As a disinformation historian I’m amazed how brazenly Fox News has attacked AOC with ancient information warfare tactics.

Fox isn’t attempting journalism. They aren’t bothering even with propaganda in the crude sense. They are launching attacks as misogynist maintenance by repurposing the pollution of news framework built for Clinton and adapted for Pelosi. This is an ages old form of derangement, now spinning disinformation directed at AOC.

The core finding in the Fox report is that Rubio gave a civilizational heritage speech, supposedly to a standing ovation, and then flew straight to endorse a man he himself called a threat to democracy in 2019. That’s pure failure and should be career-ending exposure of severely flawed character. He is unfit for office. Fox covered the disaster as triumph and the contradictory endorsement as routine. That’s asymmetric information warfare made material.

Across all of history, from Salem to Munich, the structural logic of privileged men attacking women has been identical. They say women are allowed in public space only in a state of conditional legitimacy. Every minute of any performance is still an audition. Every error is grounds for revocation. Every success must be explained away (she’s really a man, she’s really a puppet, she’s really just performing). Meanwhile, a man in the same space exists in a state of default unaccountable legitimacy. His errors are reframed as boldness, pragmatism, or evolution. His successes are evidence of inherent capacity.

Let us recount some of the ways this has manifested in history.

The witchcraft trial structure
The oldest and most direct precedent. The entire framework of early modern witch trials operated on the principle that women in public roles had to demonstrate perfection to justify their presence, while any error — verbal, behavioral, physical — was evidence of fundamental unfitness that confirmed what the accusers already believed. The accused couldn’t win the evidentiary game because the standard wasn’t evidentiary. It was ontological. You weren’t being tested on what you said. You were being tested on whether you had the right to say anything at all. The “swimming test” logic applies directly: if AOC gives a polished answer, she’s a dangerous demagogue; if she stumbles, she’s an incompetent fool. Both outcomes confirm the predetermined conclusion.

Roman political suppression of women’s public speech
Valerius Maximus documented the case of Maesia Sentinas, who successfully defended herself in court around 77 BCE and was immediately labeled “androgyne” — the explanation for her competence had to be that she wasn’t really a woman. Afrania, who regularly appeared in court, was treated as so monstrous that her name became a byword for shamelessness. The Romans didn’t just silence women — they constructed a framework where female public speech was inherently illegitimate regardless of content. Competence was deviance. Error was confirmation. The Fox article runs the identical logic: AOC’s substantive points about class solidarity and sovereignty are treated as ideological danger (she’s a Marxist), while her errors are treated as proof she shouldn’t be there.

The “lady orator” problem in 19th century America
When women like Frances Wright and the Grimké sisters began speaking publicly in the 1830s, the opposition didn’t primarily argue with their positions on abolition or labor. They attacked the act of speaking itself. The Congressional clergy’s “Pastoral Letter” of 1837 warned that women who assumed “the place and tone of man as a public reformer” would lose “that modesty and delicacy which is the charm of domestic life.” The content was irrelevant. The transgression was presence. Every Fox article about AOC at Munich is performing this same move — the story isn’t what she argued about inequality or sovereignty, it’s that she was there at all, and every stumble proves she shouldn’t have been.

The “hysterical woman” medical framework
From the mid-19th century through the early 20th, the medical establishment constructed a diagnostic architecture that pathologized women’s public participation. Jean-Martin Charcot’s Salpêtrière demonstrations literally put women on stage to perform irrationality for male audiences. The word “hysteria” — from the Greek for uterus — embedded the premise that female unreason was biological, not situational. When Eric Daughtery writes that AOC “SELF-DESTRUCTED” in all caps, when Clay Travis compares her to a beauty pageant contestant, they’re running the secular version: emotional, irrational, performing rather than thinking. Rubio can hedge on China with the identical substance and it reads as measured deliberation because male hesitation is coded as thoughtfulness while female hesitation is coded as vacancy.

Propaganda targeting women leaders in the 20th century
The playbook was industrialized. When Alexandra Kollontai served as Soviet ambassador to Sweden, Western press covered her wardrobe and romantic life rather than her diplomatic work. When Jeannette Rankin voted against entering both World Wars — the only member of Congress to vote against both — she was framed as emotional and naive rather than principled and consistent. When Indira Gandhi consolidated power, Western coverage oscillated between “Iron Lady” (unwomanly, therefore dangerous) and incompetent dynastic beneficiary (unearned, therefore illegitimate). The frame never settles because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep the target in permanent illegitimacy regardless of performance.

The Hillary Clinton template as direct operational predecessor
The right-wing media ecosystem spent 30 years constructing a framework where Clinton’s every public moment was evidence of either dangerous competence (calculating, cold, ambitious) or disqualifying incompetence (Benghazi, emails, health). The framework was explicitly perfection-or-nothing: a single cough at a 9/11 memorial became weeks of coverage questioning her physical fitness for office. Meanwhile Trump could demonstrate visible ignorance of basic policy, contradict himself within the same sentence, and it was coded as authenticity and strength. The double standard wasn’t a bug in the coverage. It was the product. Fox and the broader right-wing media apparatus refined this into a repeatable methodology during the Clinton years and they’re now deploying the same architecture against AOC as the presumptive next target.

