people will think he’s weak because he’s surrounded by people who engage in unacceptable behavior and he largely accepts it. It doesn’t seem like Vance is trying to reason with someone who has adopted an unreasonable position, it seems like he’s bargaining with someone who has made it clear through their untrue claims that they are negotiating in bad faith over how much damage they get to do to us. I don’t want people to think that the big priority is bringing these guys back on board. When that’s the case, it doesn’t matter how effective and right you are when you talk about any number of important other issues, you just look weak.
Americans need their country back. Republicans need to win for that to happen. All the successes of the last two years could be undone in a few very bad weeks. That’s how it’s always been. We’re still just hurtling across the tightrope. It’s remarkable how much people in and outside of the Trump administration have achieved so far in the face of overwhelming opposition, and at great risk to themselves. These people deserve better than sabotage and surrender.
I want us to win more than anything in the world. We have an opportunity to fix our problems at a scale unimaginable a few years ago. If we can hold on to the Senate and the Presidency until the 2030 Census, we have the chance to lock liberals out of national power for generations. We can prevent WW3, go to the Moon, save our country and people and tens of millions of lives. We’re still in the Good Timeline, after all. That’s not going to happen if there’s this never-ending internal circus where when someone is saying things that are clearly not true in order to make us lose, our leaders respond with anything other than hostility.
So, what is to be done? Does Vance need to “disavow” Tucker Carlson? No, I don’t think so. The disavowal game is dumb. No one really gives that much of a shit about personal relationships. The reason it keeps coming up is that Carlson keeps making false claims and Vance keeps giving these bad answers to journalists’ questions. However, Vance certainly does need to let everyone know that when this guy lies, you shouldn’t believe the lies. If you can’t do that, it is going to be very tough to convince Americans that you are the right person to defend their interests at the highest level.
That’s it. I will no longer be voting for Vance in the midterms.
Thanks for this.