Foundation and Union

I have been trying to figure out why our country is so riven.   It is not as though we have not been riven before, as in the 1930s when racism and anti-Semitism bloomed like an Onion at the Outback Steakhouse.   Middle American nativism, reflected in the ravings of Father Coughlin, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Bund and even Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero.  

 

Philip Roth writes convincingly of this in his novel of alternative history. “The Plot Against America,” where a sycophantic Rabbi becomes the dupe of Charles A. Lindbergh, who wins election to the Presidency against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the election of 1940.

 

In that novel, which is, in fact, based upon the true historical zeitgeist of America in 1940, Lindbergh and his anti-Semitic Secretary of the Interior, Henry Ford, send Jewish boys to families in the south and Midwest to be “Americanized.”  The novel became a television mini-series, with the conservative Rabbi, Lionel Bengelsdorf, convincingly being played by John Turturro, and shown to be a foolish dupe of Lindbergh. Rabbi Bengelsdorf is promised a position of authority and power in the Lindbergh administration to convince Jews to vote for him.

 

Anyway, it all turns out pretty sour for Bengelsdorf when he learns that Lindbergh, after the election, no longer regards him of any use. While Lindbergh does not fit the role of confidence man, he did deceive Bengelsdorf to act in his behalf by betraying his own people.  Lindbergh was, after all, a Nazi sympathizer, with no particular affection for Jews, whom he wrongfully thought had too much “influence” over President Roosevelt.

 

Roosevelt, meanwhile, had all he could do to keep political peace at home and to thoughtfully bend the United States into a fight for democracy and to save England from defeat in 1940 by the Nazi tyranny.  It was not easy, as James MacGregor Burns writes in his brilliant biopic “Roosevelt the Soldier of Freedom.”  America in 1940 was a hotbed of anti-Semitism as well as deep racial injustice and isolationism. People fleeing war ravaged Europe could not get visas to enter the United States.   African Americans were being lynched every day and the “America First” movement was coordinating rallies in Madison Square Garden with the Nazi-American Bund to keep America from fighting a war for “the Jews.”

 

Fast forward 80 years. Immigration policy remains a fiery cauldron of discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and fear.  Fear of those different.  Fear of those who do not look like us.  The nameless fear of fear itself, as invoked in FDR’s first inaugural address (1933).

 

the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance

 

This speech, given at the depth of the Great Depression, where soup kitchens lined Pennsylvania Avenue, the dust bowl caused famine in the Midwest, where unemployment was 25%, where an army of veterans descended on Washington to protest and were dispersed by the Army, shows how leaders that care about their flock act.  

 

They calm fears, they create unity, they lead the blind to quench their thirst. They do not steal classified documents, they do not enrich themselves at the public expense, they do not lie about election results, stoking fear and discord.  They do not slither like snakes, away from public accountability and double down on their wickedness.  They do not consolidate power based upon prejudice and fear. And they do not corrupt and pass fleas upon all those that lie down with them.

 

This nation was built on many different foundations.  A living Constitution, but one that must move with the times, the labor of slaves and immigrants, the dispossession of native Americans, of land stolen from Mexicans, of imperial hubris, of racial injustice, but also of decency, and the respect of our norms and institutions.  The rule of law.

 

Occasionally we take a detour, we forget our past and partially re-live it.  But in the end, we must believe that it will all turn out right.  It took revolution, civil war, civil rights movements, protests, civil disobedience; but we must finally recognize what unites us as a people.  The sticky glue that holds us together. This struggle has existed since the foundation of the union, and it will continue to exist as we labor toward a more perfect union. Not disunion.  But union.

