You may have noticed the waging of a not-so-secret campaign against President Donald Trump’s most likely successor in 2028: Vice President J.D. Vance.
The heralds of this crusade comprise the usual suspects: neocons, NeverTrumpers, and leftists in conservatives’ clothing. Altogether, those who desperately wish to turn back the clock to the golden age of loser conservatism before Trump arrived on the scene in 2015.
As my colleague John Daniel Davidson pointed out this week, Vance’s would-be character assassins don’t have an actual argument to make against him, and in truth they have no intention of making actual, reasoned arguments about why he shouldn’t be the nominee in ’28. “The only way to make sense of these garbled lines of attack on Vance is to keep in mind that the overarching motivation here is to return the GOP to its pre-Trump state.”
At the tip of the spear of the anti-Vance cause in the Twitterverse is the terminally online, terminally braindead has-been James Lindsay.
Lindsay, who styles himself as “chief anti-totalitarianism officer” in his X profile, has evolved from a relatively innocuous role as an anti-woke “ex-liberal” in convenient alliance with the right in the late 2010s and early 2020s into a full-blown cancer on the conservative movement.
Lindsay has been on the cutting edge of the anti-Vance movement, but his war of slander against the vice president has ramped up in recent weeks.
“Why does Democrat radical Ro Khanna’s ‘progressive capitalism’ sound exactly like the post-liberal (and ‘traditional conservative’) Right, like JD Vance, down to explicitly basing it on Catholic social teaching? Like line for line the same?”
“Everything about the rotten movement around Vance stinks to high hell, and if we let him become president, this nasty movement will fill every inch of the federal bureaucracy and will abuse all that power as hard as they can.”
“Vance is a problem. Everyone sees it now, or almost everyone. The dam already broke. I was just really early, like usual.”
These kinds of smug attacks continue on for … probably hundreds of posts at this point.
We really should have seen this coming. During his time supposedly aiding the right against the woke lunatics of the far left, Lindsay has made some, well, interesting statements about his past and his intentions.
“I volunteered for Obama, voted for him and all blue both times, voted for Clinton and all blue, encouraged people openly and publicly (on video and in writing) to vote ALL BLUE without thinking in both 2016 and 2018,” reads a post from 2020.
“It’s no secret and everyone knows I voted for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama twice, respected the Never Trumpers, initially thought we should take the pandemic seriously, and was a New Atheist,” he posted in 2021. (Notice how, despite the post supposedly being a refutation of people accusing him of never admitting he’s wrong, he actually doesn’t admit he was wrong about any of that.)
And for all of his scolding of “Christian nationalists” (i.e. anyone with an actually Biblical worldview), he sure did give away the game with this post in 2024: “Thinking about pretending to be Christian so I can tell Christians how bad they are at being Christian and they’ll have to listen to me.”
Of course, after being rightfully dragged for that comment, Lindsay went on a hysterical screed about how the “Woke Right” twisted his words and how it was just a big joke, man, and if you take it seriously you’re just a big dumb idiot because you can’t, like, understand the multiple layers of clever irony in that post, or something like that. Spoiler: he has consistently since then tried to dictate to actual Christians what they should believe.
This is the person who wants all conservatives to bow down to his searing intellect and moral rectitude, and then thank him for the privilege of basking in the glow of his genius.
It’s clear even to casual observers that Lindsay is extremely bitter about not being crowned (or perhaps not being allowed to crown himself, Napoleon-style) the preeminent conservative thought leader during Woke 1.0. This is despite the fact that the sum total of his work during that area amounts to little more than a slightly more sophisticated form of trolling (targeting almost cartoonishly idiotic academics). This seems to be the only work to which Lindsay is suited, because it has now become his all-consuming fixation, as his more than 360,000 (!) tweets can attest.
The truth is, James Lindsay is an op. He openly admits to being a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat up until five minutes ago and bragged about his plan to deceive Christians. He exists solely to gatekeep the right with Nazi slurs, further neuter conservatism with infighting and distractions, and bully the faithful out of public life by pretending to care about Christianity. And after infecting the conservative discourse with his tedious drivel and receiving the lightest pushback on his dumb prognostications? He retreats like a petulant child behind an air of academic superiority and ironic detachment.
I would say he’s bought and paid for, but I have no idea who would actually pay for such an inept operative. I mean, in his quest to smear Vance supporters, he created one of the coolest images of the year, and even afterward can’t help himself.
Good faith argument with Lindsay, like most of his ilk, is pointless. Not that he could argue his way out of a cardboard box, anyway. He, like his delusional attempts to take the reins of the conservative movement, deserves mockery, plain and simple. Constant, withering derision until he crawls back into whatever hole of obscurity he scuttled out of a few years ago when the right was far too welcoming of “former” liberals.
We never should have let that cohort of liberals who claimed “I didn’t leave the left, it was the left who left me” into the movement, much less given them power and influence. Almost to a man, they’ve proven to be nothing more than duplicitous Trojan horses that turn on us as soon as it becomes convenient or they receive the slightest pushback.
James Lindsay’s campaign against Vance, much like his campaign against everything else conservative, isn’t having much of an effect in the real world. Vance stands comfortably as the frontrunner to succeed Trump as the nominee in 2028. But Lindsay does remain a blight on X, constantly picking at the scabs of old internal disputes that once plagued the conservative movement in the pre-Trump era. And he will likely continue to do so at the behest of whichever master he serves, whether that be some as-yet-unidentified benefactor or his own ego — so bruised and battered by the conservatives he now pompously scorns. After all, narcissism is a hell of a drug.
But he doesn’t deserve to be challenged in the open field of discourse; he’s proven himself too craven to be given the honor of an actual debate in the “marketplace of ideas.” He deserves the same fate as every other two-bit provocateur — to be relegated to the oblivion of complete and utter irrelevancy.
