Month: December 2020

It’s kind of interesting considering that Trump wears more makeup and hairspray than Dolly Parton. But the heart wants what the heart wants:

Given how unreliable the exit polls were this year, it will likely be a while before we know exactly how differently men and women voted in 2020. But a new survey from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life offers some clues, indicating that once again, gender and sexism may have been a big dividing line, as was the case in 2016.

That may seem surprising since this year’s contest pitted President Trump against another white man instead of a woman, much less the first woman to run for president on a major-party ticket. It certainly seemed possible heading into this election that the gender gap might be smaller, especially as Joe Biden seemed poised to pick up more support among male voters than Hillary Clinton did.

Only that doesn’t appear to have happened, at least not in a widespread way. Men’s and women’s voting patterns have been diverging for the past few decades. But according to research conducted before and after the election, the COVID-19 pandemic may have played a large role in exacerbating gender divisions in the electorate. This split wasn’t enough for Trump to win this time, of course, but his attitude toward the coronavirus crisis may actually have been a bonus for some men, which could present a real challenge for Biden moving forward.

Overall, most Americans consistently disapproved of the way Trump handled the pandemic, but the AEI poll found one notable exception — men who identify as “completely masculine.” [A] majority (52 percent) of men who identified as completely masculine on the survey agreed that the Trump administration has a strategy on COVID-19 — setting them apart from all other men and women. (Compared with other respondents, completely masculine men were also much more evenly split on the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, more likely to believe that wearing a mask was more about being politically correct than about preventing the spread of COVID-19, and more likely to oppose a national mask mandate.)

Personally, if you feel the need to identify yourself as “completely masculine” we’re already dealing with some issues. But then again, the question was weird so who knows how people interpreted it.

Of course, the idea that men who identify as more masculine would be more supportive of the president isn’t that much of a shocker considering they have been among his biggest fans from the beginning. According to the AEI survey, that was true this year as well: When broken out by how masculine or feminine they identified themselves, completely masculine men were the only group where the majority (60 percent) said they had voted for Trump. These men may also be more likely to subscribe to a more traditional ideal of masculinity that echoes Trump’s “just shrug it off” attitude toward the pandemic. In fact, research conducted before the election found that these men, or men who fall into a similar category, were less likely to wear masks in the first place or take other precautions to stop the spread of COVID-19, including social distancing. One analysis even found that men who were considered more sexist were more likely to report having contracted the virus.

Daniel Cassino, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the author of one of the studies that found more masculine men dismissing COVID-19 precautions, told us that this conclusion lines up with a broader tendency among men to take fewer health precautions period — like wearing seat belts or going to the doctor regularly. Cassino said that traditional stereotypes around masculinity encourage men to shake off vulnerability, such as hiding a fear of illness and instead projecting strength. The pandemic, he added, may have sent these tendencies into overdrive, leading some men to oppose public health restrictions and forgo protective health measures like wearing masks. “COVID-19 makes men focus more on their masculine identity than they otherwise would have, because they feel this pressure to say and demonstrate, ‘Yeah, this big scary medical crisis is happening, but it’s not going to affect me,’” Cassino said.

It’s hard to completely untangle these effects from the impact of partisanship. Men who identify as completely masculine are disproportionately likely to be Republican, and as we’ve written before, Republicans have been consistently less likely to report feeling worried about the pandemic and to support public health restrictions on businesses and individuals. But arguably, this reflects the extent to which Americans’ views about gender roles have become intertwined with their partisan identity, according to Daniel Cox, director of AEI’s Survey Center on American Life and a FiveThirtyEight contributor. “Reaffirming that you are traditionally masculine is itself a political statement today — a way to push back on changes to the way society is organized,” he said.

But there is some evidence from the studies on COVID-19 and masculinity that identifying as more masculine or supporting conventional gender roles has had an independent effect on men’s response to the pandemic, separate from how they identify politically. In the AEI poll, too, Republican men who identified as completely masculine were somewhat more likely than less-masculine Republican men to approve of the way Trump has handled the pandemic, although the difference wasn’t necessarily all that huge (79 percent compared with 69 percent).

