Trump Taking Evangelicals

First Palin, now Trump gets Falwell Jr’s endorsement:

Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of the late televangelist, endorsed Donald Trump on Tuesday, giving Republican front-runner the blessing of one of the evangelical community’s biggest names just days before the Iowa caucuses.

Evangelicals are flooding to him:

Donald Trump’s outreach to Christians is bearing fruit, if results of the NBC News/Survey Monkey weekly online tracking poll out Tuesday are any indication.

Among white evangelical Republican voters nationally, Trump earned the support of 37 percent, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose father is a pastor and has played a key role in recruiting faith leaders to support his son, is at 20 percent. In the same survey conducted the previous week, Cruz registered 9 percentage points higher. Below the top two contenders, Ben Carson earned 11 percent among evangelicals, and Marco Rubio took 10 percent.

This is amygdala. I think evangelicals have reached a point that their hatred of the machine is overwhelming all other issues for them in their amygdalae. If they were to vote purely on religious issues and socially conservative issues like marriage, Cruz would probably win. Even if you were to vote purely to oppose liberal ideologues, Cruz would probably edge out Trump, based on how liberals hate Cruz’s positions. But the evangelicals seem to be abandoning concern about their core issues, out of a hatred and disgust with the corrupt machine – a hatred which actually transcends ideology.

In perhaps the most bizarre twist, Cruz is selling himself as the only candidate who can beat Trump – a clear appeal to the establishment:

Cruz, who is battling Trump for first place just a week from this state’s caucuses, told a ballroom full of pastors at a lunch here that the race between the two men is an “absolute dead heat.”

“If Donald wins Iowa he right now has a substantial lead in New Hampshire. If he went on to win New Hampshire as well there’s a very good chance he could be unstoppable and be our nominee. And the next seven days in Iowa will determine whether or not that happens,” Cruz said at a policy briefing luncheon put on by the American Renewal Project, an organization of conservative pastors that has held events with numerous candidates in Iowa.

“What I’ve told people is I can’t guarantee we’ll win. I don’t know that. That’s out of my hands. I believe we have a path to victory. I believe we put the team in place, I believe we have a winning strategy,” Cruz said. But what I can guarantee you is at the end of the day, everyone that’s been a part of this will be able to look in the mirror and be proud.”

What is amazing is the level of rage. For decades, the Uniparty has put up two parties, with two candidates, each espousing specific ideologies, and then they have watched as people divided, fought over ideology, and then happily elected one of the Uniparty’s candidates. Now, that isn’t even close to working. The level of rage at the machine is so great that people are ignoring ideology, simply to support anyone who the machine appears to hate.

What makes that really amazing is that the real cataclysm has not even begun to hit. Things are still rosy and wonderful compared to what is coming, yet everyone’s amygdalae are so spun up that everyone wants to burn it all down through the voting booth. If I were a political insider in the Uniparty I would be terrified. This would indicate that Republican or Democrat, when the debt bomb hits and the anarchy begins, it could very well be blue collar democrats and ideological conservatives setting aside their ideological differences to destroy the entire machine in real life with Al Bundy-esque rioting and mayhem. This laying down of ideological positions in favor of destroying the status quo is the type of behavior which, taken to its extreme, could easily produce a bloody civil war against a government.

My guess is that Trump wins this in a walk, and then governs as an anti-George W Bush (less overtly ideologically conservative, but very K-ifying of the population.) He will drive the populace as far rightward as Bush II drove it leftward, and at the end of his Presidency he will hand the nation to another Republican, ala Reagan. If that Republican is an ardent anti-establishment conservative, they will inherit a nation much more open to their policy positions, and they will be able to push the nation far more rightward than any Republican now could possibly do in our present ideological environment.

Add in the ever increasing pressure of the approaching apocalypse, itself a K-ifying force, and I’d bet conservatism is on an amazing upswing.

Now if we can just avoid importing millions of migrants in the interim, the nation might be salvagable.