I'm a little tired of pretending people just don't understand what is going on. Conservatives are fucking liars. They lie about their beliefs. They lie about their understanding. They feign ignorance at the horror and buy into nakedly fake conspiracy theories and artificially generated images/videos. To quote Upton Sinclair
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
The common denominator across the conservative movement is industry of employment. O&G, FinTech, Sales, Real Estate, Automotive, MLMs... If you find a staunch conservative pundit, you're going to quickly discover one or more of the above puffing up their financial sails.
Religious Right figures know full well that their religious leadership differs from their political leadership and they don't care. Their dioceses are funded with the money from extractive and exploitative industries. Their churches are built with blood money. And they're going to defend that money far more zealously than they defend some random asshole from Chicago promoted to the highest office via a conclave of foreign fucks most of them couldn't pick out of a crowd in full uniform.
The current level of cognitive dissonance has been a long time in the making.
It isn't dissonance. Its a pronounced divorce between the local churches and Rome that's been widening since Vatican II. As Catholicism spreads across the developing world and shrivels in the imperial core, the so-called Catholics find their economic future and their religious faith at odds. And they aren't flinching in response. They're going all in on the money.