re: #281 Big Beautiful Door

The Religious Right are the foot soldiers of the GOP. The billionaires supply the money, but the GOP still needs volunteers and, critically voters, since money still can’t vote. The GOP has to run on culture wars, because very few people are going to vote for more tax cuts for billionaires, and the GOP has no positive agenda to help anyone who isn’t in the top 1%.

This is so very true with all the craziness around Andrew Brunson, the pastor who has been incarcerated in Turkey. Now I think the Erdogan regime is crazy, thinking that this pastor would collude with both the Gulenists and the Kurds, but Trump’s (and Pence’s and Pompeo’s and Mnuchin’s) reactions are way out of proportion to what’s going on here. It’s because Brunson has become a symbol of their culture war.