 

 

 

 

 

Napoleon without the Bonaparte

Among the enigmatic politicians of the current crop, Ron DeSantis begs the question whether he really believes some of the things he says. If he is a hypocrite that is bad.  If not, that is arguably worse.   Not content with simply pandering to his aspirational MAGA base, he is pitching his divisive agenda to the American public.  He looms, supposedly with the benefit of a Harvard diploma, like some ostensibly Trumpian avatar, minus the drama. But Trump fans like the drama, the excitement, the apprentice rancor.   Rumor has it that DeSantis dislike index compares favorably (or unfavorably) with Ted Cruz, another darling of the extreme right. Apparently when DeSantis was at Harvard no one spoke to him, recognizing him as the martinet he was, thus rivaling Cruz’s reputation as stated by early (not the later version) Lindsey Graham, “that if someone shot Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, no one would care.” DeSantis is a Cruz fellow traveler.  

 

DeSantis became governor of Florida in 2015, squeaking by Andrew Gillam, later implicated in a drug scandal from which he was recently acquitted, after spiraling downward in a vortex of shame and guilt.  No one really knows whether he would have succeeded as governor, but he certainly failed in handling his loss. So much for picking yourself up when you are down.  Well, we escaped Gillam’s dysfunctional persona, receiving an authoritarian wannabe instead.  The important question, however, is why we are faced with such glum choices?

 

Politics is a shaky game, drawing, arguably, on those who do not have the ability to gain prominence in private life; H.L. Mencken’s aphorism aside—"no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”  

 

Loyally in the corner of DeSantis ( of course, only if Trump is not the MAGA nominee), Marco Rubio is evidence of that maxim, bashing the verdict of the New York jury finding his putative friend, Donald J Trump liable for defamation. As if either of them were capable of friendship to anyone. 

 

Attorneys can be disciplined for generically denigrating the justice system.   Attorneys should state that while they disagree with a verdict, they should not bash the system of justice after a disappointment. This is an ethical violation.  The truth is, however, that Rubio failed in his attempt to gain a large salaried position anywhere, so he changed his mind and went back to Washington, courtesy of the Florida electorate.  Being a mediocre lawyer apparently is no impediment in Florida to being a mediocre senator.  

 

And let’s not forget DeSantis potential loyalist Rick Scott, that other jewel of the Senate whose company was fined billions for Medicare fraud, and who, as chairman, lost the GOP a bunch of seats in the last election. 

 

Within this rogue’s gallery of panderers, DeSantis paradigmatically excels, attempting to woo Trump followers to his culture wars, conducting his own policies of grievance with a sycophantic, spineless legislature passing a six-week abortion ban, making it harder to sue extortionate insurance companies and businesses, eliminating licenses and training for concealed carrying of guns and virtually assuring us another shoot out, almost anywhere in our state. Florida already has suffered its fair share of tragedy.  Perhaps a gun fight at the magic kingdom, home of the subversive mouse who refuses to harken to the demands of DeSantis’ cultural imperatives, including homophobia and nixing anti-gender affirming care.  There are always Nobel prize-winning authors’ books to ban. There are always “thoughts and prayers,” I guess, to address the gun issue, and don’t forget, we haven’t the foggiest notion where the governor is going now that his travel itinerary has been sequestered.

 

There’s transparency for ya.

 

Already, DeSantis has done his best to destroy the academic freedom at highly respected New College, appointing right-wing Republican president of the University of Florida, the Governor assuming the role of education curriculum czar so students can be stripped of their secular and misguided liberal “woke” tendencies.  The methodology for this is banning subversive history books like the Diary of Anne Frank and Tony Morrison’s “Beloved.” Apparently, real history is verboten in MAGA world.

 

Good luck encouraging hormonal college students at State Universities in abstaining from sex, forbidding abortion after six weeks, putting a state prison next to Disney World, banning books, removing the tenure of “woke” professors, denying black history, politicizing the education system, expecting a plethora of guns to not result in more deaths, inserting religious fundamentalism in the schools, and stoking the cultural divisions of Floridians.   We have seen Donald Trump, we have known Donald Trump, and Governor DeSantis, you are no Donald Trump.  But you are no Napoleon either.

 

“A Black Man who hates his own People.”

