Morning Briefing: Three in Ten Americans Support Christian Nationalism
Approximately 30% of Americans 'qualify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers,' according to a new report published by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).
Morning Briefing: Approximately 30 percent of Americans “qualify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers,” according to a new report published by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). The report, which was based on interviews with more than 22,000 adults throughout 2023, found that “support for Christian nationalism is strongly correlated with voting for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.”
The Texas Department of State Health Services announced that the outbreak of measles in the state has reached 146 cases, and 20 patients have been hospitalized. Anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist are now reportedly promoting misinformation: “the highly contagious virus is being caused by the vaccine itself.”
In Wyoming, Ohio, local law enforcement released body camera video footage of an “encounter between law enforcement and a man who was cited for littering racist fliers in several communities.” During the encounter, William Bader explained to the officers that the “fliers are meant to recruit new members to the hate group and takes credit for similar fliers found across the area.”
Federal prosecutors have reportedly charged a man from the Pittsburgh area with “possessing child sexual abuse material also targeted the city’s Jewish community with antisemitic flyers.” Aidan Harding had allegedly “posted online about his interest in ‘political and revenge driven’ mass casualty events like the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.”
Leo Terrell, the head of the Trump Administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, said that the U.S. Department of Justice will file federal hate crime indictments against campus activists “supporting Hamas and trying to intimidate Jews.” Terrell also said that the Task Force would target student protesters, and that they “are going to put these people in jail—not for 24 hours, but for years.”
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Brooke Binkowski writes that “If you have been tracking disinformation campaigns over the last several years, then the goal of the ghoulish coordinated messaging and public relations campaign is clear. It’s an attempt to replace Democrats with right-wing and extractive leadership so that California’s vibrant industries can be used instead in the service of further enriching the super-wealthy. It’s what I said it was all along: A global, far right power grab that uses disinformation to leverage the ills of climate change so that its aligned members in each nation-state can grab up resources and power. The problem is, that same global far right succeeded in capturing a lot of the information world by now. The United States has a fraction of the working journalists that it had even a decade ago. Libraries are under ideological and literal attack,and ditto for schools. Our once-vibrant internet has been turned from a dazzling if overwhelming wonderland into a series of dying strip malls populated with ghastly AI-generated images and corporate brandspeak and a megaphone for hate speech and bullying mobs that are calculated to wreak chaos and push women of color in particular out of power.” [DAME Magazine]
Kyle Chayka writes that Elon Musk “has slashed the ranks of federal employees, shut down agencies whose authority challenges his own, and leveraged artificial intelligence to decide where to cut, promising a government executed by chatbots such as Grok, from Musk’s own A.I. company. DOGE has gained access to Americans’ private data and developed tools to e-mail the entire federal government at once, a digital megaphone that Musk recently used to demand that employees send in a list of their weekly accomplishments. As Mimura put it, ‘You try to apply technical concepts and rationality to human beings and human society, and then you’re getting into something almost totalitarian.’ The techno-fascist opportunism goes beyond Musk; one can sense other tech entrepreneurs and investors slavering to exploit the alliance between Trumpism and Silicon Valley capitalism, building infrastructure on a national scale. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has arranged his own deals with Trump’s government, including Stargate, a heavily hyped data-center project worth a potential five hundred billion dollars. Apple recently announced its own five-hundred-billion-dollar investment campaign in the U.S. over the next four years, including a plan to begin building A.I. servers in Texas. However nebulous, these extravagant plans signal a spirit of collaboration. On Truth Social, Trump posted approvingly that Apple’s plans demonstrated ‘FAITH IN WHAT WE ARE DOING.’” [The Atlantic]
Moira Donegan asks “who, exactly, is in charge here? The frightening speed with which the new Trump administration has pursued its sadistic agenda and frightening and unconstitutional expansion of executive powers can tend to obscure just how incompetent these people are. Two million federal workers now do not know whether their boss is the person above them on the org chart, or an erratic billionaire. Trying to figure it out required them to spend time in hectic and undignified scrambling, figuring out whether they would be obliged to grovel for their livelihoods or not. They spent time catering to the senseless and stupid demands of Musk’s ego, and because they had to spend their time that way, they could not spend it on their actual work. Not to mention that Musk, in his demand to control all federal employees and to rewrite the budgets and missions of federal agencies at a whim, seems to be pissing some people off. Members of the Trump cabinet have been leaking their displeasure with Musk over the past week, trying to assert control over their agencies and defend their turf. They, after all, have the Senate confirmations; they, after all, have the mandate of being selected by the president. It is yet to be seen whether any of that will hold a candle to what Musk has: the money.” [The Guardian]
What to expect from Radical Reports: Morning Briefing provides a daily round-up of reporting on the Radical Right; Extremist Links offers a weekly round-up of extremists activities including the white supremacist and militia movements; Narratives of the Right delivers weekly analysis of the current narratives in far right online spaces and promoted by right-wing media; and Research Desk provides monthly highlights research and analysis from academia on the Radical Right.
How in H can you put fascist, misogynist, anti-democratic Trump in the same sentence as Jesus??? You "so-called christians -WWJD??? Trump does not give one damn about the common people. What he is doing to Zelensky is completely ANTI-democratic. It is a 'quid pro quo' to benefit him and his billionaire friends. Shameful!!!!!
That means 70% of Americans are against. I like those odds.