re: #5 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

The strategy is to blame it on Biden and the Democrats, which they’ve been doing since the day Biden took office.

On top of that, conservatives do vote in their own interest: Racism and misogamy. Liberals are quick to ask why they “won’t vote in their own interest” making the same assumption: Everything is about money.

Conservatism is a religion, so the parishioners will go right along with what they’re told to do by their prelates, coupled with Christian churches telling them the same thing.

They don’t care how many of their own they kill, as long as they kill more of us. For the remainder, restriction of voting and gerrymandering might be enough.

President Johnson’s statement about picking a white man’s pocket applies.

People rag on so-called pulpit pimps, but the fact remains their members and followers are a significant fraction of all Christians.

If you can’t get Roman Catholics to throw in the towel over their church’s centuries-old child rape or make excuses for it (my church doesn’t do that), then Protestant ministers’ hold on their parishioners can only be assumed to be equally strong.

This is a bit overly cynical. The issue isn’t conservatism being a religion. Poor white conservatives tend to be heavily in churches that want tithes, and the tithes are typically 10% of income. Realizing this, it suddenly becomes a lot more understandable why even middle-class white conservatives will bitch about taxes and government: many of them are already tithing 10% of their gross incomes to churches, and then taxation on top of that feels like bloody murder to them. They have a very ancient understanding of the connection between church and state, which actually stems from the eighteenth century, when priests and preachers the colonies over would teach explicitly political sermons on the necessity of rebellion from England. This carried over into the nineteenth century, with baptist churches in the south creating a slavery apologia, backed up by dubious theology (the mark of cain was black skin). And V.O. Key writes perceptively and persuasively in Southern Politics in State and Nation about how textile owners paid the salaries of the preachers who sermonized to the poor white trash about how they were one step up from the n*****, and that they needed to fight like hell to maintain that level. So it isn’t so much, I don’t think, that these people are cynically sitting around thinking about how lovely it is to be racist: they mostly don’t have shit, and they don’t have the imagination to understand that prosperity is not finite: somebody else doesn’t have to lose in order for you to win.