Bulwark Takes - Tim & Sarah React to Vance’s INCREDIBLY Reckless Speech

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, JD Vance rushed to blame “the Left” while ignoring Trump’s violent rhetoric, and then went further, calling for liberal professors to be fired and nonprofit foundations to be investigated.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here with our publisher, Sarah Longwell. J.D. Vance guest hosted the Charlie Kirk podcast today, and that was something that I deeply just wanted to ignore for my own mental health. But unfortunately, the vice president has forced our hand here with the type of behavior that he exhibited in that podcast. Obviously, could have been an opportunity in a platform to try to bring the country together, unite, dial down the rest of,

I don't think you'll be surprised to hear. He did not do that. So Sarah, do you want to just get right into it or do you have any big picture thoughts? I think we should just roll the clips. I have a lot of thoughts, but let's start with the clips. Yeah, the clips will kind of speak for themselves. All right, here is the first one, and it is JD offering some statistical facts. While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of

the far left. All right. So he didn't offer the statistics, really, there, but I have a few issues with it. What about you? Well, so he had, earlier, before that statement, he had tried to cite a poll that had just came out. It was taken in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder. And the reason that that matters a great deal in terms of assessing people's Felix. because the question was about, is it okay to, is it acceptable to be happy about the death of a

political opponent? Okay, is it acceptable to be happy? Now, my guess is that people who are looking at that in the direct aftermath of that who do not like Charlie Kirk, right, are taking it specifically there, not sort of broadly. They're saying, now, I'm not saying that justifies it. I'm just saying that is a different thing, because if you go and look at sort of big picture of where extremist violence comes from, certainly between 2015 and 2024, the vast majority of that was on the fringe, right? And like, I do think there's probably, there has been some shifting attitudes around some of this, and it probably comes from people's, like, extreme feelings about Donald Trump. But the idea that this is just a problem on one side is the main thing that we need to take issue with. Like, you can get into the various surveys or whatever. And listen, there would be plenty for both sides to seize on, depending on how the questions are asked, depending on what was like top of mind in the news.

Like, that changes how people answer these things. I think that anybody of good faith in this moment would acknowledge. we have a political violence problem in America. It is not, it does not belong to one side. And I'm going to talk about this again in a minute, but one of the greatest acts of political violence that we have witnessed in the last decade was in 2020 when a group of people

whose passions were inflamed by the president of the United States went and broke into the country. Capitol, violently assaulted cops, menaced are elected leaders, and tried to overturn an election. And so I just think the, like, shamelessness that it takes, right? Every person then who vocally supports Donald Trump, they have a problem with moral authority, right? There's no moral authority from Donald Trump to talk about the dangers of political violence. J.D. Vance is vice president because Donald Trump, when the crowd was chanting hang Mike Pence, he shot off a tweet during that, basically saying, if only Mike Pence

had the courage, we could overturn this election and egg people on. And so there is no moral authority for them to say this problem is on the left. And also, I think that one of the things I've been thinking about, or I think that is obvious to anybody with two eyes and an IQ above room temperature is that nobody has been more solicitous of political violence, more encouraging of it, more dismissive of it. I mean, there are clips everywhere you can see about Donald Trump telling jokes about Nancy Pelosi's husband being attacked. And so our ability to grapple with political violence in this country, I think starts with not electing leaders who foment political violence, who joke about political violence, who encourage political violence.

So that starts with not electing leaders like Donald Trump. Yeah. To me, I guess I would just back up even further. Just in like, it was up until Donald Trump was elected. It was up until two minutes ago that we just understood what what leaders' obligations were in times of high emotions and fraught tensions, right? Like, the idea of Al Gore as vice president, you know, going on the news in the 90s after Oklahoma City bombing or after Columbine and saying, like, you know who the problem is, the fucking Republican lunatics. They're lunatics out there.

Like, you can't trust them. Like, that would have been crazy. Like, that just would have been unthinkable, right? Like, it would have been unthinkable. Like, the presidents and vice presidents my entire life. up until now, understood that when there was real times of tension, it was their job to kind of calm the waters. That's not, you know,

going to save us from every violent person or whatever, but it's just it's the responsible thing to do. And so, like, even if it was true, which it's not, you know, this would not be the moment to do it, to go on a MAGA podcast and attack the left. It's like, what are you, all you're doing is, is creating more tension.

and acting irresponsibly, right? It's just, and J.D. Vance knows better. It's just the reality. It's like he does because he said so in the past. Before we get to what he said in the past, I do want to mention, I did like one little line from there where he says, well, our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies. I'd like to hear somebody follow up on that with him at some point.

