DeSantis: Der Führer of Flori-duh is a rising star in America's growing fascist movement

 

This post has been updated with additional content as well as editing of original content for the purpose of flow.
~ CC

It can't be stated loudly enough or often enough: Florida governor Ron DeSantis is a fascist. As of now he's a mere spark, relatively speaking, but his elevation to the U.S. presidency could very well burn our democracy to the ground. What DeSantis is doing to Florida, he apparently wants to do to the entire country. In other words, "Make America Florida." Gaaagh!

I've spent years barking about #NeverWasMy President Donald John Trump -- and I know that this has cost me some readers, but so be it -- but in many ways, DeSantis is ever so much worse. That's no exaggeration; DeSantis is so bad that even some (actual) conservatives are very concerned.

Granted, it's all too easy, particularly in these deeply divisive times, to slap the label "fascist" or "Nazi" on people, organizations, ideas, or actions with whom one disagrees, and I am well aware that those labels have at times been unfairly applied to opponents by both "the right" and "the left." But I think it is entirely appropriate to employ such words when referring to DeSantis. For starters, follow the first link in the first paragraph (here is that link again). It contains links to articles about various aspects of DeSantis' fascistic tendencies, including opinions by experts on the history of fascism, authoritarianism, and autocracy.

Or if you want to narrow your focus a little bit, check out this February 10, 2023 Esquire opinion piece by Jeff Vandermeer, who, speculating about a DeSantis presidential run (or, worse, a win) wrote:

In the end, it may not matter whether DeSantis is a “mad king,” a cipher like Rick Scott, an ideologue, an oligarch, an autocrat, or a rather ordinary politician in the right place at the right time. The effects of DeSantis’ actions remain the same, while in his rhetoric he often takes the term “bully pulpit” as literally as possible.

Florida and its people don’t deserve this desecration—no place does, even as DeSantis and his Republican predecessors have managed to turn an absolute paradise into a place that is close to a failed state. Because what Ron DeSantis does, at base—including to his base—is simple. He inflicts damage in pursuit of political gain. On purpose and with abandon and with no regard for collateral harm.

What trickles down, then, in the end, along with all of this “freedom,” is nepotism, corruption, cruelty, greed, and—both by design and as a byproduct of all the rest—shockingly bad ideas about governance.

Why would you want any of this inflicted on the nation?

This is the Ron DeSantis of Florida, who wants to become the Ron DeSantis of America. To tell us to our dying day that we are not communities of loving grace and communion, that we are not all connected, that acts of loving kindness are for fools and traitors. To tell us that only some of us matter, not all of us.

Maybe, in the end, if we do not heed the warnings, DeSantis will tell us, in a thousand lacerating ways, direct and indirect… that none of us matter.

Unfortunately, most mainstream media coverage so far seems to have understated the threat. This December 2022 Truthout post by Henry A. Giroux addresses the infamous migrant-busing political stunts orchestrated by Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott. Giroux lamented the fact that most of the mainstream media reporting on the matter failed to connect the dots between those stunts and unpleasant historical precedents.

It is worth repeating that little was reported about how this story echoed a segregationist past of Jim Crow racist policies and violence. And almost nothing was said about how DeSantis’s politics of disposability was part of a similar logic carried to extremes in the past in fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany. Not only did DeSantis build on the legacy of American white supremacists such as former Gov. George Wallace, he also took a lesson from the history of fascism in trying to ride white supremacy and nationalism to further his political career.

DeSantis’s publicity stunt of using migrants as political pawns was also disconnected in the mainstream and liberal media from his attempt to erase the history of the Jim Crow era as part of his larger project of a politics of disposability. For instance, little was said connecting this racist policy to DeSantis’s passing laws banning books about Black history and racial narratives from schools and libraries, along with limiting what teachers can teach about racism — a policy that clearly indicates how DeSantis is following in the footsteps of the Nazification of education in Hitler’s Germany...

Presidential aspirations aside, DeSantis appears to be on the fast track to becoming the dictator of Florida. And Florida's republican supermajority has happily handed the reins -- and the reign -- over to him. From The Guardian, February 18, 2023:

It turns out, following a special legislative session last week that handed DeSantis victory after victory in his culture wars against Disney, transgender communities, students, migrants and communities of color, the person with the greatest freedom in Florida to do exactly as he pleases is the governor himself.

In November, voters granted DeSantis’s wish of a veto-proof Republican supermajority in the state legislature. In a five-day session, those politicians validated every one of his demands.

