Ron DeSantis – Sheila Kennedy

It Seems There IS A “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”

Remember when Hillary Clinton was widely ridiculed for alluding to the existence of a “vast Right-wing conspiracy”? It turns out she wasn’t wrong. She wasn’t even exaggerating.

And it explains a lot of what’s happening now.

A number of articles over the past couple of years have pointed out that Trump didn’t suddenly turn a once-respectable political party into the MAGA cult with which we’re now dealing. As Maureen Dowd recently wrote in the New York Times, in a column about our corrupt Supreme Court, there has long been “a determined group of religious zealots with a long-term master plan to pack the court with religious zealots.”

“These conservative Catholic and evangelical Christian operators believed they were fighting the biggest moral battle of the modern age, and forced America to debate on their terms,” they wrote. “But despite their public appeals, they did not convince broad swaths of Americans of the righteousness of their cause. Instead, they remained a minority, and leveraged the structures of American democracy in their favor, building a framework strong enough to withstand not only the political system but also a society moving rapidly against them. They took power to remake the nation in their image. And they were far more organized than their opponents or the public ever knew.”

Emerging reporting and research confirm the allegations. Talking Points Memo recently described one such organization–a secret, men-only right-wing society with members in influential positions around the country, intent on recruiting a “Christian government.”

More recently, a study by the American Association of University Professors documented the manufacture of the recent backlash against institutions of higher education. It uncovered a network of Right-wing “think tanks” that has been laying the foundation for those attacks for many years. In a chapter titled “Culture War, Think Tanks, and the Dark Money that Funds Them,” the scholars identified twenty-six national think tanks. Among them were the Center for Renewing America, the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and–of course–the Heritage Foundation.

The report also listed thirty-eight state-Level think tanks, and forty-three organizations it categorized as “Cultural Conservative Think Tanks (including the Claremont Institute, a think tank that figured prominently in efforts to overturn the 2020 election).

Given the purpose of the study, the report focused on eleven of the think tanks that have participated in the culture war by attacking educational institutions.

Many of these think tanks work closely with one another, often sharing personnel and board members, amplifying each other’s work, pushing the same messaging, and supporting shared political objectives. As demonstrated in Appendix 2, this level of coordination is unsurprising given that these think tanks also receive money from the same libertarian and conservative megadonors. Furthermore, as described in the second section, seven of the eleven think tanks are members of the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella organization that networks national and state-level libertarian think tanks.

Appendix 2 identifies the wealthy individuals funding these organizations.

The report analyzes a number of “model” bills that aim to impose a conservative Christian worldview on public education and promote election denial, and it describes several of the most extreme–and effective–organizations. One of those is the Manhattan Institute, which “houses Christopher Rufo, Ron DeSantis’ favored “educator.”

Rufo–who is largely credited with weaponizing the term “critical race theory”

started his anti-CRT campaign in a City Journal column in July 2020 where he wrote about diversity training offered by Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights. Since then, Rufo has published over one hundred columns in City Journal, many focused on critical race theory, DEI efforts in schools, woke-ness, so-called gender ideology, and “left-wing radicals” in K-12 and higher education. He claims that “critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions.

DeSantis appointed Rufo to the Board of Trustees at the New College of Florida, Rufo where he helped end the college’s gender studies program (which he deemed “ideological activism”).

After his appointment to the board, Rufo tweeted: “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within. Under the leadership of Gov. DeSantis, our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured, and reformed.”

The report–with copious citations–is 148 pages long, and for those with the patience to read it all, revelatory.

The White Christian Nationalists who emerged from the shadows to support Donald Trump have been working for a very long time to reassert what they believe to be the proper world order: a society dominated by White Christian men, in which Blacks, women, non-Christians and LGBTQ+ citizens are kept in their deservedly “inferior” places.

They are indeed a “vast Right-wing conspiracy.”

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Florida Man And Other Strange Political Cases

The question for our age may just be: What is WRONG with these people? What is it about science, tolerance, and ordinary common sense that sets them off?

What has set me off today is a Paul Krugman column about “Florida man” Ron DeSantis’ most recent departure from rationality. As Krugman explains:

It’s possible to grow meat in a lab — to cultivate animal cells without an animal and turn them into something people can eat. However, that process is difficult and expensive. And at the moment, lab-grown meat isn’t commercially available and probably won’t be for a long time, if ever.

Still, if and when lab-grown meat, also sometimes referred to as cultured meat, makes it onto the market at less than outrageous prices, a significant number of people will probably buy it. Some will do so on ethical grounds, preferring not to have animals killed to grace their dinner plates. Others will do so in the belief that growing meat in labs does less damage to the environment than devoting acres and acres to animal grazing. And it’s at least possible that lab-grown meat will eventually be cheaper than meat from animals.

