The “Shining City on a Hill” is Full of Fascists at Civil War

Part 3: Ron DeFascist’s Florida

Dear readers: I wanted in this essay to launch right into Ron DeSantis/DeFacist but last night’s atrocity on CNN (see my opening section) required some opening commentary.  Keeping up with the fascisation process is like playing whack-a-mole; it’s hard to keep up with the madness. Florida – the main topic today – is the nation’s (and perhaps now the world’s) leading fascist laboratory but it is hardly the only US state running hard with the neofascist/Amerikaner/Christian white nationalist agenda.  I am writing from one of those revanchist states right now (Iowa).  It’s bad and long past time to wake up to what’s right in front of us if we would take a hard and honest look.  

CNN’s Springtime for Trumpler

That was quite a fascistic shit-show that CNN broadcast last night – the Donald Trump Town Hall in New Hampshire.

Here’s an idea for  CNN primetime next week: bring on a large old man covered from head to toes in feces to intermittently vomit for an hour and a half. 

What timing: two days after a Manhattan jury found the revolting pig Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.

Way to go, CNN: host a Springtime for Trumpler event in the wake of a jury judgement confirming something most of politically and morally sentient humanity knows – that Trump is a physical as well as mental and political abuser of women.

Among the large number of lies told by the disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president and wannabe fascist strongman last night was the brazenly moronic claim to have never heard of Ms. Carroll, a woman he likely raped in a department store dressing room 27 years ago.

It was one bald-faced fascist lie after another from Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump last night: Black Lives Matter (BLM) has murdered people; “there was no reason to kill Ashli Babbitt;” the policeman who shot Babbitt is a “thug;” he has no idea who E. Jean  Carroll is; Vladimir Putin isn’t a war criminal;  he has “the absolute right to do whatever I want with” the classified documents he stashed in Mar a Lago sort when he left the White House; the master fabrication, the “leviathan lie” – the absurd, massively and multiply disproven claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The Big Orange Shit-pile’s (TBOS) characterization of the man who shot the fascist thug Babbitt is of course racist.  That officer is Black.

TBOS said he would pardon most of the fascist thugs who invaded the US Capitol in a putschist effort to cancel what’s left of American democracy on January 6.  TBOS took personal credit for the disastrous Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which is causing terror and misery for women and girls across the nation. And of course TBOS would not promise to honor the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if it doesn’t go his way.

The sickest part of CNN’s Springtime for Trumpler event came when crowd members laughed and snickered after TBOS called Ms. Carroll a “whack-job.” 

That is a reminder that the biggest problem with Trumpism isn’t TBOS: it’s the millions of mentally and morally demented Amerikaners who open their mouths and salivate when he tosses Nazi dog treats their way – and who perk up their ears when they hear his fascist dog whistles.  If he falls, the white supremacist women-hating revanchist-palingenetic nationalists of Amerika will latch on to another vicious vehicle (see below) for their odious hatred and paranoia.

Each of the eight or so CNN panel members who commented on the twisted Town Hall last night expressed disgust for TBOS’s performance. But none could accurately describe the performance as fascist (there’s a taboo around the F-word in mainstream media) and they of course offered no criticism of the network for shamefully airing it in the first place.  CNN can have its commentators distance themselves from the monster all they want but the truth of the matter is that they just helped NORMALIZE FASCISM by giving Herr Donald an hour and a half of free prime-airtime.  How shameful.

The commentator Ray Davis wrote me the following incisive reflection on why CNN committed this atrocity:

“American media is and has been under a Corporate Coup d'Etat for over 40 years now. It is purely an entertainment complex designed to empower the corporate influence over government and diminish the power of the consumer formerly known as citizen. As the omnipresent Internet eliminated advertising revenues from radio, newspapers and television, television desperately treads water in an ocean with no visible shores. This media-industrial-complex is a severely anxious enterprise with loyalties only to Wall Street’s billionaire investors. So Trump, a sure-fire bet for Barnum and Bailey ratings for a dumbed down American audience is the feature for tonight. As we move closer to environmental apocalypse, the revival of nuclear war and economic collapse an orange haired charlatan is tonight’s feature. As traditional distinctions between different forms of information dissolve, not only does politics become a form of entertainment, but entertainment becomes a form of politics. Are you not entertained?”(emphasis added.)

