JD Vance lauded for speech slamming the ‘hatred' of the far left
Vance discussed how 'hatred' has become the animating principle of the American far left during his address at the Claremont Institute's 2025 Statesmanship Award.
'This speech encapsulates why I, along with many others, wanted JD Vance to be vice president in the first place,' Mr Hammer told Sky News host Rita Panahi.
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'But they have never occupied the upper echelons of power until the last decade.' During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump tied the father of one of his rivals, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, to the Kennedy killing, citing a photograph with Lee Harvey Oswald. During Trump's hush money trial in New York last year, his one-time compatriot David Pecker of The National Enquirer acknowledged under oath that the whole thing was made up to damage Cruz and elect Trump. Unrepentant, Trump stuck to his false assertions about Obama's birthplace for years, only grudgingly admitting late in the 2016 campaign that his predecessor was, in fact, born in the United States. Trump nonetheless went on to falsely accuse Obama of spying on him, among other unfounded assertions. At one point, Trump spread the claim that Osama bin Laden was not actually dead and that Obama and Biden had the Navy's SEAL Team 6 killed. He likewise casually accused a television anchor of murder. 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Some Democrats have now dived into the Epstein fever swamp head-first, suddenly exercised by a closed case that had hardly been on the party's priority list just weeks ago, as they pile on Trump and maximise his political troubles. After Roy Black, who was Epstein's defence lawyer, happened to die at age 80 this past week at the height of the furore over the case, some on the left saw suspicious timing. America's conspiracy craze has also drawn in foreign allies in recent days. President Emmanuel Macron of France and his wife, Brigitte, this past week filed a defamation lawsuit in Delaware against Candace Owens, a far-right YouTube commentator known for antisemitic rhetoric, for repeatedly claiming that the French first lady is actually a man. Trump, however, has stirred the plot pot more than any other major political figure. In the six months since retaking office, he has remained remarkably cavalier about suggesting nefarious schemes, even as he heads the government supposedly orchestrating some of them. He suggested the nation's gold reserves at Fort Knox might be missing, resurrecting a decades-old fringe supposition, even though he would presumably be in position to know whether that was actually true, what with being president and all. 'If the gold isn't there, we're going to be very upset,' he told reporters. It fell to Scott Bessent, the decidedly non-conspiratorial Treasury secretary, to burst the bubble and reassure Americans that, no, the nation's reserves had not been stolen. 'All the gold is present and accounted for,' he told an interviewer. Trump has played to long-standing suspicions by ordering the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert F. 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The past week or so has seen a fusillade of Trumpian conspiracy theories, seemingly meant to focus attention away from the Epstein case. Tulsi Gabbard, the president's politically appointed intelligence chief, trotted out inflammatory allegations that Obama orchestrated a 'years-long coup and treasonous conspiracy' by skewing the 2016 election interference investigation – despite the conclusions of a Republican-led Senate report signed by none other than Marco Rubio, now Trump's secretary of state. She also claimed that Hillary Clinton was 'on a daily regimen of heavy tranquillisers' during the 2016 campaign. Relying on this, Trump accused Obama of 'treason,' suggesting he should be locked up and going so far as to post a fake video showing his predecessor being handcuffed in the Oval Office and put behind bars. The idea of a president posting such an image of another president would once have been seen as a shocking breach of etiquette and corruption of the justice system, but in the Trump era it has become simply business as usual. For all that, the conspiracy theorist in chief has not been able to shake the Epstein case, which reflects the rise of the QAnon movement that believes America is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles. Most of the files, the ones that his attorney-general told him include his name, remain unreleased, bringing together an unlikely alliance of MAGA conservatives and liberal Democrats. Loading It was well known that Trump was friends with Epstein, although they later fell out. So it's not clear what his name being in the files might actually mean. But Trump is not one to back down. Asked last week about whether he had been told his name was in the files, Trump again pointed the finger of conspiracy elsewhere. 'These files were made up by Comey,' he told reporters, referring to James Comey, the FBI director he had fired more than two years before Epstein died in prison in 2019. 'They were made up by Obama,' he went on. 'They were made up by the Biden administration.'