Trump and Hegseth called Sen. Mark Kelly "seditious" for advising soldiers not to follow illegal orders. Grant refused a presidential order he considered political and illegitimate. History didn't call him seditious. It made him president.
The tariff fight isn't really about trade policy. It's about whether Congress will reclaim a constitutional power it has been handing away for decades. Every new legal workaround Trump finds is proof that it hasn't.
The gap between the man Vance's biography suggested he could become and the man he has chosen to be is the most revealing measure of what MAGA actually is. He spends every day agitating for a society that treats the people he loves most as undesirable foreigners.
@bernybelvedere.bsky.social:
Vance is a Schmittian in practice. Schmitt held that politics is the drawing of a friend-enemy distinction, and that liberal attempts to transcend that conflict through law and pluralism are a mistake.
Trump is transactional—he wants power and uses ideology to get it. Vance is different—he believes American liberalism is destructive and that state power must be wielded to reverse it. He gives the movement something Trump never could: an intellectually capable exponent for the MAGA agenda.
"He’s a bundle of contradictions; his biography and his beliefs are in tension with each other." — our EIC, @shikhadalmia.bsky.social, in the NYT this week as featured in @tomedsall.bsky.social column
When Nick Fuentes hurled racist slurs at Vance's wife, even Vivek Ramaswamy condemned him without hesitation. Vance? He eventually defended his wife—then immediately pivoted to rejecting "purity tests" in MAGA. Translation: the people who berate his family are as welcome as those who defend her.
JD Vance's biography should have made him a champion of pluralism. His wife is the daughter of immigrants, a practicing Hindu. They have mixed-race children. Instead, he's the leading intellectual voice for a movement that wants people like his own family deported.
I’m in the Vance is a believer camp, but this from @bernybelvedere.bsky.social is spot on. It doesn’t exactly matter.
Once again, I’m begging people to take Vance seriously
Nurul Shah Alam came to the U.S. as a refugee fleeing oppression and brutality—and found it all over again here in America.
when you have no actual principles, it's easy to believe in something
"Vance now spends every day of his life agitating for a society that sees the people he loves most in the world as undesirable foreigners who should be forcibly deported."
Great @bernybelvedere.bsky.social piece urging us to see Vance as a genuine ideologue:
www.theunpopulist.net/p/vance-puts...
If you haven’t read it yet, @tomedsall.bsky.social’s new profile on JD Vance in the New York Times relies extensively on @shikhadalmia.bsky.social’s insights. She even provided the piece’s headline! 🔥
Check this out:
"Vance now spends every day of his life agitating for a society that sees the people he loves most in the world as undesirable foreigners who should be forcibly deported."
My latest for @theunpopulist.net
Trump himself called it a war. Which means he also just admitted he started one without congressional authorization. The Constitution doesn't have a loophole for that.
Read the full NYT piece here: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/o...
The NYT's Thomas Edsall wanted to explain Vance's intellectual turn toward authoritarianism. He called our founder Shikha Dalmia — because we've been mapping the postliberal right for years. Subscribe for the analysis others cite: theunpopulist.net
The "Twitter Files" crowd spent years warning about a censorship industrial complex. Now DHS is using administrative subpoenas to unmask anonymous critics of ICE—bypassing judges entirely. The "free speech warriors" have nothing to say.
Republicans have called Democrats' DHS demands "nonstarters." Those demands include: no secret police, don't arrest U.S. citizens without cause, don't beat people for exercising First Amendment rights. That's where we are.
@radleybalko.bsky.social
Musk has given Britain's far right something it never had before: a billionaire patron with global reach, algorithmic control, and no accountability to democratic institutions.
@aselrod.bsky.social
Postliberals invoke religious liberty as the thing liberalism threatens. But religious liberty is itself a liberal development. It emerged when liberalism displaced the older consensus that heretical beliefs should be forcibly suppressed by the state.
The real danger isn't that Trump will successfully steal the midterms. It's that he'll convince enough people the steal happened when it didn't. Delegitimization is the goal.
Does religion owe liberal democracy anything beyond following the law? A Muslim scholar, a Jewish rabbi, and a Christian theologian weigh in at an @ismapolicy.bsky.social panel.
The future of our rights may depend on how state courts and the lawyers before them meet this moment.
“In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive...[T]he trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man."
-- James Madison
www.theunpopulist.net/p/trumps-una...
A young Iranian who fled the mullah describes the incredible bravery of his peers in rejecting political Islam and standing up to the Khameini at @theunpopulist.net. Let's celebrate his removal without valorizing the authoritarians who bombed him.
open.substack.com/pub/theunpop...
Grant refused a direct presidential order, testified against the commander-in-chief before Congress, and ultimately complied with legislation over White House instructions. History vindicated him on every count.
Great, and touching, article on what had changed in Iran even before the current airstrikes.
www.theunpopulist.net/p/irans-yout...
The National Park Service removed a slavery exhibit. MLK Jr. Day lost its free-entry status. The Holocaust Museum preemptively closed an exhibit on America's refusal of Jewish refugees. To the white nationalist, racial progress and ethnic diversity are outcomes to avoid.