 

Bud Harris,  World War II bomber pilot and highly decorated war hero, and a personal hero of mine, coined this phrase to me during the Anita Hill scandal at Thomas’s confirmation hearings in 1991.  Bud has passed but his words  and prescience linger on.

 

A misunderstanding of one’s own identity is the cornerstone of being out of synchronization with one’s peers.  I think I know who I am, and if I do not, I wish someone would tell me that I do not.

 

Someone should tell Clarence Thomas who he is.  

 

He is of humble origins but has forgotten them.  He has aspired to the American dream, climbing the heights of jurisprudence at least on a superficial level.  Yale Law School. Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by a war hero President, George H.W. Bush.  Never mind.

 

Some of his dubious accomplishments are:   stopping the Florida recount in 2000, deciding that the second amendment permitted individuals, not only well-regulated militias; to carry guns (2008) (CDC figures show that gun violence affects blacks twice as much as whites); allowing dark money to corrupt campaign finance (2010), diminishing anti-discrimination features of the Voting Rights act of 1965; breaking down the wall of separation of state and religion (2014).  His latest notable accomplishment is issuing the lone dissent in turning over Trump’s purloined classified documents and asking his colleagues if he had to disclose special favors, gifts, accommodations and private jet travel from his billionaire friends. Since these colleagues said “no,” he did not.  Why would a Supreme Court justice need ethical advice?  Really?  

 

And of course, the fact that his wife and he never discussed any of the above for their 35 years of marriage, not even her wack-a-doodle efforts to aid the Capitol insurrectionists.  Only morons think that husbands and wives discuss anything at all.  And let’s not forget his consistent opposition to women’s reproductive rights as well as joining in with his Taliban oriented colleagues in striking down Roe v. Wade.  This is the pendulum swung like a guillotine.

 

The consequences of these ideological bête noirs have plunged our country deeper into the mud.  Virtually unlimited access to all kinds of firearms, mass shootings with weapons of war-- legally purchased, the states fighting over some states criminalizing health care providers in other states where abortion is legal, possible prosecution of women travelling from their home state to obtain an abortion, and states acting like this was the 1850s by pursuing individuals into other states to enforce their retrogressions.  Like the fugitive slave act.  Like the Dred Scott decision.  And now Massachusetts declaring war on Texas over contraception pills.

 

And here in Florida, our DeSantis rubber stamp legislature now wishes to cap abortion at six weeks when women may not even know they are pregnant.  Thank you, Justice Thomas.

 

Does Clarence Thomas know who he is?  Well, forgive the pun, but the jury has come back after deliberating since he was appointed in 1991.  In 32 years, Thomas has done his fair share in turning the founding fathers in their constitutional graves, and has done more to damage the principles of the republic than anyone since John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, both of whom had the honesty to announce their treachery by leaving the Union.

 

Thomas should announce his decency by resigning from the Supreme Court.    Congress should announce its decency by calling corruption hearings to investigate the justices who have sanctimoniously and hypocritically said nothing about Thomas, by filing articles of impeachment or seeking his resignation, as they did when they were a fair and deliberative body when they asked Abe Fortas to do so for far less financial indiscretions and by accepting a $15,000 fee for lecturing at American University.  Fortas stepped down.  So should Thomas.

 

REPLACE THE SECOND AMENDMENT

 

More dead children, just now in Nashville, continuing shattered families, shooting in the streets, massacrers in elementary schools, twenty state legislatures now passing laws allowing open carry of guns, including the Florida House now passing permitless carry? WTF. I have a carry permit.  I had to be fingerprinted and pass an elementary course to be sure I knew how to handle a gun.  Just like driving a car.  

 

The second amendment currently reads:

 

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”   This is a collective right.

 

A proposed second amendment should read:

 

“Citizens shall have the right to bear arms in the common defense of the United States, or as members of an authorized military organization or, as subject to regulation, designated by the several states or by the United States.  Congress shall have the authority to enforce said rights and privileges by the appropriate legislation.”  

