JD Vance Called Me a 'Dummy' for Pointing Out His Administration's Hypocrisy on Free Speech. I Guess the Truth Hurts
The vice president is busy attacking Europeans for not defending free speech while the Trump-Musk administration threatens to imprison American journalists.
“Yes dummy.”
It isn’t every day you’re on the receiving end of a playground insult from the vice president of the United States.
The one and only JD Vance has spent the past few days, both online and in person, lecturing European governments on the value and importance of free speech. At the Munich Security Conference on Friday, he (falsely) declared free speech was “in retreat” across the continent, while also claiming the Biden administration had been “desperate to silence people for speaking their minds” but the Trump administration would do “precisely the opposite.” On his boss’s social media site, he lambasted Germany’s hate speech laws as “Orwellian” and “lunacy” and warned that “criminalizing speech is going to put real strain on European-US relationships.”
And then, on Monday, after I tweeted to the vice president that his own administration was punishing a leading media organization here in the US for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” Vance arrived in my replies with this masterpiece of a comeback:
Are you kidding me?
First, I am well aware that the job of vice president is mostly ceremonial, doesn’t involve much actual work, and, in the words of our first vice president, is “the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.”
But I was still amused that the current VP had nothing else more important to do on a Monday than come into my replies and name-call like a second-grader. I get that Elon and Donald are running the country while JD tries to find a purpose in life, but surely the one elected official who is a heartbeat away from the most powerful job on Earth must have more to do with his time than just… post? Vance spends an awful lot of time on Twitter picking fights with pundits and fellow politicians. Could Musk, I wonder, maybe invite Vance to join his DOGE team to keep the VP a little more occupied?
Second, the Trump administration’s decision to ban the Associated Press from White House press events over the news agency’s refusal to bend the knee on the “Gulf of America” may not, of course, be as big a threat to free speech as imprisoning journalists but it is still an undeniable threat to free speech. The issue isn’t, as Vance put it, “not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room” but removing reporters from the briefing room because the government disagrees with what they are saying. As the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has pointed out, in defense of AP: “When the government shuts out journalists explicitly because it dislikes their reporting or political views, that violates the First Amendment.”
Or, as a federal court back in the 1980s declared: “Neither the courts nor any other branch of the government can be allowed to affect the content or tenor of the news by choreographing which news organizations have access to relevant information.” Such a practice, it added, “is unquestionably at odds with the first amendment.”
Third, forget the AP – and don’t even get me started on the chilling effect the various Trump and Musk lawsuits and threats of lawsuits have had on speech. Thirteen minutes before I tweeted at the vice president about the White House decision to punish AP for the content of its reporting, I tweeted at the vice president about his boss Elon Musk’s call for CBS journalists to face a “long prison sentence.” What for? The high crime of editing an interview with Kamala Harris in a way that Republicans disliked!
How’s that for Orwellian lunacy?
You’ll be shocked – shocked! – to hear that Vance chose to ignore my quote-tweet at 10:59 am ET pointing out Musk’s fascistic call to jail reporters and instead responded only to my quote-tweet at 11:12 am ET about the ongoing persecution of AP by the Trump administration.
But, of course, he did. There is no way for Vance or anyone else to defend or excuse Musk’s threat against American journalists. And, sadly, it’s not just Musk. Trump has also spent the past few years repeatedly threatening reporters with prison – and even prison rape!
Is it any wonder that Trump has been called “America’s Hitler”? And who was it that called him that again?
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