Ron DeSantis is either very crazy or very mad. At a press conference, he claimed that elementary school teachers are “instructed” to encourage children to switch genders.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is never one to let the facts get in the way of his latest bit of fear-mongering. The governor and possible presidential candidate tossed out another bit of rancid, Republican red meat, telling a crowd at a recent press conference that school teachers are “instructed to tell kids” to switch genders.
Governor DeSantis has insulted every teacher in the state of Florida. He hates teachers, except when he wants to arm them.
This attack must be part of his plan to turn parents against their local public schools and to create demand for vouchers. With vouchers, students can attend religious schools that openly indoctrinate their students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
DeSantis is a shrewd political operative. He is stoking the flames of the culture wars because he believes it will gain him votes. The story DeSantis recounts in the video is likely heresay from some right wing constituent. DeSantis knows nothing about public education, but he does not value them. Since taking office, he has done everything in his power to undermine public education. If he believes such accusatory languages will help him, then in his mind the end justifies the means. Propaganda thrives on hearsay, gossip and accusations that cannot be defended just like in the Salem witch hunts. Power through deception and manipulation is his game, not truth.
cx: DeSantis know nothing about public schools, but he does not value them.
shrewd political operativecynically ambitious bigot in the right state to spread his poison.Very crazy, very mad, and very ambitious. Not good.
This guy scares the h*** out of me – trading one dangerous CRAZY for another.
Keep hearing that he’s better than Trump & would be a possible front runner for the REP.
He is one mean ruthless SOB. Teachers and children will be sitting ducks, even more.
When will the madness stop? Totally exhausted & ready to move off the grid – unplug.
We’re creating our own mental illness. This is not normal!
He’s smarter than Trump, and he is dangerous because like Trump he realizes how easy it is to lead his loyal sheeple.
YES, he’s smarter than Trump & this makes him more dangerous.
DeSantis is nuts. He belongs in a looney bin.
Anyone who listens to him and does his bidding is CRAZED.
Yes he is an immoral, unethical person. That said he is catering to his uninformed voters who apparently want to hear that type of nonsense. Sad.
He is not catering to uniformed people.
He is catering to immoral unethical people.
Not catering to uninformed people.
The same immoral, unethical pussy grabbers who voted for Trump.
People need to stop giving these folks a pass for being ignorant.
I know many Trump voters and they are not ignorant. The fact is, they like everything he says and everything he stands for , including overturning the United States government.
Millions of Trump voters know that he tried to overthrow our government and still support him.
I’d say they support him BECAUSE he did so.
The only thing they are upset about is that he did not succeed.
Trump and DeSantis cult followers are just as immoral and unethical as they are. These two and their followers, for the most part, claim to be very faithful Christians. They all need to check their moral and ethical codes to see if what they believe is what they are really doing morally and ethically according to Christian standards. All, I believe many of these cult followers are as dumb as rocks and cannot see how they are being led down the road to destruction of themselves and this country.
I live in Florida and have observed Ron DeSantis in action for years. DeSantis is “TRUMP ON STERIODS, ONLY SMARTER AND MORE POLISHED, CUNNING AND DIVISIVE ! He is a professional LIAR who has used public education to “manufacture” a mythical divisive issue that will motivate his radical political base, better known as the CULT OF TRUMP”! DeSantis is TOXIC !
Well said. I’m in Florida as well and have been watching him operate in an unethical way during the campaign and in office. He is an authoritarian with fascist leanings in my opinion. He constantly scapegoats and lies to manipulate his base.
Saying DeSantis has fascist “leanings” is like saying Jesus Christ had Christian “leanings.”
Our next president
Before Trump , I would have said “unless someone digs up some dirt on him”
But if course, we know that dirt (especially abuse of women) just makes one more popular with Republicans.
Any dirt is fake news. Actual news is whatever one wants to believe. This is a CHRISTIAN nationalist movement, after all, so it’s all about make believe. Whatever one wants to believe is true. This is where Trump and Christian Nationalism converge. Trump himself has no ideology beyond devotion to Trump, but he is totally, totally committed to remaking the universe into whatever he wants it to be. He is profoundly childish, in this respect. And so he groks that in Christian nationalism. Yes, a virgin gave birth. Yes, this fellow rose from the dead. Yes, the United States is best in everything. Yes, this was a perfect phone call.
If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme. Everything your heart desires will come to you.
So American, this. Alas. This self delusion. Trump is a perfection of this trend. And that, in him, comes from his profound insecurity and the malignant pathological narcissism that serves as self medication for that insecurity.
This ability to believe anything, to hold contradictory notions to be true, is important to surviving in a Fascist state. The key fact about Fascism, the sine qua non, is terror. It begins with lots and lots of random acts of terror that establish the fact that it could happen to you and those you love at any moment. No one is immune. This is what ensures absolute compliance.
