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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.

The 8-Bit Guy is a youtuber I follow, he makes videos on retrocomputing. He got semi-cancelled a few years ago because he's a Texan gun guy who used to have an airsoft channel and once open-carried a rifle at a shopping mall (which is legal in Texas). But he's also a big EV guy, and he did a whole series of videos about adding a solar system to his house as an emergency backup, after the Texas grid blackout a few years ago caused his heating to die, a pipe to burst, and his house flooded.

He said he didn't like the "sell your electricity back to the grid" solar deployment mechanism, because that requires you to be on the grid and doesn't have the opportunity to run independently -- if the grid goes down, so does your solar, to avoid backfeeding in an outage. But apparently you can set up off-grid electricity as a backup if you install a specialized switch in your breaker that forces the grid connection off when your solar is on.

I guess it's like you said; libertarians and tech people are pro-renewables, but also pro-nuclear, and there's not much of a place in the Republican coalition for anything but fossil fuels.