And if some people choose to consume lab-grown meat, why not? It’s a free country, right?

Evidently Florida isn’t part of that free country.

DeSantis has now signed a bill that bans the production or sale of lab-grown meat in Florida. Evidently, other Red states are considering similar legislation. Evidently also, the fact that a a lab-grown meat industry doesn’t yet exist is irrelevant. As Krugman notes, Florida’s law is a “perfect illustration of how crony capitalism, culture war, conspiracy theorizing and rejection of science have been merged — ground together, you might say — in a way that largely defines American conservatism today.”

I am so old I remember when Republicans and conservatives championed limited government. A government that can tell you what you can and cannot eat–that can tell private enterprises what they can and cannot produce or sell– is pretty much the antithesis of limited. Today, when Republican candidates talk about “freedom,” they rather clearly mean “freedom to live a life in accordance with what we decree is proper.” Today’s GOP wants to define and constrain your life choices from reproduction to food consumption.

Krugman tells us that, ridiculous as it sounds, meat consumption has been caught up in the culture wars.

You saw this coming years ago if you were following the most trenchant source of social observation in our times: episodes of “The Simpsons.” Way back in 1995, Lisa Simpson, having decided to become a vegetarian, was forced to sit through a classroom video titled “Meat and You: Partners in Freedom.”

It seems that eating– or claiming to eat– lots of meat “has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler.”

Krugman attributes MAGA’s meat obsession to acceptance of various conspiracy theories, climate denialism, and the growing belief of GOP hardliners that “politics is a form of live-action role play.” We the People aren’t a polity; we’re an audience.

I have another theory. We live in the age of insanity. And it isn’t only MAGA, although that movement is surely the poster child for lunacy. Here’s a recent story from The Independent. The headline says it all: “RFK Jr says a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.”

Anti-vaccine activist turned independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has revealed that a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.

According to The New York Times, Mr Kennedy made the bizarre admission during a deposition held as part of his 2012 divorce proceeding.

That worm explains a lot. At a minimum, this admission sheds some additional light on the recent endorsement of President Biden by the remainder of the Kennedy family.

Americans today are being subjected to performative politics in which a cast of wacko characters whose antics–however entertaining–are utterly divorced from the actual work of governing. Florida Man DeSantis pontificates about the dangers of “wokism” (which he evidently defines as anything that offends him); RFK spouts anti-science, anti-vaccine lunacies; Trump claims victimhood/persecution whenever things don’t go his way; Marjorie Taylor Green sees Jewish Space Lasers.

If this was a sit-com, it would be way too over-the-top.

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Worse Than Trump

Ron Desantis (Taliban: Florida) has announced his campaign for President in a widely-mocked, glitch-filled Twitter appearance, so it may be time to re-read a February New Republic essay “A DeSantis Presidency Could Be Even Worse Than Trump.”

The sub-head is brutal: “Donald Trump was and is a lazy, ignorant narcissist. The Florida governor is a smart, motivated, very right-wing Catholic who wants to remake America as he imagines God wants it to be.”

The article preceded DeSantis’ precipitous plunge in the polls, and takes seriously the possibility of DeSantis capturing the GOP nomination. Back in February, before the general public became more familiar with DeSantis’ agenda (autocratic) and personality (wooden/off-putting/missing), the Florida Governor was viewed as relatively sane and intelligent, at least compared to Trump, and many in the public assumed that meant DeSantis would be a better president than Trump.

The following paragraphs from the essay reminded me of a gloomy conversation I had with a friend the weekend after the 2016 election. Her most hopeful prediction–which turned out to be very accurate–was that Trump’s manifest incompetence would prevent him from actually enacting much of the damage he was promising.

DeSantis differs from Trump in several ways. While Trump couldn’t care less about “critical race theory” or transgender people, and simply throws stuff into speeches at his rallies that get the biggest reaction, DeSantis is a deeply conservative Catholic and a true believer in the culture wars he engages in. The other key difference is that DeSantis is a Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyer, while Trump skated through a bachelor’s in business where one of his professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”

The damage Trump was able to do was limited by his lack of discipline, ignorance of how the system worked, laziness, and lack of motivation. He is simply a narcissist who likes feeling rich, powerful, and important. DeSantis, however, is none of these things. He is not lazy. He has discipline, motivation, and an intimate knowledge of how to use the system to get what he wants. DeSantis fully intends to remake America the way he believes God would want it to be, and his knowledge of law and governmental structure allows him to do it on a scale, and with a precision, that Trump could only dream about.