 

This is still a collective right, but much clearer. The courts will not have to continue a Kabuki dance regulating sales of guns because of a constitutional straight jacket imposed upon them by the original second amendment, written in 1787 and as interpreted by Antonin Scalia, also born in 1787.

 

This new 21^st century version will still allow people to bear arms and will give the states continued concurrent authority to regulate sale and carry.  It’s not as strong as it should be, but it will clarify the constitutionality of the states and Federal government being able to regulate guns and do away with Antonin Scala’s disastrous ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. This decision created a constitutional Frankenstein.

 

Heller, by one vote, turned a previously meaningful constitutional amendment on its head, by stating the right was individual, not collective.

 

Heller egregiously said It had nothing to do with militias, intended by the framers to protect the states, recently former independent colonies, against the tyranny of the crown or of the central government; it had to do with individual rights to carry guns, not a well-regulated militia.  John Paul Stevens was correct in his dissent.  It was all about militias.

 

Since then, the courts, legislatures and politicians have used the misguided decision written by a conservative ideologue to intellectually masturbate over the meaning of the comma in the second amendment.  Enough already.  Children, students and worshippers, cry out for help from their blood-soaked graves and their families, traumatized forever, ask “why?” to their deaf-eared lawmakers.

 

 

Law abiding citizens owning guns will still be able to keep them for self-defense.  I own a gun.  I enjoy going to the range from time to time.  And several times, late at night, when someone knocked on my door and would not identify themselves, I felt secure that I had an effective defense if, heaven forbid, necessary.

 

But the current Second Amendment prevents meaningful gun legislation.   My new version still gives states power to regulate gun sales.  It should be less subject to challenges that have filled volumes of law books. 

 

Other democracies have meaningful gun laws.  We no longer live in the wild west. People must be educated to understand that their rights are not being sacrificed to a totalitarian state.  That is not what the framers intended.   The preamble to the constitution says “…to provide for the common defense…”.  That was what they meant when they talked about militias. Since Antonin Scalia’s majority 5-4 decision in Heller v. D.C. stating that there is an individual right to possess guns, rather than a collective right, there has been a Mount Everest of gun litigation often financed by the gun lobby, to ensure that everyone, including lunatics who want a gun, can get one. 

 

This revised amendment would help clarify and lessen the mountain of litigation challenging the constitutionality of the second amendment, still allow gun ownership, but also allow meaningful gun regulation by the states and by Congress.  King George III is not coming to get us.

 

Never mind lip service paid by legislators receiving large campaign donations from the NRA or its distraction of a “mental health issue.” Or providing “thoughts and prayers,” to those poor family members who have seen their children and loved ones slaughtered in a bullet-riddled storm of blood-spattered classrooms, college campuses, places of worship and rock concerts.   And pay no heed to highly salaried NRA Gucci-loafered consultants who sail the Aegean Sea on private yachts fleecing their membership for donations to finance their cynical voyages.

 

Why the West is allowing Ukrainians to bleed and die.

 

 

During his “wilderness years,” Churchill understood Adolf Hitler’s ambitions, presciently shouting to a deaf world the dangers ahead.  The Rhineland.  Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia gobbled up while appeasers twiddled. England and France could have sent Hitler packing.  Instead, they gave him three more years to arm.  It was too late. Fifty million died. 

 

Stalin, double-crossed by his former Poland-dividing German friend, decided too late that he had to fight.  Millions of Soviets soldiers and civilians died because of his dithering.  FDR had to contend with America Firsters and could have entered the war sooner; he had third term political considerations in in 1940; but he knew he had to fight, too. Eventually. 

 

We relive the mistakes of history at our own peril, like Wiley Cayote chasing the Road Runner.   Putin invaded a sovereign country.   Stop him, Germans.  Stop him, Frenchmen.  Stop him, NATO.  Stop him, America.  Ukrainian children are freezing and starving.  People are losing their lives to a Russian bloodthirsty pyromaniac, a Hannibal Lecter.