It’s gives a whole new definition to the notion of “toxic masculinity” doesn’t it?

Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be changing everyone’s minds. People just refuse to believe it even when they know many of the people who are dying. Some have bought into disinformation that it’s pneumonia caused by people wearing masks among other propaganda they’ve picked up on right wing media.

This story in the Washington Post about one small town in South Dakota is just harrowing:

News of Buck Timmins’s death spread quickly through town just hours before the first vote.

Kevin McCardle, the city council president, heard the news in a text from a fellow referee and was shocked. He had not even known Timmins was sick. How could he be dead when McCardle had seen him filling up his tank at the gas station just a few days ago?

Timmins fell ill with the virus Oct. 24, his wife said. She was pretty sure he picked it up at one of the many games he went to, where people were casual about wearing masks.

“You may need a mask to get in the door, but once you were inside, you looked around and there were 300 people in the seats watching volleyball, pretty much going maskless,” she said. “Mitchell, South Dakota, is a small town. We trusted each other.”

Nanci had stitched Buck a mask out of quilt scraps — in the most manly pattern she could find, brown with little yellow flowers — but she wasn’t sure if he always wore it when he was out of her sight.

They both became ill at the same time, but Nanci had a mild case. Buck seemed okay, too, until about a week in, when he became weaker and weaker and didn’t want to eat or drink, or leave his old brown leather recliner. She plied him with all the flavors of Gatorade, Smartwater and Ensure she could find, but he drank very little. Because Buck was not having trouble breathing and the hospital had patients who were far sicker, he stayed at home. Nanci, a retired X-ray technologist, administered his oxygen and insulin treatments.

That morning, Nov. 16, Buck woke after a restless night and called out for his wife. He mumbled something — she thought he said, “I love you” — so she wrapped her arms around his head and said, “I love you, too!” Just after noon, he was gone. They had planned on taking an Alaskan cruise together next year, but now she was alone, 10 days before Thanksgiving with a stack of bills on the table she wasn’t sure how to pay.

“It’s just — not there,” she said. “So much life left, and then it’s just not there.”

Three hours later, McCardle walked into the Corn Palace, the city’s civic center and auditorium, with Buck Timmins’s death heavy on his mind. Timmins had coached in his Little League. They had refereed high school sports together. Now his eyes rested briefly on the spot in the bleachers behind the visitor’s bench where Timmins, in his role as state coordinator for high school refs, always sat during games.

McCardle had a yellow legal pad under his arm with his daily tally of coronavirus cases in Davison County since March. The growth he had been so carefully recording had exploded in recent weeks, with 359 cases Oct. 1 to 1,912 that morning, a 433 percent increase. Locally, 10 people had died in less than seven weeks. South Dakota now has the largest increase in deaths per capita in the nation, according to Washington Post data from Dec. 8.

The positivity rate at two local testing sites — a key indicator of the virus’s hold on a community — was 33 percent at the beginning of November and would soar to 49 percent near the end of the month, according to Avera Queen of Peace Hospital in Mitchell.

Queen of Peace, which only has eight ICU beds, became overwhelmed and sometimes had to turn patients away, opening up a second covid-19 wing Nov. 8 that filled quickly. Doctors warned of a 50 to 100 percent increase in hospitalizations in the weeks to come. “GOD BE WITH US,” the pandemic-inspired sign outside a feed store read.

McCardle said he found the numbers as alarming as the public health officials did. He is a 57-year-old camper salesman whose biggest worry as council president before the coronavirus was cleaning up algae in the town lake. But when Susan Tjarks, the lone female member on the council, had raised the idea of a mask mandate a month earlier, he had ridiculed her for wearing one and grumbled: “You don’t see the grocery stores putting mandatory masks in. Nobody would go to ‘em. They’d lose business.”

But now McCardle and others on the council, rattled by Timmins’s death, listened attentively to Tjarks’s proposal, sitting at socially spaced tables on the auditorium’s basketball court in front of murals depicting their hardy pioneer ancestors. The draft ordinance would require masks in public buildings and businesses, with a possible fine of up to $500 and 30 days in jail.

