The neocon establishment is openly scheming to reclaim the Republican Party — and they’re targeting Vice President J.D. Vance with the exact same attacks they used against President Trump a decade ago.
The NeverVance campaign exploded on X after Vance told Fox News’ The Will Cain Show last week that conservatives can’t defeat socialism by throwing slogans at voters.
“You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market,” Vance said. “You stop socialism by making people’s lives better.”
He was responding to the primary success of DSA-affiliated Democrats selling voters on socialism as the answer to affordability problems.
“You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market. You stop socialism by making people’s lives better.”
Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson immediately denounced Vance as a “right-wing socialist” for acknowledging the affordability crisis is real and proposing government action. Shapiro posted about free markets and process neutralism. Erickson wrote a lengthy essay claiming Vance thinks low prices are bad and America needs a strongman to manage decline.
Others compiled old interview clips of Vance explaining policies like taxing Ivy League endowments or seizing left-wing NGO assets — as if that’s a bad thing.
The only way to make sense of these attacks: the overarching goal is returning the GOP to its pre-Trump state.
If Vance proposes something populist, that’s “socialism.” If he talks about the common good, he’s on the “woke right.” If he suggests refocusing foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere, that’s “isolationist.”
Never mind that Trump’s top officials — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio — agree with Vance on all this but never get attacked by the neocons for it.
Neocons like Shapiro aren’t making an actual argument for free markets or against socialism. They’re using those as slop terms to express dislike for Vance.
What we have in America today isn’t really a free market — it’s a rigged market full of moral hazard, overregulation, and manufactured scarcity, precisely in the industries hitting families hardest: housing, health care, education, and childcare.
National Review recently documented that these costs have been rising at rates well above inflation and wage growth for decades.
When Americans express dismay over affordability or say the American Dream is out of reach, pointing to rising GDP won’t cut it. Those gains don’t offset the financial strain households feel every time they gas up, buy groceries, or take a sick kid to the doctor.
It’s not socialism to expect the government to do something about this.
Yet GOP establishment types mock Vance and sneer at anyone concerned about affordability. As Terry Schilling argues, “You are not a socialist for noticing that young people and families are being priced out of the economy in large parts of America, and you are not a socialist for wanting to fix these problems.”
A majority of Americans under age 50 now believe the American Dream is no longer possible for them.
Right now, half of all Americans age 18 to 29 are living with their parents — the highest share since the Great Depression. Another 47 percent in that age group get financial help from someone outside their household to pay basic living expenses.
Half of all Americans age 18 to 29 are living with their parents — the highest share since the Great Depression.
Why is this happening? One major reason: mass legal immigration. Millions of foreign nationals have entered on H-1B visas, taking jobs in tech and software development that should have gone to American workers.
Recent Labor Department data showed that through the third quarter of this fiscal year, employers filled more than 830,000 positions with foreign workers on the H-1B program — nearly a third went to software development positions.
Under these circumstances, repeating “free market good, socialism bad” isn’t an argument against Vance. For decades, the Washington establishment has focused on the health of global corporations and foreign nationals — not American families.
Noticing that and insisting government do something about it doesn’t make you a socialist.
It makes you a patriot.
The same people who tried to gaslight you about Trump in 2016 are doing the exact same thing about Vance right now. Patriots know why.
The American Dream is the promise of a process: if you work hard, and make smart and virtuous decisions, you will live a better life than your parents, and your children will live a better life than you do. That process requires free markets, free minds, equal justice before law,…
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 13, 2026
Highlight reel of @JDVance (not a socialist!) calling to "seize the institutions," "seize the administrative state," "seize the assets" of enemy foundations, "seize the endowment" to "penalize these endowments for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues." pic.twitter.com/S0YG83lzDX
— Jason Hart (@jasonahart) August 18, 2026
