Axis Daily Brief

Brad Onishi here with the Axis Daily Brief, and this one’s a little bit different. Over the last four months, we have produced over 50 versions of the Axis Daily Brief, coming to you daily with important religion and politics stories. Over the last week, that’s included Matt Taylor’s discussion of the Antichrists who threaten our freedom. It’s been Holly Berkeley Fletcher talking about the evangelical outrage about Meryl Streep playing Aslan.

We’ve covered a wide range of things this summer, and I’m really, really proud of what we’ve done here. We’ve had nearly a quarter million downloads and views of the show since it launched.

Thousands of you have joined us every morning as you wake up, get ready for the day, and tune in to what’s here. However, we are gonna have to pause the Axis Daily Brief for the time being as we search for more funding in the forms of grants and donations and other revenue. When we started this, as the leader of Axis Mundi Media I committed to paying everyone involved. I wasn’t going to ask people to give their time without remuneration.

You would be surprised how many things go unpaid in this industry. And I was also committed to ensuring that our engineers and everyone behind the scenes was paid in a fair way. What that means is that it’s expensive to do this show because we have amazing people that contribute every morning. Angela Denker’s an accomplished journalist and author.

Holly is an ex-CIA analyst, somebody whose book came out last year and is simply an in-demand personality. Matt Taylor has a new book coming out next week and is one of the leading scholars in the world on the New Apostolic Reformation and Christian supremacy.

When we do these Axis Daily Briefs, we have to put in the time to research the topics and then to write up the article and video script. And then we need to shoot that video and send it over to production. It all takes more time than you might imagine. The average rate we paid folks turned out to be on average $25 an hour. I have not paid myself for any of the briefs I have contributed.

All of that to say, we love doing this work. We believe it makes an impact. So many of you have given us feedback about what it means to you for us to be with you every morning with important stories and coverage of things that often go undetected or simply not covered in other media outlets. One of the best examples was Natalie Harp’s homeschool background and the ways that the Southern California megachurch culture really shaped her worldview - Matt Taylor brought us that. It was the most viewed and seen story that we’ve done on the Axis Daily Brief, and for good reason.

We’re gonna do everything we can to find the means to keep doing this work and to refine the format to figure out how we can do it best with the most impact and the most effect. In the meantime, we’re going to ensure that we’re still here, often with you.

And so let me just tell you about how that works here at Axis Mundi. On Sundays, we have the Sunday interview. And if you’re a paid subscriber, you get an extended version of that interview with myself or Annika Brockschmidt or Leah Payne. On Tuesdays, Matt Taylor and I will keep doing our live show and not only talk about really important stories in religion and politics and Christian nationalism, but also bring on great guests and interviewees. Today we have Mara Richards Bim. She is one of the plaintiffs in the Texas Ten Commandments lawsuit. And she represents her son, who is part of the Texas public school system. She’s also a Baptist minister. On Wednesdays, we’ll keep doing It’s in the Code with Dan Miller. On Fridays, the weekly roundup.

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We will be present. We will continue doing the work that Axis Mundi has set out to do. For now, however, this will be our last Axis Daily Brief. I appreciate all of you. I think I speak for the entire team that we’re so grateful to get to do this work because we see it as so meaningful. I want to thank Andrea Hamler, who’s been our engineer and editor behind the scenes for the last four months. I want to thank everyone on the Axis Daily Brief contributor team: Dan Miller, Holly Berkeley Fletcher, Matt Taylor, Thomas Lecaque, and Angela Denker. We’ll be back. Update soon. Appreciate all of you.

The Quiet Part, Out Loud

The Republicans in Texas have new reason to worry this week, and it highlights a lot about the realities confronting the Texas GOP. I think it also reveals a lot about the contemporary Republican Party in the United States as a whole.

Most people following politics are already familiar with the headwinds confronting Republicans in Texas. Texas has one of the highest Hispanic populations in the country, and despite swinging record numbers of Hispanic voters to the GOP in 2024 — genuinely historic numbers of Hispanic voters supporting Donald Trump and other Republicans — Hispanic support for Republicans has been slipping steadily ever since. Following the 2024 election, there were triumphant announcements from the Republican Party that a new era of coalition-building was underway, one that would usher in a new political age. But that hasn’t held.

Put those two facts together — a very high Hispanic population in Texas, and declining Hispanic support for Republicans — and you have one of the issues that genuinely concerns the GOP in Texas right now.

Why This Matters for November

This matters because Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico currently leads GOP candidate Ken Paxton in most polls. If Talarico wins, it would mark the first time the Democratic Party has won a U.S. Senate seat in Texas in decades — and it would meaningfully increase the odds that Democrats retake the Senate in the midterms.