Tjarks, who owns a drapery company called Gotcha Covered, is a conservative Republican. But she became convinced the city had to act as deaths began tearing a deep hole in the community’s civic heart.

“What we have been doing isn’t working,” she told the city council. “I don’t want to lose any more friends. I don’t want to lose any more neighbors. We have to do what we need to do to step up and prevent these cases from rising.”

So many town leaders have died in such a short time that the impact has been profound, Tjarks said. Who will fill Timmins’s shoes as a mentor for young referees in the state high school athletic association? Who will raise money for the veteran’s park and the rodeo stampede now that state legislator Lance Carson is gone? There would be smaller absences too: her neighbor, John, now missing from the morning group at the doughnut shop.

Throughout the autumn, towns all over the Midwest in conservative states where Republican governors have avoided mask mandates have tried to pass their own restrictions, often prompting virulent community debate. The town of Huron, S.D., just up the road passed one, as did Washington, Mo. In Muskogee, Okla., the city council finally passed a mandate after several tries; one of its pro-mask members had even wheeled in a casket as a prop

Read on for details about how the disease has taken over this small town — and how difficult it is to get people to behave responsibly. It’s mind-boggling.

By the way, the council ended up deciding to remove all the sanctions for failing to wear a mask so the “mandate” is toothless. And it was clear by the end that many people would still refuse to wear them. So, that’s that. People will continue to die until a vaccine is available. And even then, it’s highly likely that many of those same people will refuse to get it. But the upside, I guess, is that those people will no longer be able to transmit it to people who understand the science and do wear masks and follow the guidelines. They will only be killing each other.

Sigh. It’s all so tragic.

By the way, this sign strikes me as an effective way to signal that masks are required. It ties it in to other requirements that people have no problem with:

Schmaht as a whip:

A witness who attracted national attention after testifying at the side of Rudolph W. Giuliani about alleged voter fraud in Michigan says she is not self-quarantining and has not been tested for the coronavirus in the wake of Giuliani’s positive test and hospitalization.

Mellissa Carone testified before state lawmakers on Dec. 2 for about 30 minutes while sitting beside the president’s personal attorney in Lansing, according to a video of the hearing. Neither wore masks. She also posed for photos with Giuliani, who health officials later said was “extremely likely” to have been contagious with the virus at the time.

Health officials in Ingham County, which includes Lansing, on Monday ordered anyone who had been in contact with Giuliani at close range and for more than 15 minutes to self-quarantine after President Trump tweeted that his personal attorney had tested positive for the coronavirus. The county officials said they cannot enforce the directive outside their borders.

In a phone interview Tuesday from her home in the Detroit suburbs, Carone told The Washington Post that she was living her life normally and had no plans to change that. She said she was unaware of the health advisory and was not worried about contracting the virus.

“I would take it seriously if it came from Trump, because Trump cares about American lives,” Carone said, adding that if television networks friendly to Trump such as One America News or Newsmax “told me to go get tested, I would do it.”

“It is not that I don’t believe in getting tested. I don’t trust the tests,” Carone said.

She spoke admiringly of Giuliani, calling him “one of the most respectful, polite, just down-to-earth people I have ever met. He is great.”

Since her appearance with Giuliani, media scrutiny 0f Carone has uncovered biographical information, including a recent criminal conviction.

Too bad about all the people she could be infecting. I guess that’s just their tough luck.

People like her number in the millions. And they are driving trucks and teaching kids and dispensing medication and otherwise engaging in activities that require at least a modicum of common sense and the ability to follow rules. Clearly, they cannot be counted on to do that.

How do we fix something like this? I honestly don’t have any idea.

The following is a twitter thread from Congresswoman Katie Porter:

When I came to Congress, I knew I had a responsibility to pull back the curtain for the American people and expose corruption in real time. So, I’m filling you in on Senator McConnell’s attempts over the last 8 days to tank a *bipartisan* COVID relief bill.

