Politics
I used to be friends with JD Vance. Here’s what happened to him.
Most Americans haven’t heard of the post-liberal right, the small but influential group of conservative, mostly Catholic men who have declared that liberal democracy, the animating principle of America’s founding, has failed and want to bring about a new social order where there is no separation of church and state and men and a hyperconservative Catholicism reign supreme. They are disdainful of secularism and individual liberty. Just like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump illustrated during Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, these men idolize the authoritarian Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.
My former friend JD Vance is a prominent voice of this fringe movement, as so many of his regrettable podcast interviews have demonstrated
They’re also nostalgic for Spain as it was run by the dictator Franco and see Orbán’s government and Franco’s as potential models for the kind of regime they wish to install in the United States. The group’s political priorities — which include restricting access to contraception and divorce and banning marriage equality and pornography — are wildly unpopular. And yet the Republican nominee for vice president, my former friend JD Vance, is a prominent voice of this fringe movement, as so many of his regrettable podcast interviews have demonstrated.
To repeat, I once considered Vance a friend. We were in the same class at Yale Law School, he knew me as an openly trans person, and we remained in communication until 2021. That’s the year that he announced he would be running in the U.S. Senate race in Ohio the next year. Before running in post-liberal and neoreactionary circles, Vance was far less angry and extreme. He was also, as everybody will remember, riding the attention from his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and was a vocal and unambiguous critic of Trump, using words like “idiot” to describe Trump and “reprehensible” to describe his views on “Immigrants, Muslims, etc.”
Despite the time we spent as friends, I have no real insights (other than political expediency) into what drew him to post-liberal men like the academic Patrick Deneencolumnist Sohrab Ahmarilegal scholar Adrian Vermeule and expat journalist and author Rod Dreher, who was present for Vance’s baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019. What I do know is that Vance used to condemn Trump’s racism and be empathetic to how such rhetoric made Americans feel unwelcome in their own country. But these men have had an obvious and heartbreaking effect on Vance’s worldview.
The leaders in the post-liberal movement are elites steeped in classical and Catholic philosophy who fancy themselves warriors for the average man. Vermeule, for example, is explicitly against the separation of church and stateand believes the Catholic Church should have ultimate control over all moral questions. (Well, maybe not the church as it’s run by Pope Francis.)
Vance and his intellectual mentors like Deneen are benefiting from the conflation of MAGA and post-liberalism, because if Americans truly understood post-liberalism, they’d realize it seeks to strip them of individual freedom.
There is some policy overlap between MAGA and post-liberalism in their shared opposition, for example, to immigration and transgender rights. But the ideological overlap between the groups is a shared affinity for authoritarianism. The post-liberal right, which has goals that even MAGA Republicans would find extreme, is attempting to hijack the MAGA movement to push its own agenda.
Consider: Trump, who has been married three times and divorced two times, proudly appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine. He was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a case that prosecutors successfully argued was about him trying to cover up an adulterous affair he had with an adult film star. He is not exactly an exemplar of Christian morality.
More importantly, Trump’s positions change with the tides of public opinion. They aren’t rooted in any religious or ideological convictions. ABC News’ Linsey Davis, a moderator at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, pointed out that, according to Vance, Trump “explicitly” said he’d veto a national abortion ban. That’s after Trump suggested in March that he’d support such a ban. But not only did Trump not state a clear position at the debate, he said, “I didn’t discuss it with JD.” This comes on the heels of him first indicating he would vote in favor of an abortion rights ballot initiative in Florida, only to say he would vote against it the next day.
The post-liberal right, which has goals that even MAGA Republicans would find extreme, is attempting to hijack the MAGA movement to push its own agenda.
Unlike the MAGA movement, which is led by a candidate who is defiantly amoral, post-liberalism is steeped in a revolutionary religiosity. Its goals include replacing our social and political power structures with a new social order rooted in a misogynist understanding of gender, sexuality, marriage and reproduction closely tethered to Catholic social teachings. This is reflected in Vance’s obsession with birth rates and the way he belittles women without children.
Some of the post-liberal right’s priorities are reflected in Project 2025but not even the Heritage Foundation, which is behind that project, has set its sights on trapping people in violent marriages by repealing no-fault divorceas Vance and the post-liberal right seek to do.
