In Defense of Guilt by Association

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D.

Vance and Abdul El-Sayed have very little in common ideologically and seem to like each other even less.

As part of a nasty exchange of personal insults last month, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan implied that Vance’s grandfather would disapprove of the vice president’s Indian American wife.

In response , Vance called El-Sayed “very, very evil” and warned him to “keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league.” Yet even as Vance and El-Sayed are happy to trade schoolyard taunts, they can agree on at least one thing: that guilt by association is a contemptible means of scoring cheap political points.

“I’m tired of this guilt-by-association thing,” El-Sayed complained earlier this year, when he was asked about his decision to campaign alongside Hasan Piker, an internet shock jock who has said that “America deserved 9/11,” described allegations of sexual violence on October 7 as “rape fantasies,” and praised Mao Zedong as “one of the great leaders of the world,” among many other charming bon mots.

Despite repeated calls from within his own party to renounce Piker, El-Sayed refuses to do so.

Vance is facing a similar situation with his friend Tucker Carlson.

Vance “ doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture ,” a spokesperson said in September 2024, after the then-senator appeared onstage with the conservative podcast host.

In the years since his firing from Fox News, Carlson has lauded a Holocaust denier as “the most important historian in the United States,” accused a small Jewish sect of orchestrating the war in Iran, and praised Vladimir Putin as “the most effective leader in my lifetime.” Carlson, whose show returns again and again to the supposed perfidy of the Jews, has become the country’s highest-profile promoter of anti-Semitism.

He recently held a friendly conversation with a guest who claimed that algebra was “fake math” created for “goy slaves.” Vance was asked directly about his relationship with Carlson at a White House press conference earlier this month.

“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” the vice president said.

“And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.

I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go.” [ Jonathan Chait: J.