I'm curious who he thinks that is. I do want to go into the past on J.D. Vance, but did you have one thing on that before I went to what J.D. Vance said at Charlottesville? Well, just to your point about elected leaders. Look, there are some horrible things being said about Charlie Kirk. Both you and I have spoken about. We have commented extensively, Channel, because we think it's wrong. Not to highlight the things that he said, but to celebrate his death in any way is wrong, and it is corrosive.

No elected Democrat has done this. It is, it is, it is, it is random people out there. And that is very different from the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, and elected Republicans who have been the ones fanning the flames. And I also just want to say, like, where we are in this investigation in terms of figuring out why this happened is this idea that he is of the left. Like, the main evidence of that right now is that Spencer Cox says so, that from talking to family members. And that may very well be true. what does it mean to be of the left in this case? Does it mean that he was fighting for more taxes against the rich?

Is it because he wanted to see more restrictive climate regulations? Or is it like blackpilled internet crazy stuff? And so this idea that that is the left sort of doesn't make sense to me. just like analytically from like who are we defining here to that point about some of the crazy comments that have been made out there i want to go to one of the other clips that vans did on this podcast today something that really bugged me um and uh that was his comments about what to do uh with people who are saying negative things about charlie let's watch when you see someone celebrating charlie's murder call them out in hell call their employer

We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. The idea of the vice president of the United States of America should encourage people to try to docks, like, random folks who posted on Facebook or Twitter and call their employer and get them fired, that's a crazy way to live in a country, by the way. That is not how we want to live. We don't want to, again, we don't want to encourage people to say irresponsible things. But you want to be able to hash that. out in a society together, not rat on them to their boss, that they loot their job.

In some of these cases, people might ruin their lives. You know who made this point all the time? Every Republican imaginable, we could go through all the clips. It was, this was the whole thing around why Republicans were mad around the awakening and the Black Lives Matter movement, where if somebody, you know, if there was a person out there who said something that was wrong about George Floyd or about one of the other victims of police violence, that that person needed to be, there'd be a mob that would come after that person and try to get them fired.

And when that was happening, the people who were doing that were private citizens. It wasn't Joe Biden that was like, you know, you should really call up the employer of people who said some wrong speak about George Floyd.

So this is worse. This is the government. This vice president of the United States saying that you should call a private employer and tell them to fire somebody who said something mean about Charlie Kirk. that is and it's hypocritical it is not in free speech it's not a way to live it's just totally irresponsible it's just stoking the flames of all this the hypocrisy is obviously self-evident um i think the bigger problem is that it's pretextual right so all of these

things are meant to build a path toward uh taking people's funding uh shut down organizations that are more progressive in orientation to revoke people's tax status. Like, this is sort of just the beginning of what they want to do. And I'm not, I'm not assuming things by saying that. That's what Stephen Miller is saying. That's what Donald Trump is saying. That's what J.D. Vance goes on to say in other parts of this interview. Should we listen to that part right now?

Let's listen to that part. Okay, here we go. Something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe, a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left. There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics. There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder. There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of

that family lost a dear friend. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination. And there is no unity with the people. who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree. Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment? they are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer, and how do they reward us by setting fire to the house built by the American family over 250 years? There is J.D. Vance directly saying we're going to go after these left-wing nonprofits. Yeah, so if you want to go after left-wing nonprofits for violating their tax status for real reasons, I mean,

I, okay. But like, that's not what you're talking about here. You're talking about investigate. And this is that this is, this is the main point. They, and he talks about this, the building blocks, right? Of, you know, you get that he's thinking, he's trying to say that there's the shooter at the tippy top and below it are sort of the, the democratic operators and the politicians and, as though, as though this and then down below is the funders. And that's the key. They want to use this pretextually to go after the people who fund political projects that are coded as left wing. Now, again, for them to be 501C3 projects or 501C3 grants, they legally cannot do, like, they can't interfere, they can't go into elections, they can't say elect this person or not this person. They have to be about ideas, which means, let me tell you, on the right, many of the Tea Party things were funded through these. channels, like lots of pro-Trump policy things are through think tanks. There's a whole new, like, world of mega think tanks out there promoting and backfilling for, you know, make America great again and America first stuff. And so if, if somebody had done this after Donald Trump fanned the flames of the attack on the Capitol and went after not the perpetrators, which the FBI

