I remember once talking to a really conservative guy in Anchorage when I was a kid, and he told me America is the freest country on earth. I, being the kind of kid who asked weird questions, asked him "Why, what makes it so free?" And he said "America has the most freedom."

That idea, that the average conservative, hell the average person, has no real metric for what they'd consider freedom, that whatever America does is what freedom is and therefore America is, tautologically, the freest country on earth, has been on my mind a lot lately.

That dude, incidentally, was a big believer in personal freedom, in the right to privacy and free speech, or at least he said he was.

He had a Bush/Cheyney sign on his lawn in 2004, 3 years after the PATRIOT Act was passed. Not sure if that's relevant.

This answer isn't wrong (jingoism and xenophobia are big parts of the spicy stew that is modern American conservatism) but I dunno if I'm satisfied with that as my final answer. It's part of the answer, but it's not ALL of it. https://twitter.com/the_frishman/status/1318587554074066945?s=20

I still wanna figure out why some people in the 2000s thought that being asked to not drive huge fucking cars was a bigger infringement on their freedom than the massive expansion of the surveillance state. Hell, I wanna figure out why some people STILL think that.

I dunno if I'm ever gonna get a clean answer, but I wanna go seeking an answer.

And yeah, I know I misspelled Cheney, but people are already interacting with this thread so I'm just kinda stuck with it.