Blogger Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) explains the competition between Donald Trump and Florida Ron DeSantis for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 (both want to turn the clock back to 1924!)
Trump made DeSantis by endorsing him for Governor when he was an o score Congressman. Trump does not like ingratitude.
GOT describes DeSantis’ passion to ban mandates for masking in the schools.
How does Ron do it? One way is throwing raw meat, bloody and dripping, to the party’s base. Meat like convening a special legislative session to bar local school boards from implementing mask mandates as a public health measure during a pandemic….
The rallying cry these days for tearing apart public education and dividing the spoils among … edupreneurs, hedge fund investors, and TFA champions who signed up to spend two years in a classroom because they hadn’t figured out what to do with their lives and realized that they had staked out a claim to a gold mine.
DeSantis defends parents’ rights, among them the right for parents to spread sickness and disease to other people’s children.
It’s no surprise to GOT that he has had several children home in quarantine during November. It’s no surprise that he is receiving daily emails from students that they will not be in school. If they don’t say they have Covid, they say they don’t feel well, are running a fever, or having other symptoms.
Some mention a diagnosis of strep throat. It’s not only Covid that’s now running through the bodies of children. But we have discarded the lessons of the pandemic, that a simple mask and common sense regarding classroom practices go far to keep children healthy….
No masks, no vaccine, DeSantis is the cancerous version of that Vegas cliche: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
He wants to be president. If that doesn’t frighten you, this should: he would likely bring Richard Corcoran to Washington to be his Secretary of Education. Trust GOT, that would make you nostalgic for the days of Devos.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Same amorality. Same fascist politics. A LOT smarter.
This is the guy who ordered his health department to stop releasing Covid stats, fired the state health employee who dared to defy this order and continued to release data on hospitalizations and deaths from Covid, and then sent police into her home, waving guns in front of her children, to confiscate her computers.
This is the guy who got the Flor-uh-duh legislature to pass Flor-uh-duh HB1 (2021), which gives police the authority to declare a gathering of three or more people a riot, criminalizes gatherings of protestors in a street, and shields from civil liability drivers who run over protestors blocking a street. His response to BLM.
So here we are. We’re Germany in 1931.
Think Trump with Brains
My imagination struggles with that, Bob, but your point is very well taken. Thanks.
And the guy who replaced the puerile, curriculum-and-pedagogy devolving Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic], which had grown toxic to the base, with a carbon copy called the BEST standards. Be BEST! And who responded to his base’s justified hatred of the mandated state testing by saying that he was doing away with the state tests (by replacing them with three “standards”-based tests a year at each grade level).
Retruth that on Truth Social (Trump’s new social media platform, which takes its name from the Soviet propaganda newspaper, Pravda, the name of which meant “truth” in Russian).
I hope I’m completely wrong about DeSantis. I had better be, because here’s the deal: The Repugnicans are going to win back the Senate in 2022 and make gains in the House. Then, DeSantis is going to win the contest for the Presidency in 2024. And then the Repuglicants will control the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and the Presidency, and with a simple majority vote, they can expand the court with even more Trumpy “justices” of the species Troglydites orangii.
And so we all sit on our fat (in my case) a***s and bemoan our fate? If we as supposed democrats expect to lose in 2022, then it sounds like we are handing the country to the fascists without even attempting a fight. Who goes into a war saying, “We are going to lose anyway, so lets whine really loudly.”? We kill ourselves with our own self defeating narrative. How far would Stacey Abrams have gotten if she talked that way? I admire her and people like her immensely.
I don’t think I said that we should sit on our arses. I did imply that this is quite serious, which in turn implies that we better act. I sincerely believe that the preservation of the semblance of democracy that we have in this country depends on getting out the vote in the next two elections. As things stand now, we haven’t a rational thought’s chance in Trump’s brain.
–Cassandra Shepherd
speduktr,
Thanks for reminding us of Stacey Abrams and her brilliance. I want her put in charge of the DNC and teaching any group that receives money from the DNC about the correct way to use their resources.