I did go after, but every right-wing funder would have included a turning point USA. It certainly would have. Like, that is, so, like, that's, that's the part here. I mean, it's deeply asymmetric, but also wrong. It is just fundamentally wrong, but that's what they're doing. They are trying to use this as a reason to shut down funding and chill funding structures on the left so that they can't be meant to try to keep people from beating them in elections. Again, this is the vice president in the days after this assassination goes on Charlie Kirk's platform. And basically what he lays out is we need to go after them. Like we need to go after the institutional progressive groups.

And we need to go after individual liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call it, who say bad things. Like that is what he thinks the response to this should be. And again, when we, you know, there's. certain things we're learning with the shooter and all that, but like the idea that the shooter had anything to do with the Ford Foundation or like some nurse in Arkansas who said the wrong thing on social media should be found. Like it is all, it is a can't, it was a campaign of retribution and revenge that he's essentially announcing

on this podcast platform when I, you know, it is just using like this tragedy to advance something that they've always, they want to do to your point about being pretextual. And this is something that Stephen Miller's wanted to do since he got in there, at least at the institutional level. And now they're kind of adding on to it, harassing individual people in a way that is just fundamentally contrary to what all of them said should happen over the past 10 years with their complaints about cancel culture and doing it worse than any left-wing organization did. Because, again, it's not like Barack Obama. An example I used on Twitter is imagine if Barack Obama after Trayvon Martin was shot was like, if you see anybody, see. something bad about Trayvon Martin or defend George Zimmerman you should call their boss and have

them fired. I mean like literally that would still be on the Sean Hannity show every night right now 15 years later. So anyway, that's that. I want to talk about one other thing, one of the group that he targets on the left in particular. And it is a specific story. J.D. Vance loves to do this. Pick out a specific reporter and try to elevate them and then and just create like a harassment campaign. pain against them. He reads a story in the Nation magazine. The Nation is a pretty far left magazine, just to be blunt about it. And I guess they, he says, they misquote Charlie. In this article, he says that they write, black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. And then J.D. goes on to save with a very clip, she links to, he never said anything like that.

he never said anything like that so once again i'm going to read what what the article said black women do not have any brain processing power to be taken seriously jd says he never said anything like that let's play the clip that the article was referencing joy read and michel obama and shila jackson lee and katangy brown jackson were affirmative action picks we would have been called the racist but now they're coming out and they're saying it for us they're coming out and they're saying I'm only here because affirmative action. Yeah, we know you do not have the brain

processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously. Play cut 52. But I rise today as a clear recipient of affirmative action. And particularly

in higher education, I may have been admitted on affirmative action, both in terms of being a woman, and a woman of color but I can declare that I did not graduate on affirmative action this is my personal story I hear because of action affirmative

she can't even say that we know we know it's very obvious to us that you were not smart enough to be able to get in on your own I couldn't make it on my own and so I needed to take opportunities from someone more deserving.

You know, this is how arrogant Joy Reid and Katangi Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson-Lee are. They're so narcissistic, they think this is persuasive. They think we're like, oh, of course. That's why we need affirmative action, because you have impressed us with your brilliance. Of course. Oh, no, imagine the world without Joy Reed. Imagine the world about Sheila Jackson Lee or Michelle Obama or Katanji Brown Jackson. They think this is persuasive.

They think as they kind of now reveal that I'm only here because of anti-white, anti-Asian forced discrimination policies. Yeah. So, I mean, he says specifically there that he lists Joy Reid, Katanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, all black women, and says they don't have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. that a white, that they stole a white person's job. I'm clear how Michelle Obama stole a white person's job, but it is exactly what is written in the article, except for it's specific black women rather than black women at large, which is, again, a fair, I guess, complaint for the editor,

but it's not exactly like he never said anything like that. He said something exactly like that. That's right. So here's the thing. Karen Atia at the Washington Post was fired for doing this exact same thing. So she's been fired from the post. She tweeted out that a quotation, but she used the black women instead of the four specific black women he was referencing.

