Lots of people are having fun with Rush Limbaugh’s insistence that warnings about Irma were a liberal plot, part of the great conspiracy to scare people about climate change — plus a sales gimmick for batteries and bottled water. (He evacuated his Palm Beach mansion soon afterwards.)
But you’re missing the point if you think this is about Rush Limbaugh. Crazy conspiracy theorizing about climate change isn’t an aberration on the right, it’s the norm. Almost every senior figure in energy and environmental policy within the Trump administration is a climate change denier, with most of them having expressed the view that the science is a hoax. And in this case Trump isn’t bypassing the GOP establishment: these people are the party’s establishment.
And it’s not just climate change: the habit of accusing everyone who says or does something you don’t like of sinister motives is pervasive on the right. Consider George Will, who to his credit is now a firm anti-Trumper; but let’s not forget his declaration that progressives don’t like trains because they’re effective transportation. No,
the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
Or consider Paul Ryan and John Taylor, attacking the Fed’s quantitative easing policy, and asserting that it wasn’t about boosting a weak economy. No, it was all about helping Obama:
This looks an awful lot like an attempt to bail out fiscal policy, and such attempts call the Fed’s independence into question.
(This was back when Republicans pretended to care about deficits.)
Rush Limbaugh makes a good punching bag, both because of his general grotesqueness, and because his personal flight from Florida provides a perfect punch line. But the paranoid style in policy debates is pretty much universal on the modern right.