Post-liberalism, unlike MAGAhas no grassroots following. Most Americans aren’t Catholicand most Catholics support the separation of church and state. But post-liberalism, despite its ideological and moral disdain for Trump, needs MAGA. To accomplish any of its goals, it must leech off of a populist movement. The movement needs to exploit Trump’s popularity for its own unpopular aims. This may explain why Vance, who had more integrity when I knew him, abruptly flipped from calling Trump “cultural heroin” to the greatest president of his lifetime.
Prior to MAGA gaining control of the Republican Party, the leaders of this movement, most notably Vance, were staunchly anti-Trump. And while the post-liberal right is excited one of its own has quickly risen through MAGA’s ranks — most leaders of post-liberalism still aren’t Trump fans.
But they understand that it’s more feasible for them to co-opt the MAGA base than to organically organize a political base of their own. MAGA is far from a majority of the country, 42% of self-identified Republicans or roughly 14% of the countybut it’s a larger political force than post-liberalism could ever hope to build on its own given the unpopularity of its policy priorities.
Post-liberalism further seeks to confuse the American people through its rhetorical support for labor unions, a definite break from mainstream Republican orthodoxy. However, Vance was booed by a group of union firefighters when he stated he sought to be part of the “most pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” Nobody who’s pro-worker, as Vance claims to be, would team up with Trump, the candidate who laughed with Elon Musk about union busting. Nor would he oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would expand the right to organize. Hardworking union firefighters recognize Vance’s support for organized labor for what it is: hollow political rhetoric.
A post-liberal devotee like Vance knows how to talk a populist game, but, like Trump, he has no interest in delivering for working people.
A post-liberal devotee like Vance knows how to talk a populist game, but, like Trump, he has no interest in delivering for working people. His real devotion is to the culture wars.
Instead of persuading Americans to support their ideas, leaders of the post-liberal right are covertly positioning themselves within MAGA to be the heirs of Trump’s political base when he’s off the scene. They seek to transform the GOP into a pro-theocracy party willing to ignore the Constitution and democratic norms.
Those of us who don’t want to live in a theocracy must look beyond just defeating Trump and must also seek to vanquish a post-liberal right. That also means defeating the ambitions of a classmate whom I once considered a friend.
Sofia Nelson
Sofia Nelson, who works as a public defender in Detroit, grew up in rural West Michigan and went on to graduate from Yale Law School in 2013.
Some top congressional Republicans have privately concluded that it is likely impossible for them to keep control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, and they are now focused on limiting the scale of the defeat and salvaging the party’s Senate majority.
Five senior Republican lawmakers, all granted anonymity to speak candidly about their party’s dire position, told Blue Light News the House had all but slipped away.
One senior House Republican said the GOP’s goal at this point was to “save as many Republican seats as we can.” The president, this person said, was not helping.
“President Trump has made this election all about himself,” the lawmaker said. “Now we have to survive that political storm.”
A second Republican member of Congress said the movement of campaign advertising made plain which side was in control of the midterms. This lawmaker predicted Democrats would pick up about 10 seats, more than enough to take control of the chamber.
Even in newly redistricted red states like Florida and Texas, this person said, Republican candidates were “hanging on with their fingernails.”
Republicans have already fallen back from several contested House districts that they feel are no longer winnable, including those held by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey. Trump carried their districts just two years ago. The party last week gave up on an Omaha-based district held by retiring Rep. Don Bacon.
Trump officials and other top GOP operatives say more candidates may be cut off in the coming days, in order to shift advertising money to races where it can make more of a difference. Republican groups have already given up on multiple races where they once hoped to unseat Democratic lawmakers.
The Republican Party is under extreme pressure across the Midwest, where it is now spending heavily to defend Senate seats in once-reliably MAGA states like Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.
Bacon, a maverick often at odds with the White House, said there was no mystery in his party’s political tribulations.
“I’ve talked to some who are making these decisions: The biggest problem is the president’s polling numbers and unfavorables,” Bacon said.
White House officials insist they’re not giving up on either chamber of Congress. In a statement, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said Trump remained “committed to maintaining Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.”
As he departed on Tuesday to campaign in Alaska for embattled GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan, Trump professed optimism about the midterms but acknowledged that sitting presidents typically see their party lose seats in the off year.
“But I’m doing a tour right now and I’m doing rallies,” Trump added. “The level of enthusiasm for the Republican Party is way up.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson went even further, flatly declaring during a campaign stop in deep-red Texas that “the polling is wrong” in showing his party on the brink of a broad defeat.