So the GOP in Texas is sitting on two anxieties at once: declining minority support for the party, and a real, live threat of a Democratic senator coming out of Texas. Against that backdrop, the Texas GOP has been eager to convince Hispanic and other minority voters that despite the party’s economic policies — policies that have harmed minority voters of nearly every kind — Republicans really do care about and support Hispanic Americans.

This week, a Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commissioner position made that job considerably harder.

The Post

Bo French posted an image on X of University of Texas students celebrating a Longhorns game — just a photo of students at a football game. The students in the image appeared to include a number of people of South Asian descent. Above the photo, French wrote:

The post set off a firestorm inside the Texas GOP, with many condemning it and a few even calling it what it plainly is: racist. But notably, almost no one in the Texas GOP called for French to withdraw from the race. And French himself has stood by his comments. In an interview on Sunday, he said it is “not racist to point out that we should be favoring Texans over foreigners.”

So here’s the shape of the story: a member of the GOP makes comments widely viewed as racist, causing most of the Texas GOP — especially candidates in tight or contested races — to panic publicly, while the politician in question stands by his statement with the quiet support of other party members. That’s the version of the story you’ll find in most news outlets, and it’s worth reading. But the coverage tends to stop at exactly the point where it gets interesting.

What the Coverage Misses

Most reporting on this frames the story around damage control — Republican strategists explaining that comments like French’s make outreach to Hispanic and other minority voters more difficult. That’s true. But it treats French’s post as a communications problem rather than what it actually is: Bo French saying the quiet part out loud.

Yes, the GOP wants to win over Hispanic and other minority voters. But the party’s policies, its priorities, and its rhetoric — both since 2024 and well before it — make clear that most of the GOP doesn’t actually hold positions all that far from French’s. When strategists complain that statements like his make outreach “difficult,” they’re skipping past the more uncomfortable fact: they want those votes without having to actually support American minorities.

What a post like French’s reveals isn’t a position that most of the GOP finds offensive. It’s a position most of the GOP quietly shares but goes to considerable lengths to avoid saying in public. They don’t view Hispanic Americans, or South Asian American students, as real Americans — or in this case, as real Texans.

French actually said something in his own defense that I agree with. In that same interview, he suggested his fellow Republicans share his sentiments but are simply afraid of being labeled racist. In other words: they think what he thinks, they just don’t want to be called out for it. I think French is a racist, I think the post was racist, and I agree with him that many in the GOP share his views — no matter what they tell minority voters to convince them otherwise.

What the Post Actually Reveals

Look closely at what French actually said and the logic falls apart in a revealing way. He decries that the UT graduating class “looks like this,” pointing to an image of students who appear to be of South Asian descent. Then, in his follow-up interview, he says the university should be serving “Texans” — the implication being that none of the students in the photo are Texan.

He has no reason to think that. He has no way of knowing that. The only reason he says it is that he is profiling these students based on how they look. They don’t read as Texan to him — which is to say, they aren’t white.

That’s the assumption underneath French’s comments: that people of color simply aren’t real Texans, and by extension, aren’t real Americans. It doesn’t even occur to him that someone could be both a person of color and a Texan. In his mind, their presence in that photo means non-Americans are being served by the University of Texas, and that this shouldn’t be happening.

The Deeper Ideology

I think this is the real revelation about the Christian nationalist ideology that defines the contemporary Republican Party. The GOP wants minority votes — it actively courts them. But within that ideology, within that worldview, there is no actual place for minority voters as full participants in the party’s vision of America. It’s a vision of a white Christian nation, and minority communities don’t fit inside it as anything other than instrumental.

Instead, in the GOP imagination, minority communities tend to occupy one of two roles:

* A problem to be solved — deported if they’re not citizens, denaturalized if the assumption is (wrongly) made that they aren’t, treated by default as if they don’t belong.

* A resource to be drawn on strategically, but only when needed — courted in 2024, then largely ignored since, with no follow-through on the “coalition-building” that was promised. Now, heading into the 2026 midterms, the party needs those votes again, so the courting resumes.

What doesn’t have a place in that ideology is the idea that minority communities represent real Americans — full stop, not conditionally, not strategically. That’s what Bo French’s post shows us, whether he meant to reveal it or not.

What Comes Next

This is a story worth continuing to watch, especially with the 2026 midterms bearing down and the Texas Senate race as competitive as it’s been in decades. It’ll be worth watching how the Texas GOP handles French going forward — whether the discomfort passes, whether he faces any real consequences, or whether, as seems likely, the party quietly moves on while hoping voters forget.

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