Clown Car: 6/1/23

This week, Inez and I start by talking about a recent article arguing that the definition of “conservatism” has come to mean loyalty to Trump. We then go on to discuss the entrances of Mike Pence and Chris Christie into the race, and what their roles in the primary might be.

Inez hopes that Trump participates in the debates and thinks that him doing so would be good for democracy. This leads me to ask her what she thinks about the DeSantis strategy of freezing out the press.

Josh Hawley recently wrote a book on masculinity. His effort was critiqued by David French, and this triggered Inez, so we talk about it. I think she has French Derangement Syndrome, and one can have a more sympathetic reading of the sentence that bothers her so much.

During the conversation, I mentioned that there was an Elon Musk tweet where he wrote “Being fixed,” presumably in response to complaints that Twitter was suppressing Matt Walsh’s trans skeptical movie. As it turns out, he was responding to Inez herself. The woman gets results.

My tweet on the FiveThirtyEight article on conservatives and Trump

The article itself

The DeSantis name controversy

Trump’s response

Me on the first postDeSantis announcement poll

Steve Kornacki on Christie’s entrance into the race

David French on Josh Hawley’s masculinity

Inez’s response