The way to ensure one’s absolute compliance is to adopt the Trumpian strategy of inhabiting, in one’s mind, an alternative facts universe, one in which actual facts (the recording has him talking about grabbing the genitals of women he is attracted to and getting away with this) simply don’t register, are ignored, are dismissed, are not seen. It’s, at its basis, delusional, and the need for the delusion is born of fear, insecurity, terror.
Fascists are always, of course, self-parodying, even the smarter ones like Mussolini and Mao. But parodying them rapidly becomes quite dangerous, for if there is one key, defining feature of fascism, it’s terror. At first, of course, in the transition, fascists use surrogates–citizens’ militias. Why? To preserve a facade of normal process within the government and plausible deniability. But soon enough, those militias have served their purposes and are purged in favor of out and out terror via secret police and co-opted courts and prosecutors administering kangaroo justice.
If true, the end of the American experiment and the beginning of a new First Reich.
News from the Near Future:
In retrospect, it was a long, weird fall, but by the Twenty Teens, we were already largely there. Half of Americans had voted for a mobster money launderer and Russian asset for president, and that guy had gone on to attempt to overthrow the government my several means and did so with total impunity. Armed white citizens militias were showing up at state capitols and being let off with no punishment after having threatened to murder their governor. The Supreme Court was channeling the Council of Magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Congress had pretty much agreed that nothing could be done about the DAILY mass murders across the nation, often of elderly people or schoolchildren. Meanwhile, Cheez Whiz and the Marvel Universe and the Tide Pod Challenge and OMG did you see the dress that Sidney Sweeney was wearing!
Our version of the Cumaean Sibyl, Steve Bannon, said recently that soon The Pugs will be back in power, and woe unto their enemies then, including Biden, Harris, the January 6th Committee, and so on. And his lawyers have petitioned the judge in his case to delay sentencing until he has exhausted his appeals. I suspect that his thought, there, is that he can simply run out the clock until the new fascist Repugnican Party is in power again, which will happen in two stages, the first this November and the second 2 years later.
The Reich of Ron
The Reich of Ron
Excedes the Don
The Day is done
And Fascist won
Exceeds
Reich of Ronny, DeSantis sicko treat
We need a Namendment
No more Dons
And no more Ron’s
No more cons
And no Elon’s
Name amendment’s
What we need
Just for Presidents
Just to weed
Bushes also
Should be banned
They speak false so
Should be canned
Sort of reminds one of that regime in Germany and the reign of terror they perpetrated on Europe in tbe1930’s and 1940’s. It started innocently enough with an economy in ruins and ultimately resulted in the deaths of 50 million people. Has the US become the fertile ground from which a dictator emerges?
Thanks for your comment, Bob Shepherd!
Scapegoating an enemy within (Socialists, immigrants). Slavish devotion to a Glorious Leader. Cult of personality around that leader. The rally as primary mode of communication. Monumental architecture. Support for violent “citizens’ militias. Desire to use state violence against demonstrators/protestors. Insistence that normal media are faked. Call for return to a mythical golden age before the country was betrayed. Seeking control over voting systems and refusing to accept popular vote. Anti-immigrant minister of propaganda (Miller). Alliances with dictators worldwide. And so on. Yep. Checks all the Fascist boxes. And add to that what the Extreme Court has been up to–basically, a series of decisions that will amount to this country’s Enabling Act.
Maybe it would be a good idea if teachers ere armed.
That way they could ensure that nut balls like DeSantis can’t come anywhere near school children.
The same political hate monger who wants to arm teachers says that teachers are immoral snakes who want to perform gender altering operations on the kids! Geez, DeSantis (and Trump) are the vilest featherless bipeds and a threat to democracy if they gain the presidency in 2024. Trump won the presidency thanks to the Electoral College, otherwise we would have never been burdened with that human disaster. Do you remember the nay-sayers who said that Hillary was just as bad or even worse because she was/is a war monger and lying liar? So we got 4 years of a celebrity horror-movie clown.
Dear College Students,
WAKE UP!
Signed,
Your Future
OMG. Yes.
Succinct. Will forward as much as possible.
DeSantis is testing out a variety of lies to learn which one will be his best BIG LIE. After all, DeSantis is a fascist competing with Traitor Trump to take over as the leader of the MAGA mob that controls the Republican Party and gain their block of 20 to 30 million votes.
DeSantis is searching for a BIG LIE that will also attract enough independent voters to win elections. He can’t win with only the MAGA fascist voters.
umair has a column on how unusual it is for the fascists, fundamentalists, and oligarch authoritarians to unite, which is what we’re seeing now.
A key Supreme Court case this year was the one on EPA’s ability to regulate air emissions. That one feeds the oligarchs — “who says we can’t pollute your air?”
The reversal on Roe feeds the fundamentalist’s dream of turning back the last seventy years of SCOTUS decisions expanding rights. Obergefell, Griswold, Loving? All on the chopping block. How far behind are Baker vs. Carr and Brown? We’ll see this next session if state legislatures face any control at all when it comes to such matters.