You may have heard that Democrats and Republicans have agreed upon spending $900 billion to fund another round of small business loans, support hospitals and essential workers, and help the 10 million people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

Everyone at the negotiating table—including Senate Rs—has agreed to a compromise. Except one. Mitch McConnell is refusing to bring it to the floor unless it wipes away all COVID-related lawsuits filed that “allege injury or death” due to corporate negligence.

These lawsuits represent the worst of the worst examples of disregard for human life—cases filed on behalf of nursing home patients and grocery store workers who died because the company in charge of keeping them safe prioritized cutting costs over protecting them.

The same McConnell who said that President Trump is “100% within his rights” to pursue baseless lawsuits alleging election fraud is now refusing to pass urgently-needed relief unless it strips those same rights from the most vulnerable among us. This must be exposed.

Originally tweeted by Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) on December 9, 2020.

Trump and McConnell share a belief in dominance. Trump is an imbecile who uses power in a haphazard, self-aggrandizing way that doesn’t translate to anything but hype. McConnell is much more deliberate and strategic.

Right now McConnell is demonstrating his dominance. It won’t be the last time if he maintains the majority. In fact, it’s just a small taste of things to come. And, by the way, even if the Dems win the Georgia runoffs and fail to get rid of the filibuster, he’ll do it from the minority as well. The Grim Reaper plays for keeps.

Right after this year’s election, Politico sponsored a 2020 Voters Priority survey that showed just how shockingly divided the country really is. On virtually every issue, Republicans and Democrats are polar opposites, with eight out of 10 respondents claiming to have “lost respect for the other side” and nearly 75% of respondents saying they cannot trust members of the other party. A majority of survey respondents even said they wouldn’t want their child to marry someone from the opposing party, that they wouldn’t hire someone from the other party and that they believed the other party was literally ruining the country.

In this poll, as in earlier surveys, 79% of Trump voters refuse to accept the result of the election, agreeing that “illegal voting and fraud stole this election.” More than half of Trump voters even claim that their own vote was not accurately counted.

Despite the apparent widespread distrust, however, large numbers of respondents from both parties insist that they want the Congress to work together in a bipartisan fashion. Nearly 70% of Trump voters and 76% of Biden voters say that the best leaders “reach across the aisle to make compromises.” Even 48% of Trump voters (who think Biden stole the election) say that congressional Republicans should seek compromises and work with the new administration.

As disorienting as this may appear, it isn’t all that unusual.

Polling repeatedly shows that the public says it wants bipartisanship and compromise. People reliably affirm that they are sick of partisan fighting. But considering the scorched-earth practices of the GOP and the perennial anger among the base of the Democratic Party for its failure to “fight back,” I have long suspected that what people really mean by compromise is for the other side to give in and do it their way. Bipartisanship is just a way of describing a surrender by your political opponents, where they sign on to your ideas. There just isn’t a lot of “give” on either side these days.

Nostalgia for the old style of bipartisan compromise that was made possible because the two parties were ideologically diverse, with liberals and conservatives on both sides, is still with us. You’ll often hear pundits and historians wax on about how the parties would battle by day but that at night former House speaker Tip O’Neill would go down to the White House and hoist a Scotch with President Reagan after work. It’s a nice little fable, but if it was ever true, it hasn’t been that way for a long time.

Still, Joe Biden expressly promised to unify the country and went so far as to say he thought that after Trump left office the fever would break, Republicans would have an epiphany and they could all work together for the sake of the country. He’s a very optimistic guy — he said the same thing before the 2012 election too. It didn’t work out the way he expected.

Like Barack Obama before him, Biden ran on the idea that he could bring people together. It made political sense to do it. Many people are horrified by Trump’s divisiveness and yearn for someone who can calm things down and get things done. A veteran politician who knows how Washington works and gets along with everyone sounded awfully good to many people after this Trump clown show. Given Biden’s experience under Obama (and simply observing the cynical behavior of GOP officials under Trump), it’s hard to imagine he actually believes that, but maybe he truly sees himself as some sort of national healer.

As Salon’s Igor Derysh reported on Tuesday, Biden is making good on his promise to reach out to Republicans by appointing Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., to head a new White House Office of Public Engagement. Richmond characterizes part of his role as serving as a “conduit straight into the White House for American corporations” — which is not exactly the kind of “unity” Biden’s base voters were looking for.

