DeSantis's Florida

I think I haven't put my personal stake in the ground here much about Ron DeSantis (other than a few brief mentions like this), probably because what he has been doing is just so wild and yet not that much beyond how wild Florida has been in recent years, especially within our recent MAGA context. The Stand Your Ground law was wild, for instance, but has become normal.

But today is the day, I think. As often happens with me, it starts with a Tweet, which in this case was this from a sociology professor named Samuel Perry:

Whatever's going down in Florida is truly wild. And 40% of the country wants it to happen everywhere. And it could.

The responses range from several people who didn't seem to be aware and asked, What? What's happening in Florida?, to people who gave tweet-length lists (below), to many claiming it's just as bad in other states, to this fun pairing:

40% is low.

I think that 40% is really high.

There were two summaries that went like this:

In Florida, our government is telling us:
Everyone carrying guns makes us safer.
Vaccines make us sick.
Voting restrictions promote democracy.
Banning books improves education.
Taking away our rights keeps us free.
@AndrewWarrenFL

I’m not sure which recent development in Florida you’re referring to. The attack on LGBTQ people, banned books in schools, whited-washed curricula, high school girls having to report their menstrual cycles…
thicketcrawl

Neither of those folks specifically mentioned DeSantis's ban on AP African American Studies classes, nor his use of state money to airlift people from the Texas border to Massachusetts. Also not mentioned: The specifics of setting people up to be arrested for voter fraud just to give yourself a photo op, or the elementary school teachers threatened with felonies if they don't remove all the books from their classrooms, banning trans health care at Florida universities, taking over the board of a university...

I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of things, too. There's just so much.

The kicker to all of it is this:

What I find especially wild is non-coverage of it by leading, mainstream news outlets.
Bruce Wilson