The Intellectual Forces Behind JD Vance + Vance Divorce Rumors

Straight White American Jesus

Axis Mundi Media: Bradley Onishi + Daniel Miller

News, Politics

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brad Onishi is joined by Dr. Laura Field, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, for a fascinating look into the intellectual roots of the MAGA movement and its rising political stars, including JD Vance. Together they trace the philosophical and theological threads that tie together the Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, and Postliberal Catholics—three camps shaping the hard right’s challenge to American liberalism. From Patrick Deneen’s critique of modernity to Adrian Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism,” the discussion unpacks how these thinkers frame a moral and political alternative to liberal democracy, and how their ideas inform Vance’s worldview and public persona. The conversation also explores what’s at stake when intellectuals try to fuse religion, nationalism, and governance into a single moral vision for America. Brad and Laura discuss the deep cultural anxiety driving this movement, the narratives of victimhood that sustain it, and the potential consequences of replacing pluralism with authoritarian moral certainty. They close with reflections on how to counter these ideas with honest, accessible scholarship and renewed democratic imagination. Get Dr. Laura Field's book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right⁠ HERE Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 850-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Subscribe to Teología Sin Vergüenza Subscribe to American Exceptionalism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	AXIS Moondy
0:07.0	AXIS Moondy Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
0:31.9	I'm Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, the extremist history of white Christian
0:35.7	nationalism and what comes next.
0:37.7	And the founder of Access Winding Media.
0:40.0	It's great to be with you today.
0:42.2	I want to talk about J.D. Vance and what happened last week, and that'll lead into our interview
0:48.3	for today's episode.
0:51.2	Last week, J.D. Vance appeared at Ole Miss at a T.P. USA event where he was the stand-in
0:57.4	for the late Charlie Kirk. And we talked about this Friday on the weekly roundup, and Dan and I
1:01.8	spend considerable time breaking down his comments and what we think they mean. And we also broke
1:07.8	down this now infamous hug between J.D. Vans and Erica Kirk.
1:13.5	And I want to touch on that because I think that may feel trivial to some of you or may feel like it's not as important as other things.
1:21.4	But I think there's something there that is worth talking about.
1:25.9	And I'll lead right into today in a very serious intellectual discussion about
1:29.9	the philosophers and theologians who are kind of the influences on J.D. Vance, the Catholic
1:34.9	J.D. Vance. So my prediction on Friday, if you listened, was that when it's time for J.D. Vance to run for president, Ushah Vance will convert to Christianity.
1:49.6	And I think that is still a possibility for sure. Like, I still think that's on the table.
1:53.9	And it really is a matter of Ushad Vance and J.D. Vance. And I don't know, I have no insight into their relationship on this front.
2:18.1	Uisha Vance just may not want to do that. She may not be a Christian. She may not want to go that far. But if she is a craven political actor who wants to reach the highest levels of power, then she will. And I think that is probably the only way forward for J.D. Vance, the presidential candidate is if he's going to stay married to Usha, she has to convert to Christianity. And it's for all
2:23.4	the reasons we talked about Friday, that the Christian nationalist, the Christian supremacist,
2:28.6	the Christian ethno-nationalists, the traditional Catholics, is just, you can only go so far with J.D. Vance, not having a Christian
	...

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