Two dudes who have advanced their careers, in recent years, by saying and doing things to rile people up as they curate their cult of personality points are teaming up to make an announcement that everyone already had on their 2023 bingo card.

You’ve got Elon Musk in one corner — a man who will say just about anything to elevate his brand as the free speech Messiah. And then you’ve got Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the other — Trump’s long-anticipated 2024 rival who has spent the last year using his Republican-dominated state legislature to pass outrageous, so-called “anti-woke” legislation packaged to appeal to the furthest-right MAGA voters and cushion his 2024 bid.

As he stood before one of the friendliest crowds imaginable this weekend, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was still hesitant to spend much time touting the passage of a strict six-week abortion ban in Florida, a law that he only briefly described as “a landmark piece of legislation for this state.”

DeSantis made a big show of signing his state’s 15-week ban into law last year. He televised the bill’s signing and dragged in a bunch of Republican state lawmakers, children holding pro-life signs and a packed crowd to applaud his signature. But when he signed his six-week ban into law in April, he did it privately. His office marked the occasion by putting out a press release in the middle of the night. When he gave a speech at Liberty University the next day, he didn’t even bring it up.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) is a rape survivor who has spoken out about her party’s egregious and restrictive stances on abortion before, specifically when red states pass legislation banning abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest.

As it becomes increasingly clear that extreme Republicans positioning on abortion is, in actuality, helping Democrats win elections, Mace is begging her party to figure out how to position itself in a way that looks, at the very least, like cosplaying as compassionate toward women. Make no mistake, Mace is supportive of some restrictions on the procedure, but she tends to not get specific — like the rest of her party — beyond cautioning her colleagues away from “extremes.”

Whether or not Rep. George Santos (R-NY), with his 13-count indictment, should stay in Congress is not a matter Republicans are going to have to weigh in on — for now.

At least, that’s what the billionaire is claiming.

Just shortly after Tucker Carlson announced in a video lauding Elon Musk’s social media platform as the only safe space left for Truth Tellers like himself that he’d be taking his “show” to Twitter, the billionaire set the record straight.

Musk — who’s been doing favors for white nationalists and giving far-right extremist rhetoric an elevated platform since his Twitter takeover — tweeted to clarify that there’s no deal with Tucker and also to maintain that he, the founding father of free speech, is not playing favorites.

Tucker Carlson is scooping up his massive viewership and taking his show to Elon Musk’s janky, zombified Twitter.

Set against the backdrop of what appears to be the inside of a rustic and masculine cabin in the wood, Carlson made the announcement with a familiar scowl and posted the video to his Twitter account Tuesday afternoon. He said a bunch of his usual stuff about the media being misleading and cable news being propaganda, while making some unsubtle digs at Fox, like:

“The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it,” he said.

Take the fact that the Republican Party doesn’t have a policy platform beyond red-meat one-sided culture wars and pair it with the fact that Republicans have raised defunding PBS every few years for the last three decades or so and it becomes perhaps inevitable that conservative politicians would try to get “Clifford The Big Red Dog” canceled.

The jury in the civil trial in which author E. Jean Carroll is accusing Donald Trump of rape was finally shown video of Trump’s taped deposition Thursday where he mixes up a photo of Carroll with one of his ex-wives, Marla Maples.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is crying, and pressing charges, over spilled milk.

Or wine, in this case.

We’ve been covering the Florida state legislature from this perspective for some time now, as the degree to which Florida Republicans are beholden to DeSantis’ political objectives became increasingly clear. Each and every one of bills introduced in the state legislature attacking “wokeness,” diversity initiatives in schools, voting rights and the LGBT community in the past year have appeared hand-made to capture the attention of the furthest-right members of the MAGA base on a national level as DeSantis weighs a 2024 bid.

As DeSantis gears up to finally announce he’s running at the end of his state’s legislative session this month, his Republican friends in the state house gave him one final treat: the legislature passed several sweeping new restrictions on voting rights, and a change to election law that allows DeSantis to run for president and remain governor.