They granted DeSantis total control of the board governing Disney, the theme park giant with whom he feuded over his anti-LGBTQ+ “don’t say gay” law.

They gave him permission to fly migrants from anywhere in the US to destinations of his choosing, for political purposes, then send the bill to Florida’s taxpayers.

And they handed unprecedented prosecutorial powers to his newly created, hand-picked office of election “integrity”, pursuing supposed cases of voter fraud.

The special session is over but DeSantis’s devotion to seeking retribution against those who disagree with him is not...

 In other words, he's not just a tyrant, but a petty one at that. 

From the tyrant's playbook: seizing control of education and the media

Dumbing down the schools and universities
DeSantis is working hard to push his "anti-woke" agenda at all levels of education in Florida, from elementary schools to colleges and universities. Arguably, education has always been political, but DeSantis seems to be ratcheting the politix up to alarming new levels, waging a war on Florida students of all ages, as well as those tasked with educating them. From a February 28, 2023 piece in The Nation:

Teachers, superintendents, and school board members in Florida have been assaulted, demeaned, and targeted with death threats. Their classrooms are being surveilled, and anonymous members of the public contact administrators to report a “crime” as benign as finding a rainbow flag pinned to a bulletin board.

Amid the threats, DeSantis has signaled that he will fight a federal investigation into increased teacher harassment in Florida and nationwide.

As this is happening, children watch and learn and get caught in the middle. The people they rely on in school are forced to pay more attention to being under attack than on teaching. Politicians and extremist school board members tell them that some classmates are less equal than others. And the stories they read and the way they learn have been yanked away from them...

I don't know about you, but those pictures of empty bookshelves in elementary school classrooms haunt me.

But I would be remiss if I were to completely gloss over the nuances of this issue, and there are indeed nuances, as explained in this thoughtful March 1, 2023 piece on the Bulwark site, by Cato Institute member and contributing editor to Reason Cathy Young. To put it very politely, I am not a fan of libertarians, particularly in their current incarnation, but Young aptly points out that along with the illiberalism being pushed by DeSantis and his ilk, there's such a thing as progressive illiberalism as well. Citing DeSantis' "War on Woke" on education, particularly as reflected in Florida House Bill 999, Young wrote:

But Democrats and dissident conservatives attempting to describe and respond to this worrisome trend often resort to badly flawed narratives that distort the overall picture in several ways.

First, these narratives sometimes exaggerate the right-wing depredations they critique—for instance, by equating the rejection of the African American studies AP curriculum with an outright ban on teaching African American history.

Second, they tend to discount the very real problem of left-wing illiberalism and ideological diktat in education, dismissing all complaints about it as either astroturfed right-wing disinformation or misguided centrist panic that plays into the hands of the right. To acknowledge that at least in some cases DeSantis and his imitators are responding to real problems and tapping into valid concerns may complicate the narrative, but it doesn’t mean that the “anti-woke” right is fighting the good fight. It just means that the political fights over these issues often pit the proverbial two wrongs against each other—and that the sane middle desperately needs alternatives.

Young went on to list a few examples of "progressive illiberalism." I know what you're thinking, but it would be a mistake to dismiss this piece as mere "whataboutism" or "both-sides-ism." And she did draw attention to an important distinction between the two types of illiberalism.

Attorney and writer Wendy Kaminer, a former American Civil Liberties Union board member who has for years been a strong critic of what she sees as the progressive abandonment of free speech principles, is equally harsh about the right-wing pushback in Florida and other red states. The new Florida legislation and the earlier Stop WOKE bill, she told me by telephone, represent nothing less than “a state-imposed orthodoxy on education, and especially on higher education. It’s saying that there is no such thing as academic freedom, that professors are simply employees of the state and they have to parrot whatever the state tells them to parrot.”

But Kaminer (who is a FIRE advisory board member but stressed that she was speaking only in her capacity as an individual) also pointed to an irony that she believes a lot of progressives miss: The conservative backlash operates by using “theories that were developed on the left” and have been widely applied through college speech codes over the past thirty years or so—theories about the harms of speech that is viewed as traumatic to the listener and the right of listeners to be safe from hurtful or offensive expression.

“You see a very similar hostility to free speech coming from both the ‘woke’ and the ‘anti-woke,’” says Kaminer. However, she adds, while progressives have largely censured speech that they regard as harmful—essentially, as a form of assaultive conduct—using “cultural power” and institutional power, the right, with its current strength in state legislatures, is currently doing it “by force of law.”

