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A pastor usually leads a Protestant church. Catholic churches are led by priests.

Confession of sins to (God though) a priest is a rite in the Catholic church, but not in Protestant churches. Protestant churches often encourage members to ask forgiveness for their sins directly to God through prayer.

There are more Catholics than protestants in the world, but there are more protestants than Catholics in the U.S. The type of Christianity most often associated with socially conservative Republican/MAGA primary voters is Protestant “evangelical” Christianity.

Evangelicals are a hardcore subset of Protestants who take the Bible literally. They’re sometimes called “Born-again Christians” because of their belief in the importance of personal conversion. That is, you’re not really a real Christian until, as an autonomous adult, you willingly choose to surrender yourself, mind body and soul, and devote your life to (your pastor’s teachings about) the teachings of Jesus.

Anyway, now I’ve done an eight-hours-later four-paragraph TED-talk riff on what is otherwise quite a fine and clever comment. I mean no offense and hope none is taken. I mostly just wanted to note that when Nikki Haley talks about “pastors,” she isn’t talking to Catholics; she’s talking directly to the GOP evangelical voter base.

There is a phone app, that pretty much allows you phone to work like the scanner gun. I’ve used it before and it works fine, but my phone’s camera is not as good as the guns at scanning barcodes.

Also, as much as I realize I am trading privacy for control, I figure there’s no need to have the grocery store’s app living on my phone, when it is just as easy for me to use the dedicated device they provide in-store.

The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.

Trump became a god to that entire swath of willfully ignorant racist Americans, way back when he first attacked sitting President Obama for not being an American citizen.

Trump used the same tactic against Obama that he always uses. The same tactic he perfected in all his ridiculously public feuds with people like Rosie O’Donnell. It’s simple: The more audacious the accusation, the more press coverage it gets. The bigger the lie, the more it gets repeated.

In a certain way, I still think of the entire MAGA movement as payback for America electing a Black man to be President in 2008. And I’m still shocked to think even before 2008, there must have always been that much anger and hate and fear there, among my fellow Americans. But the hate was quieter before Trump, and easier not to see unless you were looking for it.

But that’s why I think Trump is so much more dangerous than DeSantis, or any other wannabe strongman autocrat). Trump’s already tapped into all that pent-up American hate years ago, and Trump’s completely owned it ever since. As demonstrated countless times already, he controls that hate and can use it to make his followers do or say literally anything.