 

Here’s the rub: using time as his weapon, like Hitler, Putin is conscripting, propagandizing, and  gradually conscripting massive manpower—constructing his war machine, gaslighting his people, building support, slowly, craftily, cunningly, odiously. Russians believe his lies about Ukraine as a Nazi haven, a virtual pizza parlor filled with basement dwelling pedophiles, or in this case, jackbooted storm troopers. Despite President Zelensky’s Churchillian appearance before congress, we must move swiftly, because time is on Putin’s side.  A war of attrition is not on Ukraine’s side. Even with US Ordinance, rockets, drones, artillery.   Western fear is Putin’s ally.  Time is Putin’s ally.

 

Wars start slowly but inevitably spiral out of control; aid the west provides the Ukrainians resembles aid the US gave to England in 1940, followed by exponential materiel increase from the great American “arsenal of democracy.” It was not enough. Not in 1940 and not enough in 2022; it will not be enough in 2023, 2024, 2025 as this war drags on.  Too many Russians, too much manpower.  Too much time.

 

Victory requires a credible threat of NATO mobilization—an army ready to do battle.  And an ultimatum.   But that will not happen, I fear.

 

Billions of dollars for weapons in a proxy war with Ukrainians fighting Russians has been impactful. Americans can watch Netflix war movies while Ukrainians bleed.  They can watch Tom Hanks storm the beach at Normandy.  Much less dangerous.    Let’s just ship some more rockets to Ukraine instead.  Yellowstone is on. Even so, it was heartening to see the bipartisan support for Ukraine in the Congress.

 

Military planners in the Pentagon and in Western European capitals should be preparing for a wider war. It would be malfeasant for them not to do.   We just don’t realize it yet.  NATO is obliged to tell Putin to get out of Ukraine or face an allied army to evict him.   Putin must be given an ultimatum to get out or face military force.   Germans and French, British and American, Canadian and Australian.   Putin understands naked power. The west must mobilize.  He does not understand anything else.  Lenin said, “push forward the bayonet.  If you find soft flesh, push.  If you find steel, retreat.”   Putin learned Lenin in school; Lenin is in his DNA.  He learned it in the KGB. He learned it in Mother Russia.  He wants it all.  He is Czar Nicholas, Comrade Stalin, Comrade Lenin all rolled into a painting in the Hermitage, his hometown museum, where he went as a schoolboy, where his parents took him, where he learned of the greatness of Russia.  Where the Czar had palaces.

 

Russians never had democratic traditions.   Ask Nicholas II and his family, brutally executed by Bolsheviks.   Ask the millions starved by Stalin in the Ukraine during his communized agriculture plan.  Ask the people sent to the Gulag, or the Hungarians who dared to revolt against the Soviet hammer and sickle.  Ask the subjugated Poles carved up by Stalin and Hitler.  Ask all of the subjugated and terrorized people who suffered behind the iron curtain. Ask Alexi Navalny, a political prisoner, poisoned once, and now jailed in a Russian gulag.

 

A delusional revanchist KGB agent in the Kremlin tries to raise the Soviet corpse by terrorizing a sovereign nation.   A nation which had its own history before Lenin and his desciples created a dark Bolshevik empire.

 

NATO, led by Germany and France and then the United States, face the eventual inevitability of mobilizing an army to kick Putin out of Ukraine and Crimea.  The alternative is too grim to contemplate.   Trench warfare.  Stalemate.  Ukrainians under siege.  Massive Russian armies. Possibly being defeated.  World economic disruption.  Continued war crimes. A war of attrition, cold and misery.  I hope I am wrong about this.

 

Western ambitions about this outrageous war ending through negotiation are delusional.   If Putin sees that we are serious about the sovereignty of nations, he must face a serious military threat-- mobilization of NATO forces.  Only then he will likely back down.  Until then brave Ukrainians will bleed, freeze and die bearing the brunt of our fear. 

