> They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society. Those concerns aren't going to evaporate just because everyone is fed and housed. If anything if they're more economically secure they'd be able to spend even more time on culture war issues.

The mistake is assuming that these issues rise into public debate entirely through grassroots, when really its more of a consequence of the incentive structures around politics in the US. The Democratic party doesn't want to upset their donors, but they need some issue to campaign on, rally support etc. And equal rights and such is all well and good, has been successful in the past, and played well with the base. The Republican party, also doesn't want to upset their donors, and opposing the Democrats on equal rights is easy to sell to their base.

As long as the game is about moving the ball of cultural/rights issues around, the wealthy win.

I suspect the person you are responding to is suggesting that these culture war issues are merely meant to distract from the real problem, which is wealth inequality. Many of the people worried about 'moral fabric' are fine with divorce and sexual assault (and will vote for politicians with these compromised moral values) but are also concerned about trans athletes who by most metrics comprise less that .01% of all athletes.

The majority of conservatives believe the democrats are wasting trillions of dollars on wars, inflating debt to give trillions to their corporate and banker friends, spending billions on foreign aid, "woke" education, and fraudulent welfare. This majority gets lumped together with the anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant people because they believe that a lot of this wasteful spending is going towards these communities and their needs. If you removed their concerns about this spending, the remaining people who are still against LGBTQ/immigrant/welfare policies would be a small fringe group. The vast majority of conservatives do not intrinsically hate the LGBTQ/immigrant/welfare community, it's only to the extent that the former believes the latter is taking resources from them. All of this hatred stems from fear, the fear that you won't have food, shelter, or healthcare causes people to lash out at others that they perceive are causing these deficiencies.

The spin job that the elite class does is to argue that the bankers and CEOs are actually creating jobs and wealth, and the fault rests with those low-life poors/immigrants/socialists that are consuming more than they've earned. At its core, this is all about wealth and resource disparity.

The idea is more that there wouldn't be as much fertile ground to sow fears about the "moral fabric of society" if everyone felt economically/socially secure in the first place. And that the nexus of "culture war" issues is sold as a package deal, a singular unified explanation for people's existing, vague economic anxieties (in an unabashedly conspiracy theory way).

> They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society.

It's weird how they didn't seem to give one single shit about trans people until politicians and conservative media needed new boogeymen in 2015 after SCOTUS threw us a bone and couldn't use gay marriage/gay people as effective scapegoats any more.

It's almost if they where whipped up into yet another moral panic by people who have the platform and vested interest to distract them so they can be even more efficiently robbed blind economically, politically and socially.

> I do not understand how Musk and Trump built this image that they're men of the people.

They say the quiet part out loud and make enemies out of the people their followers already don't like.

One of them had a media machine that painted them as Literally Tony Stark™ for two decades, with literal Iron Man cameos, and the other promises to hurt people with blue hair a lot.