If not for various means implemented by Repugnuts for suppressing the vote in Georgia, she would have been governor.
“1924” that sounds about right for the mindset of these creeps
I fixed it to say that people of DeSantis’ ilk want to roll the clock back to 1924.
Remember that great song by Prince’s grandfather? “Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s nine-teen-twen-ty-four”
ROFLMSAO!!!
This could be the DeSantis campaign slogan!!!
In his pictures, he always looks to me like a squat gangster from one of those grainy photos from the 1920s. Mugsy DeSantis, of the Many DeSantis of Newark.
Everyday Democrats should be calling DeSantis a mass murderer. Roughly 20,000 deaths since June 2021. While States that had restrictions and pushed vaccine mandates had a small fraction of that number. And before our resident troll gets to Florida’s current low infection rate. The Vaccination rate picked up as the bodies piled up,Florida has been since October where those other states were months before. And of course wide spread infection confers immunity as well . But at what price. Perhaps we can ship DeSantis to the Hague.
If it were only fascist supporters who were the victims I would say ” ask me if i care” how many Trumpanzees die.
OK, Trump justly deserves the moniker IQ45, ofc. However, he did manage to push the GOP well into the Red on the old Fascism Meter. Why? Well, with a moron like that in charge, the Repugs could put their corporate donors’ wish lists under his orange nose, and no matter how egregious the legislation was–replace this national monument with strip mines. he would make his semiliterate Sharpie scrawl on it. That was so much fun that The Party is looking around for the Trump Mini-Me who will assume the Orange Mantle.
As the post notes, we must remember that DeSantis would be dragging Richard Corcoran into the Department of Education, and he would be worse than DeVos. DeSantis and Corcoran seek to destroy public education. Their policies are not based on evidence. They are based on political bias. They endorse third grade retention, merit pay and expanding charters and vouchers. The two of them also recently gutted Florida’s defined pension benefit, that wasn’t that great anyway, for teachers in favor of an employee 401k plan that benefits Wall St. DeSantis then wonders why there is a teacher shortage in Florida. Nobody should give this intolerant authoritarian the keys to the White House.
That “Vegas cliche,” btw, comes from the aphorisms in Fredrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Gods: “Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.” What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. BTW, Nietzsche’s Nazi sister, Elizabeth, promoted her brother’s works, and especially his The Will to Power, during that horrific time, as prophetic harbingers of Nazi ideology. This worked like a charm. The Nazis took him into their ugly embrace.
And yet Nietzsche’s stated opinions, were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Nietzsche became estranged from Richard Wagner who was a rabid anti-semite. They broke off relations for a whole bunch of reasons, one of them being Wagner’s off the charts anti-semitism.
Nietzsche’s superman/overman was not a racial Übermenschen but rather a cultural or intellectual big shot blowhard big deal super duper philosophizer.
Yeah, she totally FUBARed her brother’s legacy there for a time.
I do understand that GOT’s “Vegas maxim” was a joke, and a good one at that.
If we are lucky, the inevitable knockdown battle between Trump and Desantis (The Battle of the Bilge) will consume both of them.
And if we see particularly unlucky, they will join forces.
The Battle of the Bilge!
Perfect!
Back during the Don the Con Misadministration, I often thought, what if this guy had the same fascist proclivities but was a lot smarter and more knowledgeable?
Well, . . .
If I were a wagerer, I would be quite willing to take the following bets, unless something really unusual happens before then: That the Repugnicans will regain the House and gain control of the Senate in 2022, and that on January 20, 2025, DeSantis will be sworn in as President.
Do you suppose there could be a mass emigration to another country where the leadership does not suffer from “open mouth, insert foot, clamp” syndrome? Where public schools are just that? Where teachers are respected? Or am I dreaming of Camelot?
We had better deal with this right here. If ever there were times for Democrats to work like crazy to get out the vote, these will be those times. I’m terrified. And we all should be.
But yeah, had I the wherewithall to go live in Denmark, . . .
DeSantis is an innovator. His education policy: Bait and don’t switch.
The space between Trump and DeSantis is referred to as the perineum.