But Richmond also said he will create a position that will reach out to conservatives as well because Biden’s team were “not elected just to help Democrats or urban cities or minorities.” That’s true enough. Biden has said many times that he will be the president of all of America, not just those who voted for him, which is as it should be. Unlike Trump, who punished the states that didn’t vote for him and lavished attention on those that did, presidents have an obligation to serve the whole country. Frankly, Democratic agendas have always been meant to benefit their own voters no more than those who despise them, whether it’s social welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare or the Affordable Care Act, labor laws and safety regulations. Biden’s agenda will do the same, even though the Republicans will fight him with everything they have.

But if anyone still seriously believes “the fever” is going to break soon or that Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell is going to have an epiphany and help Biden pass that agenda, they need to think again. Remember, that poll that showed people want bipartisanship also showed that nearly 80% of Republicans believe that the election was stolen.

Trump has already convinced tens of millions of his voters that Biden is an illegitimate winner, and the current president’s collaborators in the Republican Party are doing nothing to disabuse them of that idea. After all, it works for them.

As for “reaching out” to the Republican base, good luck.

Richmond’s announcement was not exactly welcomed in right-wing circles:

This vicious Townhall reaction to news that Joe Biden and @RepRichmond are planning an outreach effort to average Republicans shows why bypassing the noxious right wing media machine is the way to do it. GOP elites' hold on their voters is dependent on gaslighting them 24/7. pic.twitter.com/budGHHkX87

— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) December 8, 2020

In some respects I can understand this. It can feel condescending for the winner to assume that the other side wants to make nice when it’s still smarting from a defeat. But right-wing pundits or columnists aren’t really the problem. As the New York Times reported on Tuesday, the threats from Trump’s supporters are growing:

Supporters of the president, some of them armed, gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state Saturday night. Racist death threats filled the voice mail of Cynthia A. Johnson, a Michigan state representative. Georgia election officials, mostly Republicans, say they have received threats of violence. The Republican Party of Arizona, on Twitter, twice called for supporters to be willing to “die for something” or “give my life for this fight.”

In Idaho, public health officials had to call off a Zoom meeting because protesters were pounding on the doors of their homes. And this stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. People are being threatened all over the country and it’s a miracle that something terrible hasn’t happened already.

Meanwhile, over on planet-Parler, the Supreme Court's decision is being met (as many things there are) with calls for martial law and armed insurrection. pic.twitter.com/NNmM685zHO

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) December 8, 2020

Trump may have lost the legal battle and will lose institutional power within a few weeks. But the danger won’t pass anytime soon, because the GOP establishment sees benefit in leveraging this incoherent rage to sabotage what they’re essentially claiming will be an illegitimate Democratic presidency. Biden can initiate all the outreach he wants but I don’t think GOP officials could put that genie back in the bottle if they wanted to. And they have made it very clear that they don’t want to.

My Salon column

Chris Hayes tells it like it is. I’m starting to hear this sort of thing a lot. People can’t ignore about what the Republicans are doing.

Watch more here: https://t.co/O9wc6nBTjU

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) December 9, 2020

Axios interviewed Christopher Krebs:

Christopher Krebs, the nation’s former top election security official, tells “Axios on HBO” that President Trump is spreading disinformation, which he described as a form of domestic “threat” that he swore an oath to defend against in his job.

“The caller was inside the house,” Krebs told me. “The president is a big part of the disinformation that’s coming out there about the rigged election, but there are absolutely others.”

Why it matters: This is the clearest expression from Krebs of how he views his former boss, who fired him for putting out a statement saying that the 2020 election was the most secure in American history.

Krebs had refused to co-sign — and in fact publicly contradicted — Trump’s conspiracy theories that hacked computer systems flipped the election by switching votes from Trump to Joe Biden.

Between the lines: Asked how he grappled with Trump’s false claims while he was still working for him, Krebs said, “One of the questions we asked: ‘What would we do if the Russians were doing this?'”

