Whose side will you take on consequences for speech: JD Vance’s or JD Vance’s?

Vice President JD Vance, commenting on random Americans who made light of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

“Call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”

Vance, commenting on adult Republicans — including an elected official and staffers — who participated in a group chat that included racist and pro-Hitler commentary:

“The reality is that kids do stupid things. Especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. … I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”

In both cases, Vance was speaking on Kirk’s eponymous podcast. Meaning that he was offering those conflicting messages to the same audience, one that he (probably correctly) assumed would find any joke about Kirk’s death to be worthy of punishment and jokes comparing Black people to monkeys to be dismissible.

On Thursday, Pew Research Center released data evaluating the extent to which Americans see calling out offensive social-media posts as valuable. In 2022, 6 in 10 Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) felt that doing so was apt to punish people who didn’t deserve it while about the same percentage of Democrats (and leaders) felt that it introduced accountability.

In the most recent data, that divide is gone. Now, about the same percentage of each party sees accountability as a more likely outcome.

It is probably important both that the above shift overlaps with Trump’s return to the White House and social media companies scaling back their efforts to police abuse and misconduct. Trump and his allies have stoked the idea that America has undergone a sea change, one in which the prevailing ethos has shifted in their direction. Facebook and what was once Twitter have signed onto that idea. The right can’t present themselves as victims of powerful “woke” forces if they see themselves as the ones with cultural power.

But they can police conformity with that power, as they once accused the non-right of doing to them. Monitoring speech is just another tool in the authoritarian toolbox, used as a cudgel against critics or in service of their allies. For my enemies, the law, etc.

In that sense, there is no hypocrisy in Vance’s comments on the Kirk podcast. They are consistent in that they reflect the will of the administration and its approach to power.

Photo: Vance in the Oval Office. (White House/Flickr)