"By force of law" -- that's the crucial difference. Cathy Young continued the thought, explaining that this is not an absolute distinction, as, "To some extent, laws prohibiting racial and sexual harassment under Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act bring the federal government into speech regulation that is not always limited to targeted harassment of individuals." Even so, she added:

In some ways, red-state “anti-woke” bills are broader and cruder in their attempts at speech regulation: No campus policy against “discriminatory speech” has ever tried to kill entire academic programs and majors the way HB 999 would kill critical race scholarship and gender studies. (Here, DeSantis is taking a page from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the proud champion of “illiberal democracy” and the darling of American “national conservatives,” who signed a decree effectively banning gender studies programs in Hungarian universities five years ago.)

Indeed. Nuances aside, in my book the DeSantis/anti-woke brand of illiberalism is doing the most damage by far to educational systems, not only in Florida but all across the nation. Notwithstanding the usual gang of hysterics who can't stop working the base into a frenzy about the "woke mob," "progressive illiberalism" isn't even in the running, damage-wise.

Jackboots stomping all over the First Amendment
And then there is DeSantis' war on the news media. Similar to Trump's threats, during his first presidential campaign, to "open up libel laws," DeSantis wants to rewrite defamation law in America to make it easier for "public figures" like himself to sue news outlets (and, apparently, others who post critical content about said public figures). From Politico, February 23, 2023:

At the governor’s urging, Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature is pushing to weaken state laws that have long protected journalists against defamation suits and frivolous lawsuits. The proposal is part DeSantis’ ongoing feud with media outlets like The New York Times, Miami Herald, CNN and The Washington Post — media companies he claims are biased against Republicans — as he prepares for a likely 2024 presidential bid.

Beyond making it easier to sue journalists, the proposal is also being positioned to spark a larger legal battle with the goal of eventually overturning New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that limits public officials’ ability to sue publishers for defamation, according to state Rep. Alex Andrade, the Florida Republican sponsoring the bill...

...Free-press advocates call the measure unconstitutional and suggest it could have far-reaching consequences beyond major media outlets.

“I have never seen anything remotely like this legislation,” said Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “I can’t say I have seen every bill ever introduced, but I’d be quite surprised if any state Legislature had seriously considered such a brazen and blatantly unconstitutional attack on speech and press freedoms.”

Here is a direct link to the proposed bill, HB 991, which was introduced by Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola), a DeSantis ally. A February 23 piece on the Florida Politics site has more about the matter. As well, the libertarian Reason site shed light on the consequences of this bill's passage.

This bill is only the latest attempt from Gov. DeSantis to chill dissenting speech in Florida.

"The bill is an aggressive and blatantly unconstitutional attempt to rewrite defamation law in a manner that protects the powerful from criticism by journalists and the public," says [Joe] Cohn [the legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression]."And it really champions the rights of the powerful and public figures in particular as compared to the rights of ordinary people to raise questions and lodge criticisms.

Understand, however, that Ron DeSantis certainly does not hate all media. To the contrary: he seems to adore FOX News, and vice versa, much to the growing chagrin of Donald Trump. And he is not above exploiting and weaponizing certain DeSantis-friendly alt-media. According to a February 28, 2023 Grid story, there are at present a half-dozen right-leaning conservative websites, some of which have only emerged over the past two years, that cover DeSantis on a near-daily basis and enjoy access to him and his administration that most of the rest of the media emphatically do not.

Currently the most notable of these is the online-only "news" site Florida Standard, which was only launched in July of 2022 but has published one-on-one interviews with DeSantis and his crackpot state surgeon general. That's the type of access that DeSantis rarely grants to mainstream Florida newspapers. From the Grid story: 

“It’s all built around a very partisan agenda,” said Rick Wilson, a Floridian and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “The desire to have your own biases reinforced is across the political spectrum, but only on the far right is it as sophisticated and weaponized — particularly here in Florida.”

These sites play an outsized role given their small staff and traffic, which hover around, or less than, 100,000 monthly viewers at each site, according to data from the media tracking service SimilarWeb. As DeSantis builds his reputation among Republicans nationally, there is a quiet pipeline flowing from these local sites up to major national figures. Conservative stars like Ben Shapiro (5.5 million Twitter followers), Mark Levin (3.4 million followers), Matt Gaetz (2 million followers) and Benny Johnson (1.3 million followers) have all tweeted DeSantis-focused stories written by small conservative Florida news sites, and articles have been routinely cited not just in the right-wing press but the mainstream media, too.