“The oath that we pledged coming into office as a federal official is that you uphold and defend the Constitution from threats foreign and domestic. We upheld our oath, carried it out.”

When asked the obvious follow-up — is President Trump a domestic threat? — Krebs replied: “There is disinformation that he is spreading. I mean, disinformation is one type of threat.”

The big picture: Despite receiving death threats from Trump supporters, Krebs is continuing to speak out against Trump’s campaign to falsely claim the election was stolen from him. And Krebs is calling on Republican leaders to join him.

“Republican leadership needs to stand up and say that, ‘This is not, this is just not what we need to be telling the American people right now,'” Krebs said.

“We need to be restoring confidence in the election. We need to be restoring confidence in democracy. We all just for some reason think that democracy is resilient and can withstand this sort of attack.”

“I actually think that democracy’s quite fragile. And when the institutions themselves are under attack from the inside, as you said, that’s pretty close to an existential issue. And so we need the other parts of, you know, the three-part government to actively push back and actively engage.”

“Live free and die,” Nick Hanauer tweeted Tuesday night in response to reports of anti-mask protesters gathering outside Idaho’s Central District Health’s Board of Health.

Here's a photo of the crowd outside @CDHidaho from Darin Oswald. The meeting is about to start. #idahocovid19 pic.twitter.com/kyzyYMuaRs

— Ruth Brown (@RuthBrownNews) December 9, 2020

The Washington Post reports:

Minutes into a public health district’s virtual meeting to vote on a local mask mandate in Idaho on Tuesday evening, Ada County Commissioner Diana Lachiondo tearfully excused herself after getting a phone call that anti-mask protesters had surrounded her home.

“My 12-year-old son is home by himself right now, and there are protesters banging outside the door,” she told the Central District Health’s Board of Health, which serves four counties in the state’s most populous region. “I’m going to go home and make sure he’s okay.”

A visibly upset Lachiondo then disconnected from the video call, leaving her colleagues at the meeting stunned. They soon learned that protesters had gathered outside the Central District Health office and one other board member’s residence as well, targeting the public officials who were meeting virtually from their homes and private offices as a precaution amid the worsening pandemic.

Minutes later, Boise police and Mayor Lauren McLean (D) asked the board to cancel the meeting out of concern for requested the board cancel it out of concern “for police, staff and board members who were dealing with protesters on their doorsteps.”

https://twitter.com/FirenzeMike/status/1336695331589943298?s=20

Protests on Friday and Tuesday, the Post adds, “were organized by a multistate network of right-wing activists … founded by Bundy, a vocal anti-masker …”

Remember the weeks of conservative outrage when the co-owner of the Red Hen in Virginia asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave the restaurant in 2018? Michelle Goldberg reminds readers it was three days after people yelled at Kirstjen Nielsen, then-homeland security secretary, at a Washington Mexican restaurant over Donald Trump’s family separation policy. Oh, the incivility!

But conservatives terrorizing opponents? A string of incidents like those in Boise or armed protesters screaming epithets outside the home of Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, do not prompt similar media calls for the Republican Party to rein in its extremists:

The radically different way the media treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.

But you know anti-mask fervor is all fun and reindeer games until one of your own dies. Assembled from TikTok postings, the video below appeared yesterday chronicling one Alabama woman’s journey from anti-masker to grieving niece and granddaughter.

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1336221035730001922?s=20

She caught a lot of grief in comments, including suggestions her posts were staged. They are not. I checked. The obituaries of her grandfather and aunt are linked on her Facebook page. Her grandfather died Nov. 15. Her aunt died four days later.

Covid is not a hoax. Masking is not about your personal freedom. It’s about personal responsibility. But personal responsibility is a dog whistle that only applies to non-Republicans, especially non-white ones. Amazing that would-be Minutemen with AR-15s are ready to die for Donald Trump but are unwilling to defend the “colonists” next door from a virus he’s declared a foreign invader. Dying is righteous. Masking is a bridge too far.

https://twitter.com/AZGOP/status/1336186861891452929?s=20

It’s a warped conception of freedom. So, what else is new?

