How DeSantis Destroyed Florida (Is the US Next?) and NAACP Travel Warning
Texas Replaces School Counselors with Chaplains, GOP to Curb Student Voters, Target Attacked for Pride Month, Tina Turner Sings
DeSantis’ Florida: A Cautionary Tale of the Zombie Apocalypse
Ron DeSantis was born to play the movie role of the cigar-chomping hawkish general who wants to bomb our enemies “Back to the Stone Age!” That’s what he’s done in Florida. He’s legislatively bombed them back into the Stone Age. The once glorious blaze that was Florida is now a pit of dying embers Floridians huddle around while the dark closes in on them.
Florida is now like an annoying itch under your sleeve that you keep scratching, until you finally push up the sleeve and see the entire arm is a festering, oozing, gangrenous mess that immediately needs to be hacked off to save the rest of the body. Everything that DeSantis and his conservative cronies have imposed on Florida echoes what Maoist China did, Fascist Italy did, Stalinist Russia did, and, yes, cliche of cliches, Nazi Germany did.
They started by finding marginalized groups to demonize to unite people around a common enemy: Jews, gays, Catholics, or whatever group they could rally the desperate mob to hate. Then they launched overwhelming campaigns of disinformation that ensured the people didn’t know what actually was happening in the world, only what they wanted them to know. At the same time, they would re-engineer education so children would be prompted to embrace feverish, unquestioning patriotism while censoring what kids learned in order to promote an idealized country that never made mistakes and only had the best interests of all people in their hearts. Facts, they declared, were for nerds and elitists.
Why what’s happening in Florida is crucial for the rest of the country
DeSantis has announced, with Elon Musk at his side, that he’s running for president. Is he implying that Musk will be his major donor or even running mate? Or simply that he embraces Musk’s philosophy that the business of America is Business? Musk is the wealthiest man in the world, but also has used Twitter to undermine legitimate journalism, promote hate groups, silence political dissent in fascist countries, and spread disinformation that, when proven wrong, he simply erases from existence without comment. Two peas in a gilded pod.
The jump-scare in this horror movie is that DeSantis has a book—The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival—that he touts as his model for the rest of America. This blueprint has proven to be a disastrous failure for Florida, not so much a “revival” (a word crafted to appeal to his evangelical base) than a need for resuscitation. Worse, even though this horror movie is losing money for Florida (in the red?), other states have been emboldened by his success at bullying the state’s legislature into fawning submission to pass similar laws that subjugate women, endorse racist voting restrictions, and hobble education like Kathy Bates swinging a mallet in Misery. Every time Florida passes a law, an angel loses its wings.
DeSantis' presidential promise: as Florida goes, so goes the country. If that’s true, here’s a peek at the frightening future of the United States. The lesson to Floridians is summed up in the movie Getting Straight when, in the midst of a violent campus protest, Elliott Gould tells the bewildered university president, “Let go! Stop trying to hold back the hands of the clock! It'll tear your arms out!”
Amanda Gorman ‘Gutted’ After Florida School Restricts Her Biden Inauguration Poem (The Daily Beast)
SUMMARY: Amanda Gorman, the National Youth Poet Laureate, called a Florida school’s decision to restrict access to four books, including one containing her famous poem “The Hill We Climb,” a violation of its students’ “free thought and free speech.”
…The books remain accessible to middle school students at the school, according to the newspaper.
A review by the school materials review committee was initiated after a single parent objected to five titles, complaining that they contained “indirect hate messages.”
MY TAKE: Book banning, especially for children, is justified by parents as preventing indoctrination. The reality, as they very well know, is that book banning is actually indoctrination by omission. By erasing other cultural or ethnic voices, especially dissenting voices, they create in their children a distorted view of the world.
Book ban attempts reached a record high in 2022. Right now, I just want to focus on this one incident because it encapsulates the fractured ideology and disturbing process. First, let’s start with the statement from a spokesperson for Miami-Dade County Public Schools objecting “to the idea that any of the works had been banned or removed, saying they remained available to older students ‘in the middle school section of the media center.’” Preventing certain students from obtaining the book is a ban. If you ban me from eating in your restaurant, you can claim you haven’t banned me from eating, just in your place. Still a ban. (For librarians, they don’t seem to understand language.)
Second, let’s look at the process. One parent objected to the book and so it’s gone. This same parent spent March objecting to a lot of books, filing complaints against The ABCs of Black History, Cuban Kids, Countries in the News Cuba, and Love to Langston (a book of poems about beloved Black poet Langston Hughes).
Third, let’s look more closely at her specific objections of “indirect hate messages,” “cause confusion,” and “indoctrinate students.” Below are the pages she cited.
This is like those old Highlights Magazine picture puzzles where you had to find the tennis racquet hidden in the drawing of the zoo. Are we supposed to take seriously her charge that elementary kids will be indoctrinated by those nine lines? (I might go along with “cause confusion,” because you could put any poem in front of an elementary student, and they will probably be confused.) Indoctrination to this parent obviously means saying anything other than what she believes or saying anything she doesn’t understand.
The most revealing line in the complaint (see above) is where the form asks: “Are you aware of professional reviews on this material?” Her response: “I don’t need it.” Her arrogant statement clarifies that her opinions are not based on any kind of knowledge or critical thinking, just her gut reaction (i.e., her indoctrination). And that’s how she wants her child to be. It’s like having a chronic disease that is passed on to the child, except now they can cure it with medicine. But the parent says, “Nope. The disease was good enough for me and it will be good enough for my kid.”
Finally, let’s zoom in on this one parent who is able to remove books for all other students. An investigation into the parent, Daily Salinas, has shown her allegiance with far-right groups including the Proud Boys and QAnon (“Tweets Link Florida Parent At Center Of School Book Ban To White Supremacists, Far-Right Extremists”). This is part of a minority-rule campaign in which a handful of tantrum-throwing trolls control what our kids learn. According to a Washington Post investigation, the majority of book challenges across the country were filed by only eleven people (“Objection to sexual, LGBTQ content propels spike in book challenges”). Yes, eleven people control access to our what our children read!
This is the kind of clueless, fringe person influencing education in Florida with DeSantis’ blessing. And Floridians are letting her.