On December 16, 2025 a Vanity Fair series landed with the sort of insider sneers the media uses to delegitimize anyone who questions Washington orthodoxy. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles reportedly called Vice President JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist,” a cheap shot meant to hush a voice that won’t dance to establishment talking points.
Vance didn’t flinch. Speaking that same day in Pennsylvania, he laughed, tapped his podium, and told the crowd he sometimes is a conspiracy theorist — but only in the sense that he believes conspiracy theories that turn out to be true. That line landed because it cut through the pretense: too often the media denounces skepticism until reality proves skeptics right.
He named specifics: in 2020 he warned against masking toddlers, he warned the nation about Joe Biden’s fitness for office, and he warned that the administration was willing to weaponize the justice system against political opponents. These aren’t wild-eyed fantasies; they were warnings grounded in commonsense observation and later events that made many journalists look foolish for their reflexive dismissals.
The real story isn’t that Vance was called a conspiracy theorist; the scandal is that the media and the elites keep trying to police what counts as legitimate doubt. When reporters gaslight the public and excommunicate dissenting voices, they become protectors of an establishment narrative — and that is what breeds distrust across the country.
Vanity Fair’s hit-piece style coverage and the safe-space outrage that followed prove the point: insiders will applaud anyone who toes the line and mock anyone who refuses. If the takeaway from this episode is that Republicans should simply stop talking to hostile outlets, Vance is right to suggest we give fewer interviews to mainstream journalists who have forfeited objectivity.
This moment also shows why conservatives have long been suspicious of institutions that claim monopoly on truth. When evidence eventually vindicates skeptics, it’s not proof they’re fringe — it’s proof the so-called gatekeepers were wrong, and those gatekeepers must be held accountable for their failures.
JD Vance didn’t invent a conspiracy; he pointed out uncomfortable facts and refused to be silenced. For a movement that prizes truth over trendy consensus, that’s the kind of stubborn clarity the country badly needs.