The essay noted that DeSantis was pursuing what it called “one of the most aggressively authoritarian agendas in the country” by using two primary strategies: “capturing the referees and strategic ambiguity.”

DeSantis quietly packed both the Florida Board of Medicine and the New College Board of Trustees with ideological fellow travelers to bend institutions to their will. The Board of Medicine now includes campaign donors, Catholics who substitute the Vatican’s positions for that of professional medical organizations, and proponents of conversion therapy, while the surgeon general of Florida is an anti-vaxxer.

The strategy is to move the decision-making process out of the public spotlight by giving important decision-making authority to people who can’t be held accountable at the ballot box. (Diane Ravich recently noted that DeSantis had gutted Florida’s open records law–another ploy to keep that “capture of the referees” hidden from public view.)

And that “strategic ambiguity”?

DeSantis has made persistent war on “woke” education–from public schools to state universities.

The DeSantis administration swore up and down that the “Florida Parental Rights in Education Act” (the “Don’t Say Gay” law) was simply there to protect vulnerable young children from being exposed to dangerous or obscene ideas, images, or writing. In reality, it was deliberately vague and overly broad. When schoolteachers and librarians reached out for guidance on what is allowed, they were met with silence by the DeSantis administration. This left them with the choice: Do we remove everything from school libraries, or do we risk the potential legal consequences of annoying his administration?

Back when we had a legitimate Supreme Court, employment of this tactic was repeatedly struck down for creating a “chilling effect,” that violated the First Amendment.

The article lists a truly terrifying number of ways a DeSantis administration could use these strategies in support of a radically Rightwing culture war agenda. I would encourage you to click through and read it all if I thought this little martinet had a realistic chance to be President, or even the Republican nominee. But since February, when this essay was published, Americans have learned a lot about Mr. DeSantis.

Current polling reflects the public’s response to DeSantis’ repetitive attacks on “wokeness” and the strategic stupidity of picking a stubborn, petty fight with Disney (Florida’s largest employer and largest tourism draw), among other unforced errors.

And really, no one wants to have a beer with this guy.

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Well, I Guess We Know What “Wokeness” Is

If we ever thought the current war on “wokeness” isn’t an effort to dumb America down–to keep the kids from learning about times when the country failed to live up to its principles, to keep them from reading books that might stretch their horizons or (horrors!) make them aware of the existence of folks unlike Ma and Pa–Florida is disabusing us of that error.

Ron DeSantis is updating the old lyrics. Remember “How will we keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree”? In Florida, it’s now “How will we keep them in the GOP after they’ve learned to think?” (Indiana’s legislators are singing along…)

Talking Points Memo has the most recent abomination emanating from the sunshine state.

The Florida statehouse launched another strike in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” war with a new bill this week aiming to hand more control of school administration over to the governor and his political appointees.

House Bill 999, introduced on Tuesday by Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola), proposes to give boards of trustees nearly unanimous power over state university faculty hiring, allow professors’ tenure to be reevaluated “at any time,” remove critical race theory and gender studies from college curricula, and bar spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The bill also digs in on DeSantis’ obsession with shutting down any educational instruction on race and systemic racism, stating that general education courses must not “suppress or distort” historical events, reference identity politics like critical race theory, or define U.S. history in ways that contradict “universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Instead, the courses must “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”

Of course, “suppressing and distorting American history” is precisely what this bill–and the “anti-woke” movement– would do.

DeSantis’ administration has actually threatened teachers that they will be charged with felonies if they allow students to check out unapproved library books. His rejection of an AP African American Studies course for “lack[ing] educational merit” (!!) made national headlines (as did the disgraceful acquiescence of the College Board that “corrected” its curriculum.)

Decisions that are typically made with university presidents and boards of trustees in cooperation with faculty and staff – like setting up core curricula and deciding which departments should close, would be handed exclusively over to the board – members of which are appointed by the governor.

What Daniel Gordon, a historian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author on academic freedom , finds “particularly striking” about the bill is that it doesn’t require trustees to consult university faculty before hiring new professors. “This contradicts a principle, well established by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), that [sic] professors in a given discipline have the expertise needed to select a new faculty member in the discipline,” he told TPM. “Math professors are the people best equipped to assess applications for a professorship in math!”

In January, DeSantis announced plans to defund diversity, equity and inclusion programs in every public university in the state.

If these appalling measures were limited to Florida–if this out-and-proud racism and anti-intellectualism were limited to just one arguably deranged office-holder– it would be bad enough. But as the linked article notes, DeSantis’ “anti-woke” proposals are clearly intended to appeal to a “very specific breed of Trump voter as he mulls a 2024 bid.”