Florida Standard and its editor in chief, Will Witt (who didn't respond to interview requests and questions from Grid) have a fine record of pushing conspiranoid content.

In November of last year, Witt cited the baseless “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which has been embraced by extremists such as the Buffalo supermarket mass shooter, that today’s influx of immigrants is a deliberate attempt to increase the number of Democratic voters in the United States. Witt retweeted a clip of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) discussing embracing immigrants in the U.S. and added: “Great replacement is just a theory huh?”

And earlier this year, the Florida Standard published a series of articles about covid that falsely spread information about covid vaccines, such as a story focused on the idea that mRNA can spread from a vaccinated person to an unvaccinated person.

It all seems to fit right in with the DeSantis dystopian vision for Floriduh... and the nation at large.

Then, of course, there are social media, most notably Twitter. A January 25, 2023 article in The Daily Beast (updated on January 26) reports on how Ron DeSantis's political operation has silently been recruiting conservative "influencers." All of them seem to be fine, upstanding people, at least by current rethuglican standards.

According to five Republicans familiar with the discussions, the governor’s top lieutenants have quietly recruited a network of conservative social media influencers as part of a broader attempt to circumvent the mainstream press and appeal directly to GOP primary voters nationwide.

And who are, according to the three Republicans who received the initial pitch, among the ranks in DeSantis’ digital army?

Jack Murphy, a podcast host and self-described “alpha-male giga chad” involved in a quasi-professional cuckolding porn scandal. John Cardillo, a former Newsmax TV host and unregistered arms dealer who allegedly stiffed the Ukrainian government for $200,000 worth of body armor plates. Christian Walker, Herschel Walker’s right-wing influencer son who helped tank his father’s Senate campaign. David Reaboi, a Hungary-loving and Qatar-hating bodybuilder with longstanding ties to John Bolton. And Caleb Hull, an ex-Trump digital strategist who has said some very, very racist things.

This is the DeSantis A-team, and they’re fighting a battle for a presidential campaign that hasn’t even started yet—with plenty of DeSantis face time, dinners, and photo ops.

The only point with which I disagree is that DeSantis's presidential campaign "hasn't even started yet." That wasn't even true in January, and it's certainly not true now. In any case, it's a pretty sure bet that all of the restrictions DeSantis is frothing at the mouth to place upon real news media and journalists won't apply to the Führer-friendly "news" media and "influencers."

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

A history of cruelty and sadism?
Finally, there is some online buzz, though not so much from the mainstream media as of now, regarding Ron DeSantis' murky military history. How relevant this is to the DeSantis of the present and future, I couldn't begin to say, but it's worth noting that he has been accused of enabling and encouraging the torture of detainees back when he was a U.S. Navy JAG lawyer serving at the infamous Guantanamo detention camp in Cuba.

The Bulwark brought up this issue on a February 28, 2023 piece (see the second item, "Is Ron DeSantis a Sadistic Torturer?"). The piece references a transcript of an interview with one of those detainees, Mansoor Adayfi, formerly detainee #441 and also known as Abdul Rahman Ahmed. The interview was originally aired on a Nov. 18 interview podcast of Eyes Left, hosted by U.S. Army veteran and anti-war activist Michael Prysner. (The author of the Bulwark article, Bill Lueders, suggests that the House GOP, being on such an investigative frenzy, should investigate the allegations against DeSantis, among a couple of other matters. But he's not holding his breath, and neither am I, and neither should you.)

A January 26, 2023 article on the Florida Bulldog site has more detailed info about the torture allegations, as well as other aspects of DeSantis's military career. To begin with...

Not much is known about DeSantis’s duties at those locations [Guantanamo and Fallujah, during the Iraq war]. DeSantis has released only limited highlights of his military career – noting in a speech, for example, that he spent Christmas 2006 in Guantanamo without his family – and has declined repeatedly to be interviewed about it, most recently to Florida Bulldog. His official biography, cited by Wikipedia and other information sources, touts that he “still serves in the U.S. Navy Reserve,” but the Navy says otherwise.

A Navy data sheet about DeSantis provided to Florida Bulldog last week lists his separation date from the Navy as Feb. 14, 2019 – a month after his first inauguration. “He’s not active or reserve. He’s not a member of the Navy anymore,” said U.S. Navy spokeswoman Lt. Alyson Hands.

