"That used to be a five-alarm moment. JD Vance is not a podcast host or a backbench provocateur. He is the sitting vice president of the United States. One heartbeat from the presidency. Daily intelligence briefing. Continuity-of-government planning. The role requires a baseline trust in reality itself. Labeling someone in that position a conspiracy theorist is not an insult. It is an indictment of fitness for office."
"Vance's response was telling. He didn't deny the characterization. Instead, he said he only believes in conspiracy theories that are true. That formulationtreating conspiracy thinking as a matter of discernment rather than methodologyis remarkable on its own. It's also a perfect distillation of how normalized this has become. And yet the story barely lasted a day. The reason isn't simply scandal fatigue or strategic silence, though both play a role."
"It aligned too comfortably with what people already believe about JD Vance, about Trump's orbit, and about modern American politics more broadly. That plausibility drained the story of urgency before it ever had a chance to harden into a crisis. We've seen this dynamic repeatedly. When then-candidate Donald Trump amplified claims that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs, the statement should have triggered institutional alarm. Instead, it was treated as another entry in the long list of bizarre assertions that now accompany serious political power."
A White House official publicly labeled the vice president a decade-long conspiracy theorist, a claim the vice president did not deny and reframed as selective truth discernment. The vice president occupies a role requiring trust in reality, daily intelligence briefings, and continuity planning, making such allegations a fitness concern. The story faded quickly not from implausibility but because the characterization fit existing perceptions. Normalization of conspiratorial assertions has reduced institutional alarm, allowing bizarre or false claims connected to powerful figures to be treated as routine rather than crisis-worthy.
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