 

 

A Halloween Scare

The election is coming, and I am frightened, yet hoping our nation will pass through this macabre dance with lies and propagandists on social media and right-wing news networks that have gone a long way to prove that telling a lie often enough makes it the truth.

Never, during my lifetime, have I seen such rampant, angry, cultural division in this nation.  Never have I seen such demagoguery and hatred.  Ginned up not only by extremist media, but a rogue former president, and a crew of cowardly congressional consenters.  These are not mere policy differences.  

I cannot, for the life of me, understand how the great arsenal of democracy, martialing its mammoth industrial might, fighting the odious tyranny of Nazidom, the cold war oppression of Stalinism, sacrificing the flower of its youth in two sanguinary world wars and an even bloodier civil war, could now fall victim to scoundrels whose only objectives are power based on the exploitation of the darker aspects of human nature and who now deny the validity of the most closely monitored election in the nation’s history.  The big lie.

We have come through a great pandemic; the miracle of medical research has saved millions of lives.  We are entering a period of exponential technological change, though frightening, that promises to save the planet from the worst outcomes of human despoliation.  Humanity will inevitably triumph. Technology will improve human existence; it always has, even though it has often caused displacement, economic tribulation, and fear.  Even if it is true that life must be a class struggle, as Marx wrote--class warfare,  the arc of history has bent toward justice, as Dr. King said.

If human nature causes the remnants of tribalism and reptilian self-preservation to abnegate a more diverse and tolerant society, then the normative, civilized forward motion of society, the rule of law, means nothing.  If this is true, then hope dims.  Society is destined to a dark Trumpian dystopia.  “I have got mine, so fuck the rest of you.”  Let the rule of the jungle prevail. Every man for himself.   This is not what the founding fathers intended.   Even though the curse of slavery was baked into our constitution, this is not what they intended.  They intended the Union to become more perfect.  They knew it was not perfect—it was a compromise.  But they hoped that it could move toward more perfection.

Even so, different factions militate to preserve their identity, fearing a loss of self, a “replacement” by those they think less worthy.   What is that identity?  How does it differentiate us from one another?    Cultish religiosity and white supremacy that seeks to impose its rules on others, selfishly assuming that one culture is better than another?  Human DNA is all the same.  Differences in education and in societal norms are what separate us from beasts.  Human sociology confirms this premise. Some believe that theology is the curse of mankind, others believe it is the salvation.   The state has no place in this debate.  

Ignorance is the seed of prejudice, education the seed of tolerance.  But perhaps not always, some say, many educated Germans, the nation of Schiller, Wagner and Beethoven gave us Himmler and Heydrich.  But that was an education based on lies—geared upon the debasement of human fellows—a grotesque version of Eugenics.   Education perverted by lies is not education This behavior is true today of those who feed the public misinformation.

The norms of society rather than the capricious rule of men are what holds us above the savage beast.  It is not just the written law, it is the understanding and compassion of society that makes it validate our existence as anything other than debased.  Diminishing societal norms of decency and tolerance threaten our freedom.

Attaching oneself to convenient untruths often provides a path to power at the expense of the less entitled.   Something about that resonates today, although institutional anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, went hand in hand with the racist Jim Crow south.   The United States abrogated open immigration in 1924.   Before that almost anyone could come, and in coming, helped build the colossus of America—the railroads, the steel mills, the automobile and an ideal that America was exceptional.  That reality is still true, if we let it be, moving the arc of history to the better.   If the “evil that men do lives after them and the good is oft interred with their bones,” as Mark Antony cynically said in his eulogy to Caesar, then we are obliged as a society to make that not happen.  We must strive to make the good live after us.

Somehow, I want to believe that we will come through, as “Americans will always do the right thing, after all other possibilities are exhausted,” attributed to either Abba Eban or Winston Churchill, take your pick.

But I still am frightened, in fact, scared stiff.

