Ron DeSantis’s MasterClass on Autocracy
The governor’s “anti-woke” campaign in Florida just keeps getting less enlightened. But, yeah, that’s the point.
With his state’s recently instituted educational mandate that the plays of Shakespeare must not be read in full but only in redacted excerpts — yet more classified documents on the loose in Florida — Governor Ron DeSantis has once again grabbed headlines for being, well, a total putz.
Too bad DeSantis is obviously oblivious about Shakespeare; if he had read more of the plays (in full) and had been more studious in general, he might have said something memorable in the first Republican debate.
And he wouldn’t be banning books and getting all medieval on us with his palpable disgust with the Enlightenment. I seldom go this far, but no unexpurgated Shakespeare?
Firk you.
Ron, if I may further paraphrase the Bard of Avon: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day/when the water temperature on your coast is 100 degrees?/Thou art more unpleasant and more lacking charm.
With his nearly frenzied attacks on the “woke” — people understanding aspects of our history and culture they might not be proud of or happy with — DeSantis is scaring off voters as fast as members of the Elasmobranchii subclass of cartilaginous fish scare tourists out of the water and back onto Florida’s beaches.
It wasn’t Shakespeare but Elizabeth Barrett Browning who wrote, in her Sonnet 43, “How do I love thee?/Let me count the ways.” No doubt, DeSantis’s board of education will find something about Browning to object to (she campaigned against slavery, worked to institute child labor laws, and was, well, a woman), so let’s use that conceit for our little review of Florida’s governor.
Ron DeSantis, how do I find thee despicable? Let me count only a few of the ways: in your dumbing down of education and public health for political gain, your odd notions of what it means to be a man, and your unholy Christian virtue signaling.
Beyond all the banning of American history and literature, there’s the state’s educational mandate that middle schoolers now be taught that some people benefited from being enslaved.
“How is it anyone could suggest that, in the midst of these atrocities, there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Vice President Kamala Harris asked after the Florida Board of Education set those “anti-woke” rules in late July, at the direction of DeSantis, that mandate teachers inform students that people in bondage might have come out better off as a result of their enslavement.
Ron believes that some picked up a skill or two — he mentions blacksmithing — while creating untold wealth for the nation, especially for the plantation owners of the South. But as others have pointed out, Africans had skills in many fields of endeavor, including blacksmithing, long before they were enslaved by white Europeans.
When Harris accurately said that Florida is trying to gaslight the country with its new Black history curriculum, DeSantis dismissed the legitimate concerns of our first female vice president, saying, she is “chirping.”
Misogyny much, Mr. Governor? (Do I even need to mention the white supremacy thing?)
Florida’s new rules force teachers to instruct students that slavery was pretty much the ultimate internship. Call it Florida’s MasterClass. Literally.
Speaking of instruction and training, DeSantis’s continuous attacks on education (which include pushing videos from conservative PragerU) have led to increased worries that Florida is facing a “brain drain,” as teachers and professors leave a state that is severely curtailing their ability to teach.
And DeSantis’s ongoing anti-LGBTQ battle with Disney has made him, and by extension Florida, a laughingstock across the more civilized parts of the globe.
Republicans’ attacks on public education have always been attacks on the future of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to Richard Price, wrote, “[W]herever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” A well-informed public is a prerequisite of democracy. The Republican plan, being tested in Florida and elsewhere in Christian schools, is to create a truly dumbed-down populace, one that will be easily led and manipulated. They want the masses to be educated for obedience and not to compete with private school kids for elite universities. Call it what it is: even more affirmative action for the wealthy.
And then there is what we might call DeSantis-fied public health. As the country experiences an uptick in COVID cases and hospitalizations, not to mention growing concerns about the effects of long COVID, we should remind readers of the New York Times analysis that found the people of Florida were doing much better with the pandemic before DeSantis decided to play politics with a deadly airborne disease and downplay the need for vaccinations. His move for personal political gain caused hospitalizations and deaths from COVID to soar in Florida.
And he isn’t relenting on playing a health expert or ignoring reality. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte noted in her take on the first Republican debate, “DeSantis got some of his biggest cheers threatening to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, even though the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases retired last year.”
Along with his anti-human rights campaign, “Florida: Where Woke Goes to Die,” DeSantis puts his discredited pandemic response at the center of his candidacy for president in 2024. But, I suppose, he sure “owned those libs,” which is all that matters.
Always eager to gaslight the public, DeSantis denies the very fact of the Jan. 6 insurrection in the face of what we all witnessed in real-time and what the police experienced for hours in horrific medieval-style (there it is again) hand-to-hand combat that Trump’s “will be wild” message brought to Washington, DC, that he further enflamed, and then did nothing for hours to stop because he was enjoying the show.
The DeSantis campaign is shedding staff as fast as Florida is shedding its dignity.
A Yale University and Harvard Law graduate who decries liberal “elites,” DeSantis claims he’s looking out for the little guys.
Speaking of looking out for the “guys,” like quite a number of other Republican men, DeSantis is hyper-focused on being “manly” and often appears uncomfortable with other people and, well, even in his own skin. His campaign put out a truly unsettling anti-LGBTQ ad (apparently aimed at lonely, young white nationalists) that managed (as so often happens) to be both homophobic and homoerotic. (The DeSantis War Room Twitter account wussed out at the criticism and took down the video. But you can see it, with a lively analysis, here.)
With funds running short, the DeSantis campaign is shedding staff as fast as Florida is shedding its dignity. Donor money is drying up because of DeSantis’ MAGA-like behavior, including using violent rhetoric, saying he would start “slitting throats” instead of just cutting government jobs.
DeSantis apparently doesn’t much like to talk about his Catholic faith, but he has claimed to be handpicked by God and has regularly twisted Scripture to court evangelical voters and dehumanize Democrats, saying such things as “put on that full armor of God to stand firm against the Left.”
Which is a perfect time to return to Shakespeare, specifically “The Merchant of Venice”:
“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”
Oh, Ron. Maybe when this is all over, you can do a stint as a walkabout Goofy at Walt Disney World Resort, just for an afternoon, to make partial amends to all the American citizens you’ve been hating on as a public official — and thereby putting in harm’s way. It’s difficult to imagine a reputation recovering from all the vitriol against people being who they essentially are and those violent fantasies about slitting the throats of professional and deeply serious, patriotic government workers.
Really, what country are we living in now?
But you’ll have to start somewhere, after that charmless, vapid debate performance (not that anyone else did much better). It would be the appropriate humble Christian, and especially American, thing to do.
The question is, Are you capable of being either?