The Cold War “useful idiot” feminization
This is where the Bishop Barron angle connects. During the Cold War, the accusation of communist sympathy was routinely gendered. Men who expressed leftist views were dangerous agents. Women who expressed them were naive dupes — “useful idiots” who didn’t understand what they were really advocating. Barron calling AOC’s class-based analysis “right out of the Marxist playbook” performs the identical move: she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she’s mouthing ideology she doesn’t understand, she’s a vector rather than an agent. It strips her of intellectual authorship of her own positions. Rubio can articulate an ethnonationalist civilizational vision with full credit for strategic intentionality. AOC can’t articulate a class-based internationalist vision without being told she’s accidentally channeling Marx.

But wait, this gets worse.

A misogynist architecture is functional infrastructure for the authoritarian aims of Trump. The mechanism by which the Rubio-Orbán story disappeared is a pile-on attack against a woman in politics. Every outlet — Fox, NYT, WaPo, Intelligencer, CNN — spent their Munich coverage budget on AOC.

The swimming test isn’t just unfair to the woman in the water. It’s a spectacle designed to keep the crowd’s eyes off the brazen criminals on shore.

And yet the liberal news also is misogynistic, and takes up the same cause. Ross Barkan in The Intelligencer spends the entire piece explaining what she should have said — which is, almost word for word, what she did say.

Barkan acknowledges that avoiding military conflict is the right position. He acknowledges that Americans don’t want to send troops overseas. He acknowledges that armed conflict with China could trigger nuclear war. He acknowledges that no other 2028 candidate would have answered better. And yet he frames her answer as a “stumble” that demonstrates she “hasn’t yet fully conceived a foreign-policy vision.”

Read his proposed answer: the U.S. should do everything possible to avoid conflict, deploying troops is a last resort, Americans don’t want another war, and any conflict with China could be catastrophic. Now read AOC’s actual answer: “we want to make sure that we never get to that point and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation.” These are the same position. The difference is delivery speed and the number of verbal fillers. Barkan is grading presentation, not substance, while claiming to grade substance.

In the final paragraph he admits the quiet part:

It’s not clear many other potential 2028 candidates would have delivered better answers than AOC, even if they may not have paused for so long.

So the issue isn’t what she said. It’s that she paused. He then lists Newsom, Shapiro, Whitmer, and Trump as equally unprepared on this question. But the article isn’t headlined “Democrats Have No Taiwan Policy.”

It’s headlined with AOC’s name. She carries the individual accountability for a collective gap — the swimming test again. If everyone would have failed, why is only she being tested?

What Barkan never mentions: Rubio’s functionally identical China hedge at the same conference. Rubio’s immediate trip to Budapest to endorse Orbán. The contradiction between Rubio’s own 2019 letter on Hungarian democratic erosion and his 2026 endorsement.

The fact that the Fox article sourced exclusively from partisan operatives. The Washington Post calling AOC’s discussion of oligarchic power “conspiratorial language” in the same week the Secretary of State was literally campaigning for an authoritarian. None of the structural context that would frame this as an asymmetric accountability operation rather than a discrete performance failure.

The misogynist outlets maintain their attacks on American women in leadership the same way a road crew maintains a highway without asking where it leads. The cost of the Rubio asymmetry is concrete — while everyone was grading AOC’s appearance, the Secretary of State was a total disaster, endorsing an authoritarian dismantling democracy in a NATO ally, and nobody headlined that.

Apparently they were too busy with their hate rally to notice.

A new PRRI report on Christian nationalist ideology has some important insights into the Trump administration base.

First, the correlation numbers are unmistakable. Trump favorability and Christian nationalism are r=0.80 and Republican legislative representation is r=0.75. That’s structural alignment. The ideology and political machinery are functionally the same thing measured in two different ways.

Second, authoritarian consolidation is growing by exhausting opposition. There’s no actual growth of the Christian nationalists, as instead there’s a consolidation of power by a small elite (similar to Hitler in 1933 rapidly dropping in popularity while seizing power). Adherent/Sympathizer numbers held steady at ~32%, but the people actively pushing back dropped from 32% to 26% over two years.

Third, decline in “Rejecters” may correlate to the political violence of Trump’s loyalists. A shocking 30% of Adherents supported political violence under Biden, yet they holstered their guns after Trump won. Violence is expressed purely as an instrument to take power, not any other principle. It’s strategic loyalty to an authoritarian who will end democracy, deployed when out of power, unneeded when in power.

Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, Vermont and Oregon give away the whole thing. Despite mega attempts to grow congregations, they are among the least churched states in the country with low evangelical density. Trump support requires disinformation methods about economic grievances, anti-establishment anger, rural resentment of urban governance. Theological propaganda isn’t as effective yet the Trump authoritarian trigger still hits.

