Some old lady randomly stopped me outside the store yesterday leading with a hearty “Happy Easter!” Unfortunately, she ignored my reply and went off about how amazing it would be if the Easter Bunny dropped off checks at everyone’s door from Elon Musk.
Still have no idea what to make of that.
I suspect it means she’s a reactionary who has been duped into thinking DOGE is really going to be paying out “dividend checks”.
Yeah, this was my concern and why I bailed on the conversation as quick as I could.
Where is it going to get the money from? They shut down a whole bunch of profitable departments.
… I thought reactionaries were against UBI or people receiving free stuff from the government??
to be honest, Trump and Musk are not ideologically driven, the grift and their personal desires matter more than anything like adherence to principles of free market capitalism or whatever other nonsense.
And I can’t tell you how the mind of a lay reactionary works - they seem capable of rationalizing and accepting contradictions quite easily. It is simultaneously true for them that they view themselves as “anti-authoritarian” and promoting a diminished government, while enthusiastically supporting police violence and pushing to pass laws that outright criminalize sexual orientations or gender identities they don’t like.
So yeah, plenty of hypocrisy dunking to go around, I just don’t know that it makes a difference at this point - contradiction and hypocrisy does not seem to be a problem for reactionaries.
EDIT: shoot, I meant to say - also there are reactionary forms of UBI, see Milton Friedman’s support (usually re-articulated as the “Negative Income Tax”) and Andrew Yang’s support, etc.