My only point of difference with this observation is that it does not seem to take seriously the specifically fascist nature of the Trump menace.  TBOS is much, much worse than a mere “orange haired charlatan.”  Hitler too was written off as a comic buffoon, very much like the fascist maniac (Buzz Windrip)  who becomes US president in Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here.  

DeSantis’s Florida as Fascist Laboratory

Dead of Night

But let me now turn to the originally intended lead subject of today’s Paul Street Report – another fascist from Florida. Donald Trump is hardly the only sick Joker card in the contemporary Republi-Nazi deck. The no. 2 Republican presidential contender is an arguably more dangerous fascist, Florida governor Ron DeSantis (Ron “DeFascist,” according to some Florida critics), who just signed a draconian six-week abortion bill in the dead of night – just another of the many ways in which he is turning Florida into the world’s leading fascist laboratory. (Most pregnant people don’t know they are pregnant by six weeks, making the bill a de facto abortion ban.)

Nativist Kidnapping

With the help of a dedicated Republi-fascist super-majority in the Florida legislature, DeFascist is vying with Trump for the title of Republican leader most committed to white nationalist authoritarianism. He and two other Republi-fascist governors have criminally kidnapped Latin American immigrants and dumped them in northern states to make a brutal nativist statement against the supposedly “radical left” Joe Biden’s purported “open border” policy.

Victims of Communism Day

Obsessed with the supposedly constantly lurking supposed menace of socialism, fascists regularly conflate centrism and liberalism with the “radical left,” socialism, communism, and Marxism. DeFascist is no exception. He and his paranoid-style legislative majority have passed a bill making November 7^th “Victims of Communism Day” – a day on which teachers are required to teach students about the horrors of Marxism.

Big Brother Book Banning and Racist-Sexist Whitewashing

DeFascist’s "Stop WOKE" law, currently blocked by a federal judge who called it “positively dystopian,” makes it illegal for schools to "indoctrinate" students into believing that anyone "is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex." The real intent of the law is to outlaw honest discussion of ongoing historical and societal racism and sexism (which has nothing to do with calling anyone “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive”). DeFascist and his legislature have compelled teachers and librarians to pull from their shelves books that deal with the banned topics of race, racism, gender, sexism, and gender identity.

DeFascist Rule means that a Florida Department of Education “media specialist” must approve any book before students can access it in schools and libraries. It also means that schools must adopt lesson plans that whitewash the history of slavery and racism in the U.S. and delete discussion of the Black freedom struggle.

This is fascism, more than slightly reminiscent of the Nazi Third Reich’s book banning and burning campaigns.

For Nazified Higher Education and FRT

The “anti-woke” DeFascist and his party have attacked AP African American studies courses. A new measure they hope to pass would make it illegal for public colleges and universities to offer major or minor degrees in gender or critical race studies.  It would force those educational institutions to offer general education classes that exclude “identity politics” (meaning honest discussion of  race, gender, and sexual orientation) and that “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization” (meaning they must celebrate white “European” culture).  The bill would essentially make the governor Florida’s pedagogy censor and put the hiring of faculty under the control of “campus governing boards” run by the governor. It would also  prohibit schools from funding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Under the Florida law CS/HB999, recently approved by the DeFascist Party in a 12-5 party line state House panel vote, diversity, equity and inclusion programs would be outlawed at Florida colleges and universities. The legislation lets each university’s Board of Trustees order a tenure review of professors at any time. Current Florida law limits such reviews to every five years.  (Tenure has existed in American universities for eight decades.  It was put in place to protect academic free speech from political interference and is directly threatened by the DeFascist bill.)

Anybody who doubts DeFascist’s desire to turn higher education into a propaganda arm of Christian white nationalism/neofascism should look at what he did to New College of Florida – a small public liberal arts college in Sarasota. The school has a reputation for friendliness towards  LGBT students and progressive values.  Last January, the governor DeSantis replaced 6 of the 13 members on the college’s board of trustees with far-right allies, including a frothing neofascist who has helped lead the right-wing war on supposedly “radical” and “Marxist” critical race theory (CRT) – that is on any honest discussion of racial oppression in American history past and present. The new DeFascist-crafted board forced out New College’s president and hired a right-wing ideologue to serve as interim president at a base salary of $699,000.

