Important Trump ally the Heritage Foundation: "Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex"

Small government and "freedom" and an almost quasi-Libertarian theme have been kicked around by Republicans for decades.  Hell, that's DeSantis' mantra here in Florida.  "Keep Florida free."  Free from COVID restrictions, free from mandatory vaccinations, free from governmental interference in the school system.  The latter is interpreted as giving parents' groups the right to ban books.  What about reproductive freedom and gender freedom?  What about the voting freedoms that we've had?

Remember when the seat belt laws were passed?   The Ron Desantis crowd was furious that liberals took away their freedom to fly through the windshield.      But they dont a woman to have the freedom to end the pregnancy of a severly birth defected baby.

None of these flag-wavers acknowledge that freedom of religion means freedom from religion. As in: I don't have to follow the rules and tenets of your cult (Christianity is the world's largest). They also don't acknowledge that personal freedom means that I can do whatever I want, as long as no one else is harmed, even if it makes you feel icky. Conservatism is supposed to be in alignment with those ideas. It's been twisted to mean, we're in a Handmaid's Tale theocracy, and the dictates of the Christian God supersede all that silly freedom nonsense.

Likewise, the supposed plurality, equality, and egalitarianism championed by "true" conservatives have been shown to be conditional, as in, "We were only referring to white people." And y'know what? They're right! The Constitution was written to explicitly endorse slavery and state that black people were less human than white people. It's only much later that them liberals came along with that foolish civil rights stuff.

And that's why Amerika is so much different than America.