Yet at a tactical level, the Republican Party’s moves to shift money away from defending the House and toward saving the Senate are clear enough. In recent days, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the top super PAC for House Republicans, canceled advertising for key House candidates in Nebraska and Iowa and allowed the Senate Leadership Fund – a Republican group focused on the upper chamber – to swoop in and claim the airtime to support Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa.
“These are not the moves of a party that’s going to keep the House,” a third Republican lawmaker said.
In statements to Blue Light News, both CLF and the National Republican Congressional Committee said they had no intention of giving up on the fight for control of the House.
NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said districts are won “one by one,” and that the GOP has “the financial firepower and ground game needed to win.”
Chris Winkelman, president of CLF, said his group would keep moving money around to maximize the impact nationally.
The goal, he said, was to “keep the pressure on the most vulnerable Democrats and preserve a path to 218 seats.”
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican who lost his swing seat in Trump’s first midterm election eight years ago, said his former colleagues were clear-eyed about where the election seemed to be headed.
“The environment is about as tough as one could expect,” Curbelo said. “There is no one who has privately stated that they believe Republicans can hold the House — not in recent weeks, anyway.”
Megan Messerly, Lauren Fedor, Lisa Kashinsky and Myah Ward contributed to this report.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff said Tuesday he will not run for president in 2028 and committed to serving a full six-year Senate term if reelected.
“I have zero interest in running for president. I’m not running for president. I’m running for reelection to the Senate,” Ossoff said during a Georgia Senate debate against Republican Rep. Mike Collins.
Asked by Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution whether he would serve his full term if he wins in November, Ossoff replied: “Yes, I will.”
The remarks are Ossoff’s most forceful rejection yet of a potential 2028 presidential bid even as his name has repeatedly surfaced in national Democrats’ conversations about possible contenders for the party’s nomination. His public commitment to a full Senate term on Tuesday is the latest of his campaign’s many efforts to tamp down that speculation.
Ossoff gained national attention this year given his strong fundraising numbers, his consistent lead in public polling against Collins and his ability to generate viral moments on the campaign trail, particularly through his attacks on President Donald Trump. Democrats are bullish about Ossoff’s ability to hold onto his Senate seat — so much so that the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC said Tuesday it was removing its ad spending in Georgia for the week.
He’s also taken steps to boost the state Democratic party in Georgia, a perennial battleground that has been and will be key to winning the presidency. If November brings historic wins up and down the ballot, Ossoff will get some of the credit — and he’ll have confirmed his status as a leader in the swing state.
Democrats may be discovering the political power of calling something rigged.
They’re leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.
Messaging from Democrats that tied corruption to housing, health care and the cost of living increased voter support for Democratic congressional candidates by about 3 percentage points, according to a national survey last month conducted by Blue Rose Research and Democratic-aligned Winning Jobs Narrative Action, which was obtained by POLITICO.
The findings align with a shift in how Democrats are talking about corruption — and help explain why that message has exploded on the campaign trail. From Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia to James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Democrats have zeroed in on a common argument: Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans.
“We have a corruption crisis in this country, and it is leading to an affordability crisis,” Iowa Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek said during his Senate debate against Rep. Ashley Hinson last week.
It’s a message that is reverberating across campaigns. In a recent presentation delivered to Democratic groups on Capitol Hill, longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson offered a succinct playbook: “Corruption is why your costs are high,” according to the presentation viewed by Blue Light News.
His presentation also encouraged Democrats to lead with the acknowledgement that costs are high and then go into corruption, acknowledge that it happens across parties and avoid making President Donald Trump the sole focus of their attacks. “Trump works as an example of corruption that raises costs, not as the whole case,” the presentation said.
Since April, Democratic candidates and outside groups in House and Senate races have spent roughly $104 million on advertising mentioning corruption, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. Republicans, meanwhile, have spent $36 million across House and Senate campaigns over the same period.
“It’s not just like, ‘oh, look at what’s happening with the ballroom,’ or ‘boy, Donald Trump’s made a lot of money on crypto,’” Democratic strategist Chris Meagher said. “You have to be able to tie it to the impact on people’s lives.”
“The narrative works best when it’s an outsider candidate who is linking a rigged economy to a rigged political system,” longtime Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said of the anti-corruption messaging.
