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.

What didn’t CBS want you to know? Colbert explains another example of Trumpistan closing down freedoms.