Hmmm… I think that’s the opposite, actually. Maybe not those specific organizations, but I think that the extremist version of Christianity that animates the Heritage foundation influenced religious extremism abroad. After all, the Taliban was a byproduct of American imperialism, ultimately speaking…
I was trying to come with a clever “pull the camera back and the Taliban is cheating off of…” who? John Birch Society? KKK? Then real life interfered before i could complete the thought.
Hmmmm closer to the KKK, I’d argue… but there is a general argument to be made about how these regressive movements are in part a response to the failures of modernity. People who’ve studied the roots of Islamism (groups like the Egyptian brotherhood, for example). They took at least some influence from scholars in the region studying western imperialism’s impacts on the mid-east, specifically concepts like “westoxification”… Their solution was a return to traditional Islam (which, much like their western counterparts doesn’t really exist).
and we’re still seeing this influence in other countries too:
Yeah, and a lot of these cultures have historically been quite progressive about LGBTQ issues. I have no knowledge of Uganda, of course, but it has certainly been true in many places until Christianity of a certain sort came to the fore.
A kind of writer’s block. Reality and nasty details can do that. Try absinthe. Did wonders for 19th c. artists into surrealism and symbolism. 
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan,
a stately pleasure dome decre— hang on, there’s someone at the door.
Would that someone at the door be the editor of a little parish broadsheet passing on his way from Porlock just dropping in on a famous poet for an impromptu interview?
“Sam, love, can you get the door? That’ll be Uber Eats. I hope they didn’t forget the honeydew this time.”
