New York Times Declines to Publish Evidence of JD Vance's Private Views on Israel

This corruption isn't going to fly anymore

I want to be clear that I like JD Vance. I’ve met him, and I appreciate his willingness to change. But he’s being slotted into a role here, in which a lot of these so-called “national conservatives”—a foreign influence op by Israel, Poland, and increasingly India—will call for more or less the same foreign policy views as the failed consensus, just more reluctantly, and call it “realism.” That will not do.

At this point, given that most of Israel—including Mossad and increasingly the generals of the IDF—has turned on Netanyahu, it seems like now would be a very good time for some Republicans to rethink their grotesque subservience to a foreign country, and especially a leader who is currently on trial. Vance has heard out some of the arguments here but has not allowed himself to be persuaded by them.

The New York Times has a big piece today about the Vance vice presidential pick, with bylines from Jonathan Swan and Likud asset Maggie Haberman. A third reporter, Mattathias Schwartz, who has been covered in these pages, was given texts from Charles Johnson regarding Vance’s private views on Israel. How do I know this? Because he freaked out when Charles posted them today.

Vance seems to have convinced himself that the Israelis were uninterested in America taking out their regional rivals. An interesting theory, but not a true one.

“If the GOP had listened to Bibi, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, we wouldn’t have done nation-building in Afghanistan, and we wouldn’t be threatening a war with Iran,” reads one of them. This, I’m afraid, is unacceptable naïveté in this moment.

But it’s also not terribly surprising that these two reporters, and the New York Times as an institution, would fail to run something like this. It is a huge problem in prestige media in general, some of which is not their fault—the Israelis will hurt them if they play a straight game—but this is a moment in which their feet need to be held to the fire.