You’ve got to give Vice President J.D. Vance some credit here. The man knows how to trigger the snowflake set without even trying.
Vance joined the oh-so-bumptiously named X-competitor Bluesky yesterday. It didn’t take long for the fun to start.
One moment, he was creating an account; the next, the platform was reacting like Alec Baldwin at the prop department—panicked, unhinged, and a lot of imprudent pointing going on.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Vice President J.D. Vance joined Bluesky on Wednesday and posted a polite, even warm greeting:
Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.
Attached to that post? A screenshot of Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in United States v. Skrmetti, a Supreme Court opinion upholding Tennessee’s law banning sex-change procedures on minors.
In two follow-up posts, Vance said Thomas’s opinion exposed how “so-called ‘experts’ have used bad arguments and substandard science to push experimental therapies on our youth” and noted that many of those same “scientists are receiving substantial resources from big pharma.”
He closed with a simple, “What do you think?”
Apparently, what Bluesky thought was: Get him out of here. NOW!
Within 20 minutes—less time than what gets trimmed from a Kamala Harris word salad before it airs on 60 Minutes—Vance’s account was suspended.
No warning. No encrypted verification. Just a digital trapdoor. Only after public outcry and press inquiries did Bluesky quietly restore the account, blame an “automated filter,” and cite a rash of fake online identities.
Right.
And I’m sure it had nothing—nothing—to do with the Vice President’s posting of Justice Thomas’s stance on this issue.
His presence—and a modest, reasonable question—was enough to short-circuit whatever passes for a content filter in the left’s favorite social sandbox: a delicate cocktail of Python code and progressive paranoia supervised by an intern who once ventured west of the Hudson during mandatory DEI training in Palo Alto.
Flash! Bam! Alakazam!
The Vice President’s Bluesky account was vaporized faster than a Babylon Bee headline at NPR.
Or a Bee headline at Bluesky, for that matter—yeah, they censored them, too.
He didn’t post a meme, drop a hot take, or even quote Chesterton. He merely existed in their digital safe space, asked “What do you think?” about a Supreme Court opinion released that very day—and it sent Bluesky’s denizens into a full DEFCON-level weeping circle.
You’d think he’d posted a video of himself eating non-organic beef in red-state Kansas. Medium rare.
No—rare.
Now, if you’ve made it this far and are wondering what in blue blazes Bluesky even is—it’s the hipster cousin of Twitter, born from a need to escape Elon Musk’s gravitational pull and re-create the safe, soothing experience of yelling into a kale-scented critical thinking void where everyone agrees with you.
Think “decentralized-central control,” “community-run,” and populated by every known strand of the perpetually aggrieved progressive fifth and sixth columns—with profiles featuring every imaginable variant of “resist,” pronouns galore, and enough unresolved parental issues to cast a Wes Anderson film.
And into this digital drum circle walked J.D. Vance—Vice President of the United States, proud son of Middletown, Ohio, bestselling author, senator, and now the proud owner of the quickest account deletion since your college roommate signed up for Columbia House for the fifth time in one semester.
Twelve CDs for a penny. Free speech is not included.
Let’s pause and appreciate the absurdity. A social media network founded to avoid “censorship” just banned the Vice President of the United States before he even had time to select an avatar.
If only he’d led with his pronouns—he might’ve lasted until lunchtime.
Imagine if Joe Biden had been suspended on X.
Yeah, it's a bad example.
We still haven’t figured out who was actually running the country while he was president—let alone who was ghost-posting for him between soft serve cups.
Now, imagine if Donald Trump had been suspended from Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
Oops—another bad example.
That actually happened. For real. Multiple times. Across multiple platforms.
Hopefully, the third time is the charm. If AOC were ever banned from X, there’d be candlelight vigils, mass doxxing of Tesla salespeople, and more burning intersections in Los Angeles than usual—which is really saying something.
But J.D. Vance? He’s conservative. He talks about borders, babies, and manufacturing.
So Bluesky treated him worse than an AstraZeneca executive at a Bernie Sanders reception—polite social distancing, immediate finger-wagging over patent thickets, a strongly worded Threads thread (yes, that’s what they call it), and a follow-up fundraising email titled:
“Your Name Is Missing From Our Records—Donate TONIGHT!”
These platforms aren’t neutral. They’re not public squares. They’re gated communities with ideological bouncers, curated timelines, and Terms of Service ghostwritten by imps from the eighth circle of Hell.
Bluesky promised decentralization. What we got was deplatforming.
It didn’t stick this time—not with the Vice President—but this isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. Conservative voices are routinely targeted by the odium blob, silenced not for violations but for visibility. And most don’t have the megaphone to shame the social shamers.
There’s always a trap door for the right, a red carpet for the left.
And now I’m stuck with Nat King Cole’s “Orange-Colored Sky” in my head.
Or as the song might go:
I was walkin’ along, mindin’ my business,
When censorship hit me in the eye!
Flash! Bam! Alakazam!
Our veep was banned under a phony Bluesky!
Flash! Bam! Alakazam and goodbye!
Charlton Allen is an attorney and former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. His commentary has been featured in American Thinker and linked across multiple RealClear platforms, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearWorld, RealClearDefense, RealClearHistory, and RealClearPolicy. X: @CharltonAllenNC
Image: YouTube video screen grab.