Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Who Ron DeSantis Is


A comedian active on Twitter whose tongue is in his cheek:

With DeSantis’s appointment of loyalists to a board overseeing Disney, mirroring how he is deconstructing FL education to suit his white supremacist world views, how long until there’s a ‘whites only’ day at Disney World? Ron is a racist.

As far as we know, DeSantis' views do not constitute classic "racism," though he may be a white supremacist and surely is trying to increase racial antagonism. However, even that objective is probably not among the governor's one or two major objectives.  CNN reports

Students and faculty at the New College of Florida are planning to demonstrate during a board of trustees meeting Tuesday after Gov. Ron DeSantis launched a conservative takeover of the small public liberal arts college.

In January, DeSantis replaced six of the 13 members on the college’s board of trustees with conservative allies, including Christopher Rufo, who has fueled the fight against critical race theory. The new board forced out the college’s president and appointed DeSantis ally Richard Corcoran as interim president. Corcoran will earn a base salary of $699,000.

DeSantis’ office insists that the New College of Florida in Sarasota has seen declining enrollment and focuses too heavily on diversity and inclusion, critical race theory and gender ideology.

But the ideology goes well beyond race and gender for Rufo, about whom Salon last April explained 

Earlier this week, the man who's been widely credited with single-handedly willing the "critical race theory" panic into existence (even if the truth is a bit more complex), laid out a new set of marching orders for the right: Defund public universities, discard academic freedom, remove credentialing requirements for K-12 teachers and generally foster so much anger against public schools that it drives a nationwide popular movement to privatize education.

For Ron DeSantis, governor of "where woke goes to die," the attacks on school libraries, gay individuals, and racial minorities are largely a diversion, intended to rouse the passion of the GOP primary voters he will be courting in a presidential race. In the phrase a half century old, this is where it's at: 


The President should not be able to control every federal government "bureaucrat," as the Florida governor contemptuously calls them. If they can be fired at will, unions would be undermined- much to the delight of the donor class- and a President DeSantis would amass far more power than a President currently has. Government- except for employees spared DeSantis' scalpel- would be eviscerated. As government shrinks, he'd be able to exercise ever more control.

Above all, this guy wants to amass power. If liberals peer at the shiny object of race- he's a racist!- they will not understand what Ron DeSantis really is after. 

 



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