Watch how SCOTUS favors the fundamentalists, the fascists, and the oligarchs in its decisions.
DeSantis is a smarter, more dangerous version of Trump.
Exactly, Steve!
Let’s remember that DeathSentence won the 2018 governor race by a mere 0.4%– after a recount [required for margin under 2%]. No matter how red FL looks to many of us, that’s a split vote. I suspect he takes the mainstream Republican vote for granted, and keeps his eyes glued to social media to suss out best approaches to keep the ½% tinfoilhats putting him over the top.
Governor DeSatan.
So, here we are. Let’s recap the last few years.
Almost half of Americans voted for a money launderer and Russian asset for president, which has to be the greatest intelligence failure in history.
In the days leading up to and after this creep’s losing reelection, the Don, Cheeto “Littlefingers” Trumpbalone, attempted to overthrow the U.S. government, the government he had been leading, not in a single way but in several ways, carried out in parallel. He engaged in defrauding the United States, seditious conspiracy, and conspiracy to obstruct and official proceeding, as well as attempted election fraud and treason (because he aided and abetted groups that wanted to overthrow the United States). To date, he has NOT been prosecuted for ANY of this.
After goons responding to this seditious criminal stormed the Capitol, attempting to stop the peaceful transfer of power and seeking to HANG the Vice President, 147 sitting Republican Congressmen and Senators STILL voted not to certify, effectively colluding with the criminal traitor. This didn’t seem to bother much of anyone.
The DOJ then went after all the small fry and pretty much let the big fish slide. The Attorney General of the United States effectively did a Sleeping Beauty imitation.
Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court busily started hacking away at freedoms and doing its best imitation of the Council of Magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and laying the framework for a new legal era WITHOUT unenumerated rights and WITH state nullification of federal law–basically, a new body of decisions that amount to an Enabling Act for American fascism. Oh, and the same court cleared the way for the creation of state (taxpayer) funded Christian fundamentalist nationalist madrassas.
A show trial was held of Ghislaine Maxwell, co-conspirator with the blackmailer of the rich and famous and powerful, Jeffrey Epstein, but not a single person who could and would name a single one of the powerful Epstein clients was asked to testify, and none of the video and photography that Epstein gathered as kompromat on these people ever surfaced. It all just, poof, disappeared. And no one seemed at all bothered by this.
Corruption and ineptitude. And a populace more interested in what was going on in the Marvel Universe and the new Cardi B song and OMG that dress that Sydney Sweeney was wearing. This is tragicomedy become utter farce.
In the not-so-distant future, looking back, people in other parts of the world will say, it was a long way down for the US, but by 2020, it had descended into complete madness. It was only a step from that to full-fledged fascism. All it took was someone with like Trump but smarter to take the reins.
cx: Almost half of Americans voted for a money launderer and Russian asset for president, which has to be the most bizarre event (and the greatest intelligence failure) in history.
An intelligence failure in more than one sense of the word.
Stick a fork in US.
We’re done (and dumb)
Done and Dumber.
Done and Dumber
Done and dumb
And number One!
Fascist fun
Has just begun
A Female Ron DeSantis?
If Ronny switched his gender
Would difference it make?
Would Ronny then be tender?
And want to bake a cake?
Would Ronny care about the folks
Who haven’t much to eat?
Would Ronny fight for dreams and hopes
Of homeless on the Street?
If Ronny switched his gender
I bet he wouldn’t change
DeSantis is dead ender
And can’t be rearranged
If Ronny switched his gender
He’d be a a Taylor Greene
Or maybe Ms. Stefanik
Or someone we ain’t seen
If Ronny switched his gender
He’d really be the same
A Ronny gender bender
Returns to whence he came
LOL. There needs to be a book of these SomDAM gems!
eeeeeee!
Long ago, I did collect many of my goofy poems in a book called A DAMthology of Deform, whi used to be on Google docs, with a link, but Google apparently didn’t like that, so censored it.
I also basically decided it wasn’t worth the effort required to organize all the stuff into a coherent book, which as you well know is a HUGE amount of work.
So I just leave stuff here, like a trail of scat left by a bear in the woods.
If some scatologist wants to follow the trail, good luck to them!
Does SomeDAM Poet leave goofy poetry at Diane Ravitch’s blog?
Does a bear shit in the woods?
If Ronny switched his gender
The only thing to change:
The name with which he’s rendered
To “Ronnie” , but the same
Driving while Ronny
Driving while Ronny
Will cause you to weave
It really ain’t funny
Cuz others will grieve
Driving while Ronny
Will lead to a stop
For thinking you’re crazy
And high on the pot
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education and commented:
Rhonda Santis, well known Florida drag star once again comes out with a statement that demonstrates how the fever dreams of rightists catch on among the poorly educated.