UPDATE: Added Tweet containing video of the Idaho meeting.

“What does it profit a faith to gain a whole country and then lose it, along with its own soul?” Sarah Jones asks at New York magazine. Jones refers to the ever-shrinking Evangelical movement that forms a large chunk of the Republican base. About three-quarters of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump not once but twice.

“To be Evangelical in the 1990s was to learn fear,” Jones writes, herself a product of the church’s culture. The movement inhabits a “shadow universe” within the world. In it but not of it, as the theology goes. But entitled to rule it for Jesus nonetheless. It was easy to believe when membership was relatively stable, when the first thing new neighbors asked was where you went to church. But as youths fled the movement, with membership in decline for 13 straight years, it became harder to believe the promise of dominion.

White Evangelical Protestants and African-American Protestants lie far apart politically. Latino Evangelicals are more of a mixed bag, said Robert Jones, author of The End of White Christian America:

But white Evangelicals are still outliers overall: They’re more conservative than other Protestants, more conservative than Catholics, more conservative, in fact, than any other demographic in the country. The implicit claim of the Moral Majority — that it embodied mainstream opinion — always lacked evidence, but it’s become even less true over time. By the time Trump applied Richard Nixon’s label of a “silent majority” to his own coalition, it barely made sense at all. A bloc that can only take the White House through the Electoral College, and not the popular vote, only to lose it outright four years later, has no claim to majority status. They are a remnant within a remnant, a nation within a nation.

They know it, as do Republicans in leadership. And they don’t like it one bit. Two terms of a black, liberal president and a Supreme Court that sanctioned same-sex marriage rubbed salt in the wounded egos. Their mission to “purify the nation, and pacify the barbarians” was sorely at risk.

Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, attributes Trump’s success with Evangelicals to his ability to exploit “two key Evangelical tendencies,” Posner writes: white racial grievance and the shifts brought on by televangelism that made churches mega and preachers megastars. The culture war was on, Sarah Jones explains, and they needed a general.

Enter Donald J. Trump. Exit Evangelical pretensions that character is what mattered most in a leader.

Former Christianity Today editor Mark Galli caused an uproar with an editorial last year calling Donald Trump “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.” Galli believes Evangelicals “are deeply suspicious of human authority” up to a point:

What they may fear, really, is authority they don’t control. “Paradoxically,” he continued, “they are a group that’s attracted to authoritarian leaders, whether that person be a pastor of a megachurch or a dictator.” Those tendencies existed before Trump. With the help of the far-right press, social media, and alternative institutions, they will survive Trump, too.

“I think that the thing that we have to keep our eye on is the ways in which the infrastructure that they built gives them an advantage beyond what their numbers would tell you,” Posner said. Conservative Evangelicals already know that they’re no longer the Moral Majority, and they’ve found a way to make it work for them. “They’ll recognize, for example, that they may be in the minority on LGBTQ rights, but in their view, that’s all the more reason that they should be protected by either the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or the First Amendment, in having the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.”

Evangelicals raised from the cradle to yearn for the return a heavenly king were predisposed to settle for an earthly one. Republican patricians who give lip service to “created equal” and promoting “the general welfare” in the founding documents follow the tradition of royalists who supported the British Crown during the American Revolution. Some persons are more equal than others. Both factions are sure they represent the better half. Seeing their ability to legislate that slipping away is where more secular Republicans and Evangelicals have found common cause since at least the late 1970s.

After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republican post mortem recommended a softening of its radicalism to expand its base. It went nowhere. Democratic norms became disposable. Compromise with barbarians was unacceptable. It matters not if their numbers are shrinking. It’s nothing a little gerrymandering here and a little vote-suppressing there cannot fix to ensure the better half get places in the lifeboats when the authoritarians sink the republic.

I’m not sure which strategy this is, but it’s interesting:

Newsmax TV has notched a ratings win over Fox News Channel for the very first time.The win, fueled by conservative viewers who are disappointed by the election results, happened Monday evening. In the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic prized by advertisers, “Greg Kelly Reports” on Newsmax out-rated “The Story with Martha MacCallum” on Fox.The margin was narrow — Kelly averaged 229,000 viewers in the demo and MacCallum averaged 203,000 — but it is still a milestone in the cable news industry.

