On Wednesday, Vice President J. D. Vance spoke at the University of Mississippi, as part of a tour organized by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth movement founded by the late Charlie Kirk. After his talk, in a nod to Kirk’s freewheeling campus debates, Vance fielded questions from students for nearly an hour, an impressive feat of rhetorical stamina that illustrated why he is one of the Trump right’s best communicators. But he flubbed a key question.
“I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion-dollar foreign-aid package to Israel,” asked a young man in a MAGA hat. “I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”
Although ostensibly about Israel, this question was fundamentally an attack on Jews and Judaism, segueing immediately from the Middle Eastern country to claims that the 0.2 percent of the world that is Jewish oppresses the 29 percent of the world that is Christian.
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