The fourth point makes the first point far more alarming. The strong correlation means Christian nationalism is THE dominant authoritarian channel nationally despite two strong secular outliers pulling the number down. Vermont and Oregon prove that Trump disinformation channeled as Christianity isn’t required, yet nobody is bothering. The theological framework works too well. It remains the primary delivery mechanism to coordinate dangerous authoritarian nationalist cells.

The outliers also expose what Christian nationalism actually does functionally: it provides moral permission structure. Vermont and Oregon Trump voters have to justify their support through economic or anti-establishment arguments that can be challenged empirically. In comparison the Christian nationalists don’t because they believe God called them to exercise dominion, end of discussion.

The Trump fascist movement needs the theology even when the politics could theoretically stand alone. The theology makes their authoritarianism unfalsifiable.

And that brings us to why CBS just censored Rep. James Talarico, a man of the faith in Texas, running for Senate. Actual Christians completely destroy the Trumpistan plans driven by these nationalist groups.

Civil rights are enshrined in constitutional amendments and federal law. They’re not a partisan position.

A judge in Texas saying “I admire King”, while simultaneously ruling that an MLK image is too politically inflammatory for his courtroom, is a contradiction that only works when already you decided that the people invoking civil rights are the problem.

It’s racism from the bench.

Full context matters enormously here. This is for a case that the Trump government calls their first federal prosecution of people who oppose fascism. To be clear, the government’s official framing calls them an “antifa cell,” which means the prosecution literally is naming opposition to fascism as the crime.

The jury pool was already expressing anti-ICE and anti-Trump sentiments, adjacent to anti-fascism. Judge Pittman, appointed by Trump, was already frustrated with lawyers questioning the jury pool over the difference between noise, protests and riots, which goes directly to the defense theory. Then he noticed MLK on the defense lawyer’s shirt and used it as a procedural vehicle to reset the jury pool. The first one appeared hostile to Trump’s un-American fascism, so this judge threw them out.

None of the defense attorneys asked for a mistrial. The prosecution didn’t ask either. Judge Pittman declared one alone sua sponte, something he admitted he’d never done before, over a shirt depicting American civil rights leaders. And he’s now threatening to issue sanctions against the defense lawyer who wore it, notably, in honor of Jesse Jackson passing away that morning. It should have been a day of mourning. Instead this federal judge was so disturbed by the image of MLK in his courtroom that he blew up his own trial.

It’s racism from the bench.

This judge’s recent record is also important. We are talking about the same man who was found by the Fifth Circuit to have abused his discretion in sanctioning lawyers. He sanctioned another attorney in this very case last month. There’s a pattern of him using procedural authority to punish defense counsel in a politically charged prosecution.

Is it any wonder he was appointed by Trump to rule against anyone opposed to fascism?

Oxford’s Wooldridge “glorified spreadsheets” speech shows he understands AI isn’t what people think it is, but his institutional position requires him to frame the problem as a future discrete risk rather than admit a present constant reality.

The race to get artificial intelligence to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, a leading researcher has warned.

Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, said the danger arose from the immense commercial pressures that technology firms were under to release new AI tools, with companies desperate to win customers before the products’ capabilities and potential flaws are fully understood.

The Royal Society lecture circuit doesn’t reward him saying “the disasters already happened, they are ongoing, and you enabled them, look at yourselves.”

He may as well be trying to convert people to Christianity by saying just wait until you meet Jesus. Sin now, someday later you can repent.

Looking for the catastrophe, as if to look for the conviction to act, despite the evidence demanding action accumulating the entire time, isn’t moral. It’s the same pattern as climate change denial: waiting for some mystical moment of belief instead of reading the data already in hand.

The Hindenburg was not somehow uniquely catastrophic. It killed sentiment because it was undeniable. Thirty-six people died on camera in front of reporters. That’s what made it different from every other airship failure — not the scale of harm, but the impossibility of looking away.

AI failures are designed for the opposite. They’re individualized, distributed, buried in terms of service and corporate liability shields that punch down. UnitedHealth’s algorithm denies claims at scale and patients die at home. Tesla’s software kills owners and pedestrians on public roads. AI-generated police reports fabricate evidence. Chatbots drive people toward self-harm and suicide. Each one is isolated, litigated, settled quietly. No cameras. No film at eleven.

This is a celebrity-only model of societal risk. Elites wait for a signal dramatic enough to care about, while the harms they enabled accumulate below their threshold for paying attention. It treats a Pearl Harbor event as motivating catastrophe only because of the spoiled famous beauty of Hawaii and the loss of big ships. The actual failure was years of threat assessments ignored, warnings dismissed, intelligence misread. Willful ignorance has a huge societal cost, and it’s enabled by those who perform it at the top.

Wooldridge is warning about a future singular catastrophe that kills public confidence. The actual pattern is thousands of distributed catastrophes that never coalesce into a single spectacular image, because powerful institutions work to prevent exactly that. Don’t keep waiting for the one dramatic event that will finally wake everyone up. Those who waited for the “big one” with social media, with surveillance Big Tech, with every other integrity breach for thirty years, are still waiting.

The Hindenburg of AI crashes every day and nobody really cares. Just look at Wooldridge.