It is interesting that your mind lumped those five together. I am from the US. But, I primarily live in Thailand. Yes, Thailand is technically a dictatorship however it has a parliamentary democracy with the occasional military coup every decade or so. The King isn't that involved with the parliament and all coups are blessed by the King.
What Trump, Epstein, Bannon, Putin, Musk do is a learned skill that has to be practiced. "Moments after they arrived, she alleges, Trump greeted Williams, pulled her toward him and started groping her. She said he put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and her buttocks. She said she froze because she was “deeply confused” about what was happening. At the same time, she said she believed she saw the two men smiling at each other. After the alleged incident, Williams said that she and Epstein left Trump Tower, and that she began to feel Epstein growing angry at her. “Jeffrey and I left and he didn’t look at me or speak to me and I felt this seething rage around me, and when we got down to the sidewalk, he looked at me and just berated me, and said: ‘Why did you let him do that?’” she said on the Zoom call (to journalist, the incident was 1993). “He made me feel so disgusting and I remember being so utterly confused,” she said. She described how the alleged incident seemed to her to be part of a “twisted game”. How do you get to Carnagie hall? PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE.
You’ve got a growing authoritarian-libertarian paradox where a faction of self-identified libertarians now accept power as long as it’s wielded by "their guy." That’s a major shift from the Cold War-era libertarianism that distrusted all forms of state power.
American here. Yes there is a major bloc in the right wing that is very much actively trying to fuse religion into our government. But what has actually propelled religion into our government, mostly by way of the courts, is the cult of personality that is Donald Trump. Very much as they said of Ceasar, Trump is every republican woman’s husband and every republican man’s wife. I get the republicans on this forum are going to be offended by that statement because they think it’s a sexualized and homosexual statement but it’s more about them believing he can cater to all of their needs. We are not like Iran. The religious element is powerful but it is not prevailing. What is prevailing is a sort of view that is very much in the stream of European legend and mythology of this sort arch male stereotype but without any kindness. It’s odd but think of crusades but the knights Templar are more into attacking vulnerable people in their own country.