Before the election, Newsmax was not regarded as a formidable competitor to Fox; it was mostly dismissed as one of a handful of wannabe challengers.But President Trump’s loss on November 3 changed the cable TV calculus. Viewers who were frustrated when Fox admitted the truth of Trump’s loss sought other options. Trump encouraged them to try Newsmax.Newsmax — and Kelly in particular — offered a safe space in which Biden was not called president-elect and Trump was not yet defeated.

Through the post-election weeks in November, as Trump’s legal team suffered dozens of losses in court in its attempt to overturn the results, Kelly insisted that he believed Trump would still prevail.His 7 p.m. program consists of long, pro-Trump, anti-media commentaries of the type typically found later in the evening on Fox. And a certain subset of viewers are rewarding him for it. Kelly’s show is usually Newsmax’s highest-rated show of the day.

“We’re here to stay,” Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy said Tuesday evening. “The ratings are showing that.”

Fox News is still four times higher-rated than Newsmax at any given time of day, according to Nielsen. Among viewers of all ages, Fox averaged 1.36 million viewers around the clock on Monday, while Newsmax averaged 316,000 viewers.But Fox is down from its pre-election highs while Newsmax is way up.

Take Kelly’s hour: Before the election, his show barely had a heartbeat. The 7 p.m. hour had barely 10,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo and 100,000 viewers overall, according to Nielsen data.Now the hour has nearly a million viewers on a good night, and Monday was good: 949,000 viewers.

Ruddy pointed out that Newsmax TV is also live-streamed on a variety of platforms, so there is an additional audience that is not measured by Nielsen.

In the 7 p.m. hour, Newsmax ranked third overall, behind CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront,” which averaged 423,000 viewers in the demo on Monday, and MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” which had 280,000.The 25-54 demo is critical because most advertising on cable news networks is bought and sold using demographic ratings.

Newsmax seems to be cutting into Fox’s demo performance at some other times of day, though it’s hard to say for sure.

At 4 p.m. on Monday, for example, “The Howie Carr Show” on Newsmax averaged 101,000 in the demo, while “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on Fox averaged 148,000 in the demo.One hour later, the gap between the two channels was much wider: “The Chris Salcedo Show” on Newsmax averaged 120,000 while “The Five” on Fox attracted 303,000.What’s the main difference? “The Five” is an intense right-wing talk show while Cavuto’s 4 p.m. hour is less ideological. Fox’s more opinionated shows outperform its newscasts, even when the newscasts are stacked with conservative guests and storylines.

Newsmax maxes out on talk shows, not newscasts. In the coming weeks, Ruddy said, Newsmax will continue to expand its programming schedule, including a 10 p.m. program led by Rob Schmitt, a former early morning host on Fox.Ruddy is still brainstorming options for the 9 p.m. hour.It must be emphasized that Fox is still far ahead of Newsmax by almost every conceivable metric.

But Fox is accustomed to being No. 1 in the 25-54 demo so losing to Newsmax, even for one hour of one day, is a serious shock.Fox Corp. chief financial officer Steve Tomsic addressed the competition at a financial conference earlier in the day Tuesday.

He mentioned Newsmax and One America News by name.”I think when people think about competition, they sort of, their knee jerk reaction is to think, ‘well all we need is two or three talking heads to go head to head with ours.’ The business is much bigger than that,” Tomsic said, including news coverage and digital properties.

He described Fox News as a business “that has stood the test of time, and every time there’s been skepticism about what the future looks like, we’ve pierced through and hit another high.”

“So,” he said, “we feel super confident about Fox News being able to compete in any environment going forward.”

It doesn’t sound like they are super-confident. Look for them to start the “Q-Anon Hour” any day now.

Trump calls for judges and Republican legislators to have the "courage" to help him overthrow the election, then says, "I'll tell you what, life will be much easier for this country." He then exits the White House event to cheers. pic.twitter.com/tb7QiskANf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 8, 2020