Fascism shouldn't be this easy for Ron DeSantis
Fascism shouldn't be this easy for Ron DeSantis
Will anyone call out his latest white nationalist ploy?
Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.
Trigger warning: I’m about to say something that may cause most political journalists and Democratic lawmakers to experience hot flashes of panic. OK, here goes:
Ron DeSantis is a racist and a singular threat to both multicultural democracy and America’s children.
Sure, by virtue of subscribing to this newsletter, you almost certainly agree with the above statement, but it’s proven almost impossible for the media and most lawmakers to express even as he pursues objectively evil policies at an unprecedented pace. There’s an election coming up and it needs protagonists, after all.
In tonight’s newsletter, our Florida education correspondent brings us the latest from the front lines of DeSantis’s war on public education and decency, and we look at just how pathetic the response to it has become. Why are we doing this? Because major national outlets just don’t seem to mind what’s happening.
by Jen Cousins and Jordan Zakarin
The event that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held in Sarasota on Tuesday morning may have been billed as a press conference, but it more closely resembled an extremely hostile invasion.
Decrying education that works to ensure equity and equality for people of all races and gender identities as a kind of “indoctrination,” DeSantis announced a series of new policies that will turn Florida’s public colleges into well-funded hives of bigotry, hostility, and public corruption. The new initiatives include the end of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which DeSantis has regularly assailed as ideologically-driven.
The remodeling of the state’s public college system will be driven by the far-right activists that DeSantis appointed to the board of trustees at the New College of Florida, a liberal arts school renowned for its accepting environment and personalized approach to education.
As we’ve covered here at length, the list of initial new trustees at New College include Christopher Rufo, an avowed white nationalist who has helped to drive the hysteria around Critical Race Theory and transgender students; Matthew Spaulding, a dean from Hillsdale College of Michigan, an ultra-conservative Christian private school; and Eddie Spier, the superintendent of a religious charter school in Sarasota County.
DeSantis’s most recent appointee, Ryan Anderson, is the president of a conservative think-tank and author of a book that was so transphobic that Amazon pulled it from its inventory. That’s no problem for DeSantis, though, because Anderson’s work fits his objective worldview.
What’s clear is that DeSantis considers racism and homophobic libel as objective truths and thus the starting point for all school curriculum, and anything that diverges from those reprehensible beliefs as inappropriately ideological. His commitment to rooting out different worldviews is such that DeSantis is also granting the Board of Trustees at these institutions the power to strip professors of tenure and even fire them.
Should there be some lingering ambiguity about their intentions, Rufo has provided years of explicit declarations of his intent. In 2020, he began urging conservatives to “lay siege to the institutions” of public life, including education systems and corporate boardrooms. It was during this time that he started to insist that Disney had a quiet predatorial agenda and sought to “groom” children into being gay. He makes no secret of his homophobia and disdain for the poor, and he has waged a bottomless war against the idea that the United States, a nation whose founders wrote slavery into the Constitution, was founded on racist principles.
With a majority now in place, Rufo and his fellow racists at New College Florida voted today to terminate the school’s recently appointed president, Patricia Okker, without cause. Earlier in the day, it was announced that the board of trustees would recommend Richard Corcoran, the Republican former Florida education commissioner, to take over as president.
Corcoran ran the Florida Department of Education during the worst of the Covid pandemic, and was responsible for penalizing school districts that defied the DeSantis and issued mask mandates and school closures to mitigate spread of the virus. He also issued a directive to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in grades K-12, which has since morphed into the ban on any lesson that could make a white child feel uncomfortable.
Towards the end of DeSantis’s unhinged rant, he announced that the Florida legislature would be giving $15 million dollars this year to New College in order to recruit new faculty and offer scholarships. The intent of the funding increase is hardly a mystery; Rufo complained about scholarships that are rewarded specifically to people of color, while Speier wrote in his newsletter several nights ago that he wanted to fire all faculty and staff to end “dogmatic wokeness” on campus.
NCF is now all but guaranteed to experience some mix of mass exodus and mass firing, and see a large segment of its students discontinue their enrollment. It will rapidly change from an accepting, progressive and independent environment to an extreme right indoctrination camp where conservative zealots are given a steady platform and paycheck.
On Thursday afternoon, the brave students at New College staged a protest against DeSantis’s new board of trustees and its plan to dismantle the inclusive campus that has become such an essential part of their lives. Some, joined by their outraged parents, spoke out at the board’s meeting as well, forcing Rufo and his fellow bigots to face some consequences for their cruelty.
Perhaps more outrageous than anything pulled by DeSantis and his Klan college board today was the fact that state Rep. Anna Eskamani was the only sitting lawmaker to join the students at the rally; she traveled there with former state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, who spoke out forcefully against DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and narrowly lost reelection in a historically pathetic cycle for Democrats.
Both Orlando-area politicians spoke at the rally and promised to do whatever they could to slow the far-right steamroller that is crushing Florida’s education system, which will be severely limited by the unconscionable lack of fight shown by any other Democrat with even a modicum of power or influence.
Democrats have a desire to avoid the so-called “culture war” battles being waged across Republican states, falling back on tired old fears that should have been obliterated this fall. Once afraid to run on abortion, Democrats surged to new legislative majorities and kept the Senate with reproductive freedom at their forefront of their campaigns. It should not require abundant political courage to stand up to a bully who is torturing children with menstrual monitoring, forcing entire school districts to strip their shelves of library books, and installing abject racists into positions of power.
More importantly, the electoral stakes should be irrelevant either way, because we are watching in real-time as a deeply narcissistic and shameless man turns the nation’s third-most populous into a fascist ethnocolony. Being unwilling to speak out against his treachery helped DeSantis win reelection by 20 points last year, and is only further encouraging and empowering him now.
Most dismaying is how the national media has entirely failed to properly contextualize DeSantis’s reign of terror. Most coverage has been dry and dispassionate, granting legitimacy to laws that would have stuck out as overtly racist during the Jim Crow era. Because DeSantis is almost guaranteed to run for president, his actions, no matter how many people they hurt, are seen through the amoral lens of the election horse race.
Take today’s coverage in the New York Times, which transforms DeSantis's aggressive, state-sponsored campaign of bigotry into a savvy brand-building venture by an edgy politician:
So long as the media is unwilling to allow even the most basic code of morality to inform its work, villainous reprobates like Ron DeSantis will seize the initiative and further poison the lives of millions of people, while riding the attention to further power.
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De Santis is a horror. I hear he’s thin skinned and has a glass jaw? Any truth to this? I’m nervous about his authoritarian monologues littered with “wokeisms.” I don’t know what he’s talking about but he’s using it as a weapon. Words matter, words have meaning. DeSantis behaviors and language is fascist.
I hope emperor desantis throws you in jail first.