Forty-two pages of heavily censored U.S. Navy records released to the Florida Phoenix during DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign say his naval duties included things like assistant urinalysis coordinator. At Guantanamo, where hundreds of people scooped up in the George W. Bush administration’s post 9/11 War on Terror were held indefinitely without trial and amid multiple allegations of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross and others, the Phoenix reported the records showed that from March 2006 through early January 2007 “DeSantis’s primary duty was a trial counsel – meaning a prosecutor. The record also showed that DeSantis was described as a ‘JTF-GTMO [Joint Task Force Guantanamo] scheduler/administrative officer.’” No further details were released...

The aforementioned Gitmo detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, was held without charges at Gitmo for 14 years. He alleges that JAG Officer DeSantis observed, allowed, and participated in illegal acts of torture to help end a 2006 hunger strike by dozens of detainees.

“I saw a fucking handsome person who was coming. He said, ‘I’m here to ensure that you’re treated humanely.’ And we said, OK, this is our demand, you know. We’re not asking for much,” Adayfi said. He said DeSantis went on, “And if you have any problems, if you have any concerns, if you have…just talk to me.’ And you know we, we, we, we’re drowning in that place. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ That person actually writing something. He will raise the concerns, but it was [a] piece of the game. What they were doing, they were, they were looking what’s [going to] hurt you more, to use against you.”

Adayfi, now 44, said DeSantis watched with amusement as he and other detainees were repeatedly force-fed Ensure, a “meal replacement” shake, through a nasal feeding tube pushed down their throats.

“Ron DeSantis was there and watching us. We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair and that guy; he was watching that. He was laughing basically when they used to feed us, because…our stomach cannot hold this amount of Ensure. They used to pour Ensure, one can after another, one can after another. So, when he approached me, I said this is the way we are treated. He said, ‘You should start to eat.’ …I threw up on his face. Literally on his face.”

DeSantis’s office did not respond to several requests for comment this week. However, shortly after his election to Congress in 2012 he told PBS NewsHour his time serving in the Navy shaped him as a leader. He told PBS that senior officers are accountable for getting their job done because there are consequences if it’s not done well.

The Bulwark piece mentioned above also has details about the torture allegations.

Adayfi alleges that the Ensure was laced with “some kind of laxative” so he and the other prisoners were “shitting ourselves all the time.” After these sessions, “we were moved to solitary confinement—really cold cells. It was like five times a day. It wasn’t feeding. It was just torture. Five times a day.”

He says the guards also beat them, with DeSantis standing by...

DeSantis didn't use his name in Gitmo, so Adayfi did not know DeSantis's true identity in real time, but says he recognized him after the governor rose to national prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He insists that DeSantis is indeed the one who witnessed his torture, encouraged it, and laughed at his suffering. To my knowledge, DeSantis has not yet publicly commented on these allegations, but if and when he does I will add that information to this post

There's really so much more to write about Ron DeSantis, but this post is already more than long enough. But I'm not done yet. Expect more in future posts. For now, I'll leave you with this February 27 commentary regarding a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, said opinion piece having been penned by a self-described liberal, no less, who accused his "fellow liberals" of exaggerating the dangers of DeSantis. The "liberal," Damon Linker, suggested that DeSantis is not, in fact, worse than Trump. But there are different flavors of evil, and Trump and DeSantis are both in their own ways monstrously evil, and both would be disasters in the Oval Office. Linker's piece is pretty weak sauce. The bottom line is that American democracy has never been in greater danger from the rising tide of fascism -- and Ron DeSantis is becoming a bigger threat by the day.

PS, added 6 March, 2023: The inimitable John Oliver mercilessly roasts Ron DeSantis on everything from the latter's bizarre dating tactics back in the day, to the usual fascism stuff.
 

PPS, added 14 March, 2023: A key point of DeSantis' still-unofficial presidential campaign is his outrageously false claim that Florida (meaning DeSantis) was right and "they were wrong" regarding the state's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Alternet (March 10, 2023) reports that Florida's "right" results rank among the worst in the nation. (But don't expect facts to get in the way of DeSantis' narrative and the "Freedom" Fascists' overall covidiocy.)

DeSantis isn't the only source of fascism in the Sunshine State. Next on my Whirled: In Ron DeSantis' Flori-duh, freedom's just another word for fascism.