Running against corruption is not new. But as Democrats looked for a way out of the political wilderness after 2024, they began turning a familiar attack — anti-corruption — into a broader message tied to voters’ economic pain. What once was an attack largely focused on Trump has become a more expansive argument for candidates trying to connect it to why Americans are struggling financially, potentially providing a blueprint for the party beyond November.
“Democrats used to talk about corruption as a crime. Now corruption is the explanation for costs,” Ferguson, the Democratic strategist, said.
The issue — and messaging around it — is also coming to the fore in a cycle when anger over the suppression of Epstein files hit a fever pitch and public pressure to ban Congress from trading stocks continues to mount.
And it’s not just the research by Blue Rose that shows the potential potency of that message.
In another recent survey from the Democratic group Navigator Research, obtained by Blue Light News, the vast majority of Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — say corruption is driving up their costs. That same survey of registered voters, conducted in August, found majorities, including roughly a quarter of Republicans, say Trump is bringing more corruption to Washington than fixing it.
And new results from the nonpartisan Center Square’s Voter Voice Poll, conducted this month by Noble Predictive Insights and shared first with Blue Light News, show 10% of voters ranking government corruption as the second most important issue facing Americans, tied with the economy and jobs, and only behind inflation and price increases.
In some instances, Democrats have wrested the word “rigged” away from Trump who has used it in the context of unproven election fraud and turned it into a mobilizing political talking point. That’s a departure from March 2024 when Democrats criticized then Rep. Katie Porter for accusing special interests of spending money to “rig” the California Senate race after she lost in the state’s primary. But now some Democrats are embracing that language as a way to rail against what they see as a corrupt system.
“They’re rigging the rules to benefit their wealthy donors and corporate special interests,” former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said in a message to supporters announcing the launch of his campaign to return to office.
But the corruption resonates across parties. Republicans who spoke with Blue Light News said Democrats do not own the issue — voters everywhere are animated by it. While polling shows that voters in both major parties believe the government is corrupt, Republicans accuse Democrats of lacking credibility on the issue.
“Americans have been disgusted by the level of self-serving corruption that spread like herpes through the slimy politicians who run the Democrat Party, and now they’re suddenly changing their tune because it’s an election year,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement. “Voters see through the facade, and they know Republicans are cleaning up the rot left behind by Democrat leaders.”
On the Senate side, National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Bernadette Breslin pointed Blue Light News to a poll in Minnesota — a rare offensive opportunity for Senate Republicans this cycle — that shows there are just about as many voters who blame Democratic Gov. Tim Walz for widespread fraud of federally-funded government programs in the state as there are who blame the criminals. Walz’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, is running for Senate against Republican Michele Tafoya, and corruption under Democratic rule is a key theme for Republicans in the race.
“The overwhelming majority of Minnesotans blame the Walz-Flanagan administration — and the criminals it aided and abetted — for plundering their hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” Breslin said. “They’ll vote for Michele Tafoya to right the ship this November.”
Steve Pierce, executive director at Winning Jobs Narrative Action, said one of the biggest shifts for Democrats this cycle on corruption has been a move away from a message largely rooted in concerns over democratic norms, which have struggled to break through in a way that moves voters in past cycles.
“You’ve seen Democrats, rather than connecting corruption to democracy, connecting it to affordability, connecting it to the top concern that voters have,” said Pierce. “It’s connecting it in a way that’s meaningful to voters around the things that they are thinking about every day.”
The anti-corruption message has played out across the country, and as an explanation for frustration against different economic pain points, including rising electric bills and local data center projects.
A recent memo on data centers from House Majority PAC, the main super PAC working to elect House Democrats, noted the “message environment in the 2026 election cycle has been dominated by costs, with an important secondary theme around corruption that began to emerge last year.” The group’s spokesperson, CJ Warnke, told Blue Light News that “every single poll and every single focus group shows affordability to be voters’ number one issue, and they specifically point to corrupt politicians as being responsible for driving up prices.”
Next month’s midterms will offer the clearest test yet of whether Democrats can turn this message into votes. But Democratic operatives increasingly see anti-corruption messaging as more than just a short-term political weapon — as long as they try to do something about it if they win control next year.
“I think the thing for Democrats, if they do want to keep it on the radar heading into 2028, and I think they should because I think it is a really potent issue for them, they are going to have to also deliver on it,” said Pierce.
“They have to be able to show up to get caught trying,” he said.
-
Politics2 years agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics2 years agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Politics2 years agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words