J.D. Vance previously described a lot of what this administration is doing

I want to highlight two recent developments in the Trump/Musk/Vance administration. First of all, the National Institutes of Health dramatically slashed grants to support research institutions by putting a cap of 15% on what is allowable for so-called "indirect costs." Look behind that curtain and here's what you'll find:

It’s the Trump administration’s latest blow to the American higher education system, which Republicans for years have charged with cultivating progressive culture and churning out liberal-minded graduates.

In case you're wondering if that is an exaggeration, Stephanie Miller, who directs communications at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and is married to Stephen Miller, wrote on X that, in making these changes to NIH grants, "Trump is doing away with Liberal DEI Deans’ slush fund."

The all-out assault on higher education is underway.

Trump is calling for changes that reach every type of school and could affect almost every function of college life from financial aid and academic services for students to research funding that has long driven innovation. 

None of that is happening by accident. Three years ago the vice president gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference that was actually titled "The Universities are the Enemy." Here's how Vance opened his remarks:

If any of us want to do the things we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

So yeah, that's where things are headed.

Secondly, the Trump/Musk/Vance administration is getting some push-back on their attempted coup from the courts. 

At least nine federal judges — from Washington, D.C., to Washington state — have halted aspects of Trump’s early-term blitz, from his effort to rewrite the Constitution’s birthright citizenship guarantee to his sweeping effort to freeze federal spending to his plans to break and remake the federal workforce.

So, of course, we're starting to see arguments from right-wingers suggesting that this is "judicial interference."  

In case you've never heard of Adrian Vermeule, he is a proponent of Catholic Integralism (ie, the Catholic version of Christian Nationalism).

The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.

Vermeule seems to have decided that the courts must bow to the will of our "Dear Leader" president and his unelected oligarch.  

The vice president, who embraces those views, didn't simply repost the tweet from Vermeule. He responded with his own post speculating about defying the courts. 

That comes as no surprise because, in 2021, he said this:

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”...

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Whether it's about destroying our systems of higher education or denying the legitimacy of the courts, J.D. Vance previously described a lot of what this administration is doing. Perhaps some of the time the media spent chasing down Vance's lie about immigrants eating pets should have been used to unpack his actual agenda. I would simply remind you that a lot of it mirrors the radical ideas proposed by Curtis Yarvin, who thinks Americans "need to get over their dictator phobia" and welcome a monarch.