The silence on Vance’s anti-Jewish conspiracy theories speaks volumes

News The silence on Vance’s anti-Jewish conspiracy theories speaks volumes Comments: by Steven Lubet, opinion contributor - 08/03/26 11:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Steven Lubet, opinion contributor - 08/03/26 11:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied

Alex Brandon, Associated Press President Trump, Vice President Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent arrive for the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) at the Washington National Cathedral, July 28, 2026, in Washington.

Even as the Trump administration continues to investigate major universities for allegedly failing to address campus antisemitism, the president and leading Republicans have all remained disturbingly silent about the Jewish conspiracy theorizing of Vice President JD Vance.

In Vance’s recent lengthy interview with contrarian podcaster Joe Rogan, the talk inevitably turned to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Repeating a baseless rumor, Rogan opined that “most people think he was Mossad.”

The vice president agreed. “He clearly had connections to the upper — the highest — levels of Israeli intelligence,” said Vance, affirming a purported relationship unsupported in the 3.5 million pages released by the Department of Justice pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

There are two important things to know about conspiracy theories. First, everything counts as proof. There are no events or associations that cannot fit into the theory. Viewed from just the right perspective, it can all be stitched into the narrative. Even the complete absence of evidence confirms the conspirators’ ominous power to cover their tracks.

Second, they all too frequently focus on Jews. Whatever has gone badly in the world, whether trivial (a disallowed World Cup goal) or tragic (the Los Angeles wild fires), the consequences can be blamed on Jews.

Vance’s Epstein-Mossad affirmation is a classic exemplar. No evidence? No problem. It was cunningly removed years ago.

Vance said he asked if there were “documents connecting Jeffrey Epstein directly to our intelligence agencies or anybody else’s, and the answer is no.” He added: “But if that s— existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”

Vance also channeled several of conspiracy theorists’ favorite memes, alluding to secret information available only to truthers.

“I know beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he told Rogan, without providing details, that there is a “very discreet, extremely well-funded … literal foreign-influence campaign being funded to tank” the Iran deal on Israel’s behalf.

Archetypal complaints of underhanded funding and malign foreign influence are characteristic of anti-Jewish conspiracies. Never mind that the Iranians themselves have rebuffed ceasefires, with no need for influence from outsiders.

Vance’s adventure in conspiracy land was just the latest episode in a long-running story line among certain conservatives.

Former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green joined other internet trolls imagining covert Jewish manipulation in the Maine senate race. “I do find it interesting that Platner is hated by AIPAC and rape accusations show up years later from a woman who dated him,” she said in a now deleted X post.

Greene’s rumination pales compared to right-wing pundits Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who have dabbled in Holocaust denial and more. Owens has intimated that Israel and Jewish donors played a role in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Carlson once hosted the noted antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast. He may well have been an original source for Vance’s imagined Epstein-Mossad link, including an evidence-free allegation of a “blackmail operation.”

Speaking at a Turning Point USA event in July 2025, Carlson displayed conspiracy theorists’ distinctive reasoning, in which all inferences lead to Jews.

How could Epstein, Carlson asked, “go from being a math teacher at the Dalton School in the late ‘70s with no college degree, to have multiple airplanes, a private Island, and the largest residential house in Manhattan? Where did all the money come from?”

Carlson has the predictable answer. Skipping over the documented facts, he called it “extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government” and “that foreign government is Israel.”

The unspoken implication is that Israeli funders, for some nefarious reason, helped enable Epstein’s sex crimes. Similar depravity themes have deep roots in European antisemitism. Sometimes the quiet parts are still said out loud, as when a failed Democratic congressional candidate promised to turn a prison into “a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

Carlson claims that his theorizing is not antisemitic because he named Israel rather than Jews. He shares that excuse with the leftists who claim to be anti-Zionist rather than anti-Jewish, even as they push standard antisemitic tropes with only one word changed.

The use of Zionists as a coded reference to Jews dates to at least 1903, with publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in Russia, decades before the establishment of Israel. This malicious forgery has been circulated around the world, spreading the defamatory tale of a sinister plan for global domination.

The Soviet Union used the same deceitful euphemism in its international propaganda, while engaging in pervasive discrimination against Jews within its borders. Henry Ford’s 1920s screed “The International Jew” also used Zionism as a synonym for Jews.

Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are often discounted as the province of provocateurs, demagogues, dupes and bigots. It is alarming to add the vice president of the U.S. to the list.

Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.