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The Koch brothers bough a monkeys paw by investing small in state legislatures in the 70s in an attempt to gerrymander districts into business-friendly right-wing majorities. The resulting tiny turnout required to win party primaries led to the elevation/empowerment of a chaotic fringe.

GOP has spent over two decades "creating our own reality", as Rove put it. It's largely worked for them due to their media dominance (radio/cable), the national media's fecklessness, and the sclerotic and inept Dem leadership. But every so often actual reality intrudes...but for how long...

The "good times create soft men" meme but they don't realize they're the soft men

"These NPCs must have advanced ai or something!"

The problem is that "immunity from consequence" doesn't apply to other countries or physical reality. If you're immune to consequences, you don't need to model others - you can do what you want and be what you want and it doesn't harm you. Sooner or later, that fails - sooner would have been better.

The scary thing is that it's still working insofar as the real consequences haven't yet hit. But it's very much the moment of Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff and continuing to make running movements, not realizing he's not on the ground anymore. The drop is going to be very sudden.

MAGA. Mad American Gulf Adventure.

Excellent theory. How we got here. MAGA types walking through life inside a reality distortion field.

I vividly remember an interview in the Times or Post in Jan 2021 about Trump’s efforts to dispute the election results. An R was quoted (anonymously): ‘what’s the harm? He will lose in court and then go away.’ That attitude has been the major problem, and here we are.

Tired: America must cope with a rising China by grinding down its workers even further. Wired: America must cope with a rising China by applying the ancient tradition of miezu to its more dysfunctional elites.

It’s hard not to see this through a racial lens.

Great description!

where did they all come from how did they get this way

“Watching the days go by…”

If people could be processed food.

Rich bullies... That's it..

this genuinely explains their entire administration tbh

I concur.

sociopaths gonna sociopath

Screaming SNOWFLAKE!! At the generations that followed was *always* a projection.

The MAGAs in my South Dakota hometown own the car dealerships, the light industrial plants, and the 1,000-acre "family farms".

All the data shows that MAGA voters tend to be better off on average than Democrat voters.

No, they own the local car dealership or something. Small-business types — the petty bourgeois

At least a good portion of the working class Latinx population appears to see the writing on the wall.

A lot of MAGA voters are business owners or top sales & admin types with multiple homes. Poor people weren’t doing Trump boat parades and flying out to J6 on private jets.

No they're not. They're mostly fairly well-off.

Yet somehow they’re still “oppressed for their views.”