How a heavy-handed demagogue threatens to shatter our democracy.

 

 

What has happened to America?  Do we remain racists?  Are we, as Charles Blow of the New York Times argues, that people who vote for Republicans are themselves representative of malignant white supremacists?  Do they really wish to restore America as it existed in its original form?  No votes for women, blacks, the return of Christian institutional religion, votes for landowners only, enslavement of blacks, a Senate representing only 3,000,000 Americans, most of whom could not vote, created only as a malapportioned 2/3  compromise to appease slave states finally resulting in a bloody Civil War, staining the soil with an avalanche of blood? Is that where we are headed?

 

In the early 20^th century, quotas kept out immigrants by nationality, not merit, beginning in 1924.   In the Jim Crow the South, no black voting, segregation, lynching.  The GOP, the party of Lincoln, now has devolved into the likes of Kevin McCarthy, and Mitch McConnell, who sanctimoniously spoke on the Senate floor and blamed Trump for the Capitol insurrection, after not voting to convict him.  Had he lined up the votes for impeachment in his caucus, we would  spared Trump’s empowering election deniers and promising to run again.

This is unimaginable. Faulkner said, “this is a tale of sound and fury told by an idiot.”

 

Two countries of red and blue, despising each other and looking at the same facts, drawing completely different conclusions?  Thank you, avaricious Rupert Murdoch and your cast of greedy misanthropes, for spewing years of propaganda and contributing to the skewing of public opinion far beyond our wildest imagination. Thank you, Rupert, for promoting the big lie, and enriching your already swollen bank accounts at the expense of our Nation.  There is a special place in hell for you, perhaps the Australian outback. Go back there and take Tucker Carlson with you, the obsequious, preppy demon who could be the world’s worst human being.

 

In Florida, DeSantis wants no grade school instruction about the enslavement of black people?  No books in the schools that allude to racism in America?  Massive resignations among schoolteachers who do not wish to comport with Governor DeSantis’s concept of Eurocentric, Christian education? What about the other religions, many of which do not pray, or believe in a Christian god?  Breaking the wall of separation of church and state, which allowed many different denominations to thrive in America, unlike European state religions. Stifling intellectual discourse among academics as too “woke?”  Or woke people barring different viewpoints to be expressed? (a fault of the left) Banning of books that accurately reflect the history of the United States?  Books that tell the story of the dark stain of racism in America?  Biased maps drawn showing that in “Colonial” America there was very little importation of slaves, but no mention of “breeding” African slaves like cattle during the 18^th century post-colonial South to pick cotton, feeding the growing economy of the Northern mills? Suppressing the truth that 25% of the building of the American economy and railroads was on the backs of slaves?  Removing a lawfully elected State Attorney who did not agree with his idea of prosecuting teenagers for their reproductive choices? Telling Disney “Don’t say gay,” and threatening one of the, if not the, largest employer in the state to adhere to his homophobic agenda?  I am unaware of a course at Harvard Law School on becoming a facsimile of big brother, a proto-Mussolini, a propaganda minister, an anti-gay activist, or a panderer to the worst social instincts of humankind.

 

Republicans like our fascist inclined, heavy handed governor DeSantis are busy suppressing the vote, separating women from their reproductive choices, attempting to pervert the constitution, taking advantage of Republican gerrymandered overrepresentation in the House of Representatives and the malapportioned Senate to cravenly pander to the gullible electorate by stoking their underlying fears of “others?” 

 

The DeSantis “Stop Woke” Act, now temporarily blocked by a federal judge, attempts to control how businesses address race, gender and nationality.  This is the cheapest, most craven way to run for President of the United States.   DeSantis’ ambitions have moved beyond the State of Florida, inserting himself as a smarter avatar of Donald Trump aping Trump’s racism?

 

Reelecting Ron DeSantis would insidiously reaffirm the worst possible values for Florida and for the Nation. The problem is, do most Floridians agree with DeSantis?   If so, the future is both frightening and depressing.