So I do think the editor should have caught that. However, for J.D. Vance to suggest that Charlie Kirk was just, you know, just saying cool stuff. And these guys totally misquote him and he didn't say anything in the vein. Like, that clip is pretty breathtaking. And it's racism. If you just watch it, I've watched it now multiple times. And he's got lots of things like this. He talks about the blacks, whatever.

So this idea that like people have to misquote Charlie Kirk in order to make him sound, have bad opinions is just, or opinions that I find reprehensible that I think are pretty safely categorized as bad, that that is not something that can be criticized in this moment is is crazy uh now look again we we said in the immediate aftermath of his death i don't think that you know we had to go and immediately uh talk about like him being a terrible person i just i think there's time for that i think what happens is is then when you go though and then canonize a person in the wake of this murder have everybody lower flags to half mass take moments of silence then, you know, a lot of people are going to say, what is the thing that we are, like, who was the person that we are sort of deifying honoring here?

And I think that, you know, Charlie Kirk had a lot of reset a lot of really dishonorable things. And so I think it is not unfair at all for people to say, I don't know, maybe we take a beat before, you know, anointing this person. and with sainthood. He should not have been murdered. It is horrible what has happened to him and his family, but let's not pretend that he didn't say some of the most grotesque things in our politics because he did. Yeah.

And let's not do it in just the most smug and condescending way possible if you're the vice president and do everything you can to kind of rile up. Again, it's not, I guess I'm just going to close by saying like once again. It was not that long ago. I'm old enough to remember a time when leaders of all political stripes understood that they had an obligation to represent all Americans, even though those that didn't vote for them, to do what they could to try to foster a civil dialogue in this country, there would be a competition, there'd be during campaigns, they could criticize the other side and all that. but like especially at moments of tragedy that there was like a concerted effort to say what can we do right now to bring the country together and that doesn't necessarily mean in this case that they couldn't have honored charlie kirk or done the Kennedy center memorial for him and all that like they absolutely have the right to do that like my issue is is going on to then a partisan podcast as vice president of the united states and and demonizing half the country and kind of making making maybe not half because he calls it the far left the

demonizing a huge percent of the country and and and trying to portray them as in league with the assassin that we have mixed amount of information about right now and there's no reason to do that um doing so and taking things out of context and attacking the other side and doing everything possible to inflame at this moment like it's just just wrong. It's not, it's wrong. It would be wrong if it was just Steve Vannon doing it or some other podcaster. Like I probably wouldn't come on to do this video about that, right? Because like, podcasters are going to podcast, right? The vice president needs to be the fucking vice president in these moments, right? Not just any other replacement level podcaster trying to get clicks and

ratings and inflame tensions in a moment of a real, I think, fraught danger in the country. So that's all got on JD. No, please, you're going to find a word. I don't need the last word. I want J.D. Vance to have the last word. Here he is in 2017, right after the far right march in Charlottesville that left a young woman dead. I think the president really missed an opportunity to name this phenomenon, to give people a sense of where it comes from, and to really show the moral leadership that a lot of people want in their president. The thing that's really important for folks from my political side, from the conservative side of the aisle, have to keep in mind is that a lot of the people who feel physically threatened by white supremacism, not the people

who are angry by it, not the people who see it and get really upset by it. That's all of us. But the people who feel physically threatened by it are by and large not people who voted for Donald Trump. And so when those people look to that movement, I think the president has to show leadership to say, you may not have voted for me, but I'm going to come out and deplore and criticize that particular movement just as strongly as I would as if it was on the other side of the political spectrum. I think a lot of people felt like the president

could have spoken to that, and unfortunately by not naming this as what it was, which is white supremacism, he missed an opportunity. If I was President Trump in this situation, I'd be spiking the football, because this is one of the things that really unites the entire country. Racism

is bad. Naziism is bad. We fought a war to defeat Nazism. And the president should not just be There's a sense in which he's a little ambivalent or a little bit too cautious about coming out and criticizing this stuff. It's not just about him using the right words, but he's got to come out with the right tone and really stridently condemn this stuff. There it is. Moral leadership. Moral leadership. He knew that's what was required then. I don't think we're seeing it now. Sarah, thank you so much for popping on with me. Everybody, thanks for sticking around and dealing with all those JD Vance clips.

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