We all know what that “specific breed” believes.

DeSantis is evil, but not stupid. He clearly intends to ride the tide of White Supremacy to the White House, and he just as clearly believes that there are enough voters who share his racism, misogyny and homophobia to put him there.

A 1939 article from the Atlantic said it best.

THE early Americans were determined that education should be free from political control. Being liberals in the original and true sense of the term, they believed in the integrity of the individual as opposed to the despotism of the state. This integrity or dignity of the individual was, of course, basic in democracy. Among other things, it implied the right of the citizenry to think independently, to seek truth honestly, and to determine without political interference what should constitute the education of their children….

It was the experienced judgment of these early liberals that education, religion, and the press should be free from political domination. These were the institutions of thought. They had to be untrammeled if the individual was to be free. Hence it came about that early America produced a peculiar system of education, its outstanding characteristic that it was to be supported and controlled by the people, by parents, by citizens — but not by the state.

I guess our Founders were woke.

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Florida Man…Again

For the past couple of years, comedians have focused on nutty things done by people–okay, men–who live in Florida, leading to a much-used meme about “Florida man.”

Maybe there’s something in the water that leads Florida guys to lose it–that would go part way, at least, to explaining Ron DeSantis. (Nothing I can come up with can explain the Florida voters who support him.)

Diane Ravich recently reported on DeSantis’ headlong dive into authoritarian anti-Americanism.

Florida has become a Petri dish for potential fascism. DeSantis has made war on African Americans, on gays, on transgender people, on drag queens, on public schools, on higher education, even on private corporations (Disney). He likes to stand behind signs that declare Florida is “free,” but no one is free to disagree with him. That’s not freedom.

Now DeSantis has proposed to create a military force that answers only to him. To call out the National Guard, he must get federal permission. That’s not good enough for him. He wants a Florida state guard. Some other states have them, but they are not in the hands of a would-be dictator whose vanity knows no limits.

Ravich quoted a CNN report on the proposal that included the following paragraph:

But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be “not encumbered by the federal government.” He said this force would give him “the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible.” DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them.

The thought of giving this tin-pot would-be dictator the authority to call out troops to “respond to events” triggers all kinds of questions. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture DeSantis using his chosen goons to break up peaceful demonstrations–or other “woke” events like those nefarious Drag Story Hours at the local library.

And speaking of DeSantis’ “war on woke,” Florida media are reporting on recent actions taken by judges Herr DeSantis has placed on the state Supreme Court

Florida judges no longer will need to learn how to at least try to ensure “fairness and diversity” while applying the law under a rule change that the Florida Supreme Court has adopted by a nearly unanimous vote.

Florida’s Code of Judicial Conduct still requires 30 hours of classes every three years about “judicial professionalism, opinions of the Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee, and the Code of Judicial Conduct.”

However, the court has stripped language mandating education in “fairness and diversity” to count toward the requirement.

The order was signed by Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz and by associate justices Charles Canady, Ricky Polston, John Couriel, Jamie Grosshans, and Renatha Francis. All but two of them–Canady and Polston– were placed on the court by DeSantis.

One Justice, Jorge Labarga, dissented strongly. Labarga, appointed by former Gov. Charlie Crist, wrote that “this unilateral action potentially eliminates vital educational content from our state courts’ judicial education curriculum and does so in a manner inconsistent with this court’s years-long commitment to fairness and diversity education… Moreover, it paves the way for a complete dismantling of all fairness and diversity initiatives in the State Courts System. I strenuously dissent.”

And of course, DeSantis continues to wage war on education–especially, but not exclusively, higher education.

As one Florida newspaper has reported, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Florida universities had been told to prioritize diversity plans. Two years later, DeSantis is gutting them. The report quoted one official saying “It takes years to get where we’ve gotten. It takes days to destroy it.”

As the Guardian has reported,

Florida’s rightwing Republican governor, Ron DeSantis – and likely would-be presidential candidate for 2024 – has launched a relentless campaign of attack on higher education in the state, seeking to appeal to his party’s Trumpist base by positing that the state’s colleges and universities are a bastion of liberal extremism that needs to be reformed.

Last week DeSantis unveiled plans for a sweeping overhaul of Florida’s state university system that has left thousands of in-state students and faculty members feeling by turns indignant and dumbfounded as the man seen by many as Donald Trump’s only serious Republican rival set them up as a punchbag for his self-declared “war on woke”.

DeSantis may have trouble selling his “in your face” fascism to a national electorate. It’s hard to see how he might “pivot” to the center after winning the GOP nomination–even assuming he can wrest that nomination from Trump.

But “Florida man” is undoubtedly the (terrifying) face of today’s GOP.

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