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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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The obvious GOP front-runners for 2028 and 2032 are Vance, Rubio, DeSantis, and Hegseth in roughly that order. All of them are currently under 55 and much closer culturally to what @FCfromSSC is describing than anything you have.

The obvious front runners are Vance, Rubio, Abbott, and Youngkin.

  • Vance is a ‘based Christian’ catholic convert

  • Rubio is a Hispanic cradle Catholic

  • Abbott runs ads on having become a Catholic to bond with his wife’s family. While she prefers to go to Latin mass governor Abbott definitely doesn’t. He has a good relationship with the Texas Catholic bishops(not the most based bishops around- the most based archbishops in the USA are, ironically, those of Portland, San Francisco, and Denver, in addition to military services and the ordinariate for former Anglicans).

  • Youngkin is a country club conservative picked, in part, specifically to be non offensive. The chances of muscular Christianity are low.

I’m counting one example of based muscular Christianity out of four.

Talking about GOP front runners at this point is more snail brained than usual: the odds that more than one of Rubio, Hegseth, and Vance are still in Trump/MAGA's good graces in 2028 are lower than the odds that none of them are.