There are genuine discontinuities between Trump and the pre-Trump Republican Party, but at the same time, Musk & co. are enacting the braindead Rush Limbaugh, dorm-room libertarian fantasy that the right has been drilling into its supporters for DECADES. - ThreadSky

adamkotsko.bsky.social • 1 day ago

There are genuine discontinuities between Trump and the pre-Trump Republican Party, but at the same time, Musk & co. are enacting the braindead Rush Limbaugh, dorm-room libertarian fantasy that the right has been drilling into its supporters for DECADES.

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adamkotsko.bsky.social•1 day ago

No one should subject themselves to this, but I'd be willing to bet that you could find a Rush Limbaugh transcript that would EXACTLY capture what DOGE is doing.

adamkotsko.bsky.social•1 day ago

The big discontinuity that the Trump era (and the Tea Party before it) introduces is that there is no gap between the propaganda for the rubes and the "real stuff" that the insiders know and do. The insiders are now basically Fox News drones AT BEST. There's no reality principle.

decmusicology.bsky.social•1 day ago

This is exactly it. There used to be the stuff that country club Republicans would say in public, only to retreat to the mahogany-paneled bar and chortle over their flyover country constituents while clinking scotch glasses

decmusicology.bsky.social•1 day ago

They now believe that stuff in earnest, and they've got a techbro so deep in a K-hole, so convinced of his own messianic power, that they can test out the theories directly, bypassing entirely all of the annoying guardrails that used to prevent a Grover Norquist from fully realizing his project

adamkotsko.bsky.social•1 day ago

By my estimate, the last time a Republican genuinely responded to reality was at the beginning of the pandemic when Mitt Romney did the math and his little brain realized: "Huh, if nobody can go work, everyone will starve -- we should give them money or something."

rhetoricpj.bsky.social•1 day ago

no one can b/c most of the limbaugh transcripts were destroyed

zacharybraiterman.bsky.social•1 day ago

No surprise but still shocking: shit cooks on the stove for decades, and then at dinner time it gets slopped on the plate

librariansteve.bsky.social•1 day ago

Goes even further back: to Grover Norquist: "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub"

scottstimer.bsky.social•1 day ago

I saw all of this emerging in the California Young Republicans in the early-90s and I remember a convention where I had this kind of light-bulb moment: omg these people are actually insane - Bush II, Iraq and GFC killed off the competent, sane GOP elite - and here we are

tomakeitfall.bsky.social•1 day ago

This is why I'm 🙄at the pubs coming out with their "Trump voter is regretting his vote" stories bc from what I've seen, the TrumpMusk playbook has been exactly what all these people have wanted. If you handed my dad a notebook and told him to draft a Month1 policy, it would look mostly like this.

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