DeFascist’s state education commissioner expressed his desire for New College of Florida “to become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.” Hillsdale College is a private Christian white nationalist college notorious for advancing an extremist, far right agenda in southern Michigan.  Instead of supposedly radical CRT, Hillsdale promotes actually radical right-wing GRT, that is “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center accurately describes as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.” 

I call it FRT: fascist replacement theory.

(DeFascist’s assault on higher education is the inspiration behind TBOS’s recent claim that he wants “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left and Marxist maniacs” and will encourage the weaponization of the nation’s college accreditation system to force Marxists, socialists, and communists out of colleges and universities. Any actual “radical Left Marxist” veteran of US higher education like myself can testify that communists, socialists, and anarchists possess nothing remotely close to a hint of the power over US higher education that TBOS and DeFacist believe or pretend to believe “the radical left” has.)

“A Petri-Dish of Anti-Press Freedom”

Then there’s DeFascist’s attempt to turn Florida into “a petri-dish of anti-press freedom culture.”  A bill introduced in the Florida legislature bv DeFascist state representative Jason Brodeur would require bloggers who write about governor DeFascist to register with the state! “If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post,” the bill states, “the blogger must register” with the Florida government. The bill defines “elected state officer” as “the governor, the lieutenant governor, a cabinet officer, or any member of the legislature.” Failure to comply will lead to a $2,500 fine. 

This Big Brother bill goes so far down the authoritarian path that even the far-right Republican godfather New Gingrich calls it “insane.” DeFascist’s press secretary says the governor will consider signing it. 

DeFascist is currently pushing for the passage of a repressive bill that would punish journalists and social media users for calling out racial, gender, and sexual prejudice. The legislation would open those who dare to report on such bias to anti-defamation lawsuits. 

Squelching the Right to Protest

A DeFascist Florida state agency has ruled that that groups holding protests at the state Capitol must be “sponsored by a state agency or lawmaker and must align with the state agency missions.  “It’s crazy,” the president of the League of Women Voters told the Washington Post: “we have to go to the government for permission to speak about the government.”

Nativism on Steroids

DeFascist will soon implement what The News York Times calls “the toughest crackdown on undocumented immigration by any state in more than a decade”:

“The bills would expose people to felony charges for sheltering, hiring and transporting undocumented immigrants; require hospitals to ask patients their immigration status and report to the state; invalidate out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to undocumented immigrants; prevent undocumented immigrants from being admitted to the bar in Florida; and direct the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to provide assistance to federal authorities in enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.”

More Gun Massacres, Please

DeFascist recently signed a bill that ended HB 543, which permits Floridians to carry concealed weapons without a government-issued permit. Insanely enough, the bill was passed and signed as the nation was mired in a mass shooting epidemic amidst an explosion of gun carnage that has killed more than 14,000 Americans so far this year.

To Abolish the Other Ruling Class Party

Oh, by the way, A member of the DeFascist Republican Party has advanced a bill to outlaw the Democratic Party.

DeFascist and TBOS Coming to the Aspiring “Florida of the North”

The recent conventional wisdom holds that the unmitigated authoritarian Christian white nationalist uber-asshole Ron DeFascist is fading relative to Herr Trump in the 2024 Republikan presidential contest. Only time will tell if TBOS can maintain his lead over DeFascist as his legal troubles mount in coming months. It’s too early to count DeFascist out. Even if the Florida governor fails to win the Republican POTUS nomination, moreover,  he remains supremely dangerous as a hands-on fascist policymaker and leader – an inspiration and role model for top fascist monsters in numerous other red (try brown) states. This despicable Energizer Bunny of vicious and vindictive racism, sexism, nativism, anti-Leftism, anti-liberalism and LGBT-bashing is coming to one of those sorry states – Iowa – in two days. Iowa, the once semi-progressive and half-reasonable Midwestern state that is now ruled by despicable LGBT-bashing and women-hating white supremacist cretins – by malevolent, grain-fed Republi-fascist porkers who boast that they are turning their Big Ag-poisoned state into “the Florida of the North.” Right-wing Iowans can goose-step their asses off at a Trump campaign and hate rally in Des Moines on Sunday afternoon and try to get a glimpse of DeFascist in Cedar Rapids later that night.