The fact-free world of the American right wing

Here’s Florida Man Rick Scott’s 11- point plan to Save America ™.

I’m going to translate it from wingnut into English.

(1) Teaching history will be criminalized.

(2) Racism will be eliminated by making it illegal for the government to gather information regarding it.

(3) The 50% decline in both violent crime and property crime rates over the past 30 years represents in out of control crime problem, that requires a fascistic response.

(4) We must build the Donald Trump Wall, named after Donald Trump, for who the wall is going to be named the Donald Trump Wall, because violent immigrants are taking our jerbs and poisoning our children with drugs.

(5) Any regulation of capital is the same thing as socialism (which is bad, I mean why do you think they call it socialism anyway?) and cannot be tolerated in a Free Country ™.

ETA: Commenter CP points out that (5)(a) has been inexplicably omitted:

(5)a: any business that adopts vaccine mandates, or that allows employees to unionize, or that fires people for sexual harassment or racial intimidation, or that chooses not to let racists use its services, will be strictly regulated until such time as these un-American practices are rescinded and their business model has been certified by Tucker Carlson as conforming to the one true way of How America Ought To Be.

. . . Murc elaborates:

The first sentence sounds like its going to launch into a rant about government regulation of capital, as Paul implies in his paraphrasing… only it doesn’t. Instead it makes a weird left turn into “gummint too big, we’ll slash it and drown it!” Now, that’s ALSO a common conservative talking point, but it usually isn’t yoked so directly to their economic message, such as it is. They’re separate rants, related to their ongoing vandalism project but usually distinct. And that swerve is weird, right?

Well, lemme take a look at the preamble to this hit list:

The militant left now controls the entire federal government, the news media, academia, Hollywood, and most corporate boardrooms

There’s been a sudden and quite rapid pivot away from unchecked support for unregulated capital to do as it pleases in the conservative movement. They don’t actually want that anymore.

And that’s alarming. Old-school conservatives had little to recommend them, but they really DID believe in the primacy of capital. That’s pretty bad… but you know what’s worse? Believing in the primacy of your reactionary culture wars, and demanding that the power of capital submit itself to carrying that forward, and if it doesn’t, it will be MADE to do that.

That’s one of the stark ideological dividing lines between conservatism and fascism, and its really starting to flower now. The guys who were using the culture war as a stalking horse (and those people did exist and they’re still powerful in the Republican Party; you’ll note that the only real “successful” part of the Trump Administration was the unchecked capitalism) are aging out, being replaced, or coming to Jesus.

(6) Government bureaucrats should be term-limited because Government is Inefficient and people should be free to Do Their Own Research.

(7) Democrats are trying to rig elections, which is why they’ve only won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. They must be stopped at all costs.

(8) God likes the Nuclear Family so much that He put it in the Constitution.

(9) Men are men, women are women, and the Earth is round. [The poor flat earthers can’t get any respect in even this unhinged rant; why is Rick Scott against Teaching the Controversy?!?]. Men pretending to be women are destroying the most sacred of all American institutions, aka Sports.

(10) Allahu Akbar!

(11) We are Americans, not globalists. We are rooted to the soil by our blood, although we are relentlessly mocked by cosmopolitan elites who wander the face of the Earth, like Satan in the Book of Job, or Soros in the Book of Dreams (oops, wrong Steve Miller).

OK that’s enough for now.