Gaetz’s is indeed a very Trumpian, old-time male brand, which the right and the @GOP have bet everything on preserving. Just look at the men they revere: Clarence Thomas, Kavanaugh, Judge Roy Moore, Trump... and how hard they fight “wokeness,” i.e. to them: “weakened” manliness. https://twitter.com/CaslerNoel/status/1378356856607936518
It’s this sense that manliness needs to be damn near predatory, or openly so to be real. And there is this sense of lament on the right that “woke” culture and inclusiveness have destroyed old school social norms. That’s part of the nostalgia for Trump and his anti-woke style.
And frankly it’s why some conservative Christians flock to Trump and his ilk, even though they behave in decisively un-Christlike ways. People who are hardcore nostalgic for the old norms on race and gender don’t care how offensive those norms are to people in the “new normal.”
They just want those old norms back, or at least to have them still be respectable in the public square. And when people cry out that the old norms are racist, sexist and outdated, many on the right just roll their eyes and brush that off as “politically correct wokeness.”
So they cling even harder to anyone willing to spit in the eyes of that restrictive wokeness. And here’s the thing: there’s a lot of money to be made in doing the spitting; you can sell a lot of substack subscriptions and get a lot of ratings and clicks by doing the spitting.
The grift on the nostalgics is real... the marks just don’t realize they are marks...
UPDATE: Rush Limbaugh was perhaps the most effective peddler of this toxic conservatism, other than Trump himself. Shocking (not) that his was one of the voices used to advance the grift. https://twitter.com/frankluntz/status/1378419307089031168
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