#neo-fascist

So what could be worse than Donald Trump? The answer: Ron DeSantis. A Trump with lots of experience in government who knows what he is doing but with the same neo-fascist tendencies. That’s DeSantis in a nutshell.

The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida published an editorial warning about Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Now, as the ex-president sees DeSantis emerge as his biggest rival, Trump must have buyer’s remorse. You can practically hear the dishware breaking at Mar-a-Lago.

The recent (and welcome news) that Trump’s grip is weakening with Republican voters also positions DeSantis as his strongest potential rival for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. That’s bad news for the country.

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A University of New Hampshire poll found Trump and DeSantis statistically tied in that first-primary state. DeSantis continues to play coy, but his intentions are obvious. He’s raising money out in Utah this week. He recently hosted a select, very private gathering of other Republican governors in Fort Lauderdale, the sort of thing that would-be presidents do.

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“Just because DeSantis is smarter than Trump doesn’t mean that he is any less dangerous. In fact, he might be an even bigger threat for that very reason,” wrote columnist Max Boot in The Washington Post.

That’s right. Anyone who admires DeSantis from afar should come to Florida with eyes wide open. After winning by just 32,463 votes, he has governed with total contempt toward the 4 million people who didn’t vote for him.

He’s as authoritarian as Trump, just as disdainful of democracy, no less polarizing and openly hostile to scientific evidence that doesn’t conform to his narrow agenda.

Although DeSantis didn’t endorse Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election, he is not willing to refute it and he still won’t say whether Biden was fairly elected. He has scorned the House committee’s brilliant investigation into Trump’s attempted coup.

DeSantis is a bully. No Florida governor has been as ruthless or effective in dominating his state, owning the legislature and trampling dissent.

The governor who boasts of empowering parents mocked school kids in his presence for wearing masks to protect themselves against the coronavirus, as their parents had told them. Calibrating his political appeal to voters who put selfishness over social responsibility, DeSantis appointed a quack physician to run the health department. The quack refused to order vaccines for children under age 5 and intends to deny gender dysphoria treatment to young people who depend on Medicaid.

DeSantis and his drones in the Legislature ruthlessly put down school boards and local governments that sought to save lives with masks, vaccines and social distancing requirements.

It’s terrifying to contemplate DeSantis in the Oval Office when the next pandemic inevitably comes along.

When Nazis picketed at Orlando, he was silent. Exploiting society’s vulnerability to cultural warfare, DeSantis has prohibited schools, colleges and even private businesses from dealing honestly with racism and its ugly history. His law labeled “don’t say gay” by critics openly caters to homophobia, chilling sex education in schools and putting students at risk of being outed to their parents.

For Disney World’s mild opposition, DeSantis got the Legislature to repeal its taxing district, putting the company at risk and threatening to bankrupt two counties that might inherit Disney’s debts. He carried his culture warfare into the selection of public school textbooks. A new civics training course for teachers maintains that the Founders did not intend to separate church and state, which is grossly false.

When the Legislature tried to honor the Fair Districts amendments to Florida’s Constitution, DeSantis demanded, and got, a ruthless Congressional gerrymander calculated to replace two Black Democrats with white Republicans.

He signed a 15-week abortion ban that openly flouts Florida’s constitutional right to privacy, secure in the belief that a Supreme Court turned flagrantly reactionary by his appointees will be just as contemptuous of the Constitution. He has boasted of packing the appellate bench with fellow ideologues from the Federalist Society.

He spends $120,000 a year of our tax dollars on a press secretary whose principal duty seems to be slandering his opponents. Anyone opposing his anti-gay bill, she said, was probably a “groomer” — a sexual predator.

Unless you’re a far-right homophobic theocrat, there’s little good to be said about Ron DeSantis.

The editorial ends with...

Voters in America’s 49 other states, take note.

DeSantis is running for re-election this year. If he is defeated, he’s probably out of the 2024 presidential race. So now is a good time to make sure that friends and family who live in Florida are registered to vote. If anybody has moved since the last election they need to register at their new address.

By Roman Ardelyan December 7: When you hear the phrase "European nationalism,” what comes to your mind first? Most likely, you will remember Marine Le Pen and her supporters, Hungarian President Viktor Orban with his anti-migrant policies, and the German ultra-rightists who organized the pogroms in Chemnitz. What about the Romanian nationalists? Most likely, this question will stump you, right? It’s not surprising, because the European media practically do not cover this dangerous phenomenon. But in vain: the main feature of the Romanian ultra-right, unlike their “colleagues” from other countries, is not hatred of migrants, but the desire to redraw the map of Europe. This phenomenon is called “unionism” (from the Romanian term Unirea) and envisages the liquidation of Romania’s neighboring Republic of Moldova, as well as the annexation of part of Ukraine.

So Ron DeSantis, one of whose goals is to keep people who don’t like him from voting, was the star of his own TV special where he complained that 20 votes out of 11,100,000 cast in Florida in the 2020 presidential election were illegal.

So that’s 1 out of 555,000 votes were allegedly illegally cast.

Only 17 of the 20 are in custody. 3 culprits apparently are still roaming the streets and swamps of Florida – poised to repeat their nefarious deed.

For the sake of comparison, 1,290 murders were committed in Florida in 2020. Shouldn’t those cops standing behind DeSantis in that pic to act as window dressing be doing real police work rather than acting as political props for a neo-fascist governor?

The event included all of the necessary law-and-order dress-up: Held in the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, DeSantis spoke in front of a wall of uniformed law enforcement officers and behind a podium labeled “ELECTION INTEGRITY.”

The governor’s remarks were punctuated by the cheers of an audience in the courtroom’s jury box and public gallery, which held up signs, distributed minutes earlier, that read “MY VOTE COUNTS.” 

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Joe Scott, Broward County’s supervisor of elections, told The Miami Herald his office hadn’t received any advanced notice on the substance of the press event; rumors swirled ahead of time that DeSantis was coming down to announce Scott’s suspension.

“They were very mysterious about it, with everybody. Nobody really knew what it was about,” Scott told the Herald. “You’re making an election-related announcement in my backyard, and they didn’t tell me anything about it.”

Yep, this was a political event done at a local government facility without approval of officials. I wonder who set this up. 🤨

More important than the details of the alleged violations, apparently, was praising Ron DeSantis. Ashley Moody, Florida’s attorney general, commended “our very detail-oriented governor.” And DeSantis himself paused at one point to note the source of all the hubbub.

“This was my idea!” the governor exclaimed.

Banned in the USA

RISING SCHOOL BOOK BANS THREATEN FREE EXPRESSION AND STUDENTS’ FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS Book bans in public schools have recurred throughout American history, and have long been an issue of concern to PEN America, as a literary and free expression advocacy organization. Over the past nine months, the scope of such censorship has expanded rapidly. In response, PEN America has collated an Index of…

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