John Daniel Davidson now claims Ben Shapiro's a "neo-con"

The Federalist editor John Daniel Davidson continues to go insane in his claims it's "neo-cons" like himself who're responsible for supposed problems like attacking vice president J.D. Vance:

As we near the halfway point of President Donald Trump’s second term, the neocon establishment is openly scheming to reclaim the Republican Party.

That’s why they’re attacking his proxy and likely successor, Vice President J.D. Vance, attempting to paint him as a socialist of the “woke right.” These attacks are being launched by the same people who opposed Trump in 2016, who derided the America First agenda as protectionist, socialist, isolationist, and denounced the president as a fascist and a xenophobe over his immigration agenda. The NeverTrumpers are back, and they’re recycling the same attacks they leveled against the president a decade ago, aiming them now at Vance in a bid to retake the GOP.

The NeverVance campaign has been going strong, especially on X, ever since Vance said in an interview last week on Fox News’ The Will Cain Show that “You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market. You stop socialism by making people’s lives better.” He was responding to the primary success of a handful of DSA-affiliated Democrats who are selling voters on the idea of socialism as the answer to affordability problems.

Vance’s crime, according to critics like Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson, was acknowledging the affordability issue is real and proposing that government should do something about it. Shapiro responded with a bizarre post about free markets and process neutralism, while Erickson wrote a lengthy essay arguing that Vance thinks low prices are bad and that America needs a strongman to manage its decline. [...]

Neocons like Shapiro are not making an actual argument, either for the free market or against socialism. They use these as slop terms to express dislike for Vance. Indeed, Vance’s shot last week at those who would “throw slogans at people about the free market” is well-aimed in this regard. What we have in America today, across vast swaths of the economy, is not really a free market but a rigged market full of moral hazard, overregulation, and manufactured scarcity — precisely in the industries that hit families the hardest.

While Erickson is a bad lot himself, I've never heard of Shapiro being accused of being a neo-con before, and while Shapiro has said some stuff I disagree with, something tells me Davidson's much too eager to take swips at him while excusing anything appalling Vance has done so far. What Davidson's telling here only hints he hasn't mended any of his own woke rhetoric, nor his negative stands on Israel. And then, Davidson even makes a questionable statement about the following subject:

Why is this happening? One reason is mass legal immigration, which has brought millions of foreign nationals into our country on H-1B visas, taking jobs in tech and software development that should have gone to American workers. Recent data from the Labor Department 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 of which went to software development positions.

Umm, how do we know none of those jobs went to illegal immigrants? And how do we know the legal ones didn't study for these particular jobs? They're not allowed to seek employment in the USA, if they think that's where they'll find the best wages? All that aside, some of the people Davidson's attacked don't read as neo-cons at all, and it sounds more like he's just desperate to belittle everyone else in his own confused quests. This is another example of how Davidson's not worth listening to, and perhaps it's about time I just ignored him altogether, because no matter the content in his "op-eds", he fails to convince, and the Federalist itself has gone way downhill for a number of years now. People like Davidson simply aren't worth reading.