Conservative Culture is a carefully built Cult
Cults carefully break your mind and will. The churches at the heart of this apply constant pressure to their members. This pressure is made worse as it becomes clear that an individual who breaks free, will probably lose their spouse, their friends and their job. You probably have to relocate if you want to really be free.
With those pressures, right becomes wrong and wrong becomes right. People who absolutely know that the King James is word for word perfect will deflect and ignore sentences that clearly show their doctrine is wrong. As this continues, smart people become idiots or they become evil and join the leadership.
Cults don't have to be churches. They can form around a few people and the patterns of exclusion, shunning punishment and brainwashing appear wherever bullies are tolerated. The slow brainwash presented by Fox News is a good example of a set of programs demonstrated to make people less intelligent over time.
Bush gave money to megachurches. Evangelical churches support Trump blindly.
My own theory is that the southern strategy was based on demographic analysis of how a large block of voters could be shifted by careful and quite frankly evil, advertising. As this grew, Murdock and Rush added to it and then their power grew beyond the original planners control. Now I think their methods have become distilled enough for independent sociopaths, using the internet, to take up the reins of control and we are watching the results of greifers in control of cult members. QAnon is not doing it's followers any sort of service.
