JD Vance Defended the America First Movement With One Intelligence Finding the Media Won’t Touch

Sergey Nivens image via Shutterstock
Sergey Nivens image via Shutterstock

In November 2025, X exposed a group of popular accounts that were actually being run from overseas.

At a CBS town hall, minister and professor Matthew Burford asked JD Vance how to reach young men who feel singled out.

Vance answered with an intelligence finding about who is really behind the worst of it.

Vance Refused to Blame Ordinary Americans for Foreign-Paid Hate

The town hall took place in Flat Rock, Michigan, with CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil moderating.

Burford teaches college students in the South, many of them white men, and he is a father of two.

He told Vance those young men feel unheard and targeted, but that he also hears bigoted talk and sweeping judgments about entire groups of people.

He asked how to take their frustrations seriously without ignoring the ugly rhetoric just to keep them in the coalition.

Vance said nobody should ignore that rhetoric – you argue with it and beat it in the open.

What you don't do is censor it, because silencing people instead of proving them wrong only hands their ideas more power.

Vance admitted something very dark is happening online, and that what people see is real.

Then he said that based on the intelligence reports he has seen, "we know that a lot of the most virulent racism and antisemitism that exists online" is coming from foreign-paid actors.

But he rejected the idea that the country is full of bigots, saying most white guys have no problem with anyone because of their skin color.

The same goes for a black barber like Keyshawn, the Detroit voter who questioned him earlier.

"Most of our fellow citizens are fundamentally decent people," Vance said.

That is the America First position in one sentence – trust the American people, and go after the foreign operators trying to make them look like monsters.

Young men drift toward extremism, Vance said, when they are demonized because of their race.

His answer was to confront bigotry on both sides, not just the side the media likes to cover.

Fake MAGA Accounts Were Built to Split the Movement

X's location feature tore the masks off fast.

An account called @1776General_ had more than 140,000 followers, cheered on America First Republicans, and billed its owner as an ethnic American patriot.

X listed it as based in Turkey.

Accounts flying the America First banner turned out to be running out of Pakistan and Egypt.

Legal scholar William Jacobson called what surfaced "a massive foreign influence operation of fake MAGA accounts."

Those accounts were built to turn conservatives against each other and make the whole movement look like a pack of bigots.

Foreign Governments Friend and Foe Have Run Fake Accounts On Americans

In September 2024, the Justice Department charged three men accused of hacking the Trump campaign for Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In July 2024, Biden's intelligence chief, Avril Haines, warned that Iranian operatives were posing as activists online to stir up protests in America.

But Iran is not the only government that has tried it.

In 2024, Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs was reported to have paid about two million dollars for a campaign that used hundreds of fake accounts posing as Americans.

Those accounts targeted more than a dozen members of Congress, including Hakeem Jeffries and Raphael Warnock, with pro-Israel messaging.

When Meta pulled down more than 500 Facebook accounts tied to STOIC, the Tel Aviv firm behind the campaign, it found them impersonating Jewish students, black Americans, and concerned citizens.

Their posts fanned the flames around incidents they said were antisemitism on American college campuses – manufacturing the look of homegrown American alarm and making every incident, whether real, imagined, or manufactured, appear part of some widespread epidemic.

In reality much of what is deemed

Meta said that network drew little traction before it came down.

But the method is the point.

None of this makes real antisemitism less real, and Vance never pretended it was.

It means Americans can't trust the volume knob on any of it.

America First Means No Foreign Government Gets a Vote in Your Feed

Vance didn't name a country, and he didn't need to.

The principle is the same whether the operator answers to an enemy or an ally.

Every fake bigot does double damage.

It hands the real America First movement's critics a ready-made smear against every conservative who asks hard questions about foreign wars and foreign aid.

Fake alarm does damage too.

When foreign sock puppets make a problem look bigger than it is, the pressure builds for speech codes, platform crackdowns, and blacklists that land on real Americans.

Deep State actors changed definitions so they could target ordinary Americans critical of the regime.

Biden's White House leaned on social media companies to bury posts it didn't like, a fight that landed at the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri.

One transparency feature on X did what Biden's censorship machine never even tried to do.

Similar definitional shenanigans are now seemingly being leveraged to make standard criticism of a government into supposed hate crimes.

Vance's answer is the America First answer.

Expose the fakes, whoever is paying for them, and trust Americans with the truth.

Sources:

  • Ian Hanchett, "Vance: 'A Lot' of Worst Racism, Antisemitism Online Is Foreign Astroturf," Breitbart, October 17, 2026.
  • Roll Call Factbase, "Interview: JD Vance Participates a CBS Town Hall Discussion in Michigan," Roll Call Factbase, October 15, 2026.
  • Anders Hagstrom, "X's New Location Feature Exposes Apparent Fraudster Accounts Posing as Americans, Gaza Journalists," Fox News, November 23, 2025.
  • William A. Jacobson, "Foreign Fake MAGA Anti-Israel Accounts Exposed In X 'Location' Disclosure," Legal Insurrection, November 23, 2025.
  • David Spunt and Timothy Nerozzi, "3 Hackers With Ties to Iran Indicted in Plot Against Trump Campaign," Fox News, September 27, 2024.
  • Erez Linn, "Report: Israeli Fake Social Media Accounts Targeted US Congress for Military Funding," Israel Hayom, June 5, 2024.
  • Raphael Kahan, "Meta Removes Israeli and Iranian Online Campaigns Simultaneously," Ynetnews, May 30, 2024.

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