It isn't Hitler shit, it's George Wallace shit. Populist governors get all book-burny every 20 years or so. The basic problem for conservatives, however, is that the culture is always progressive so what happens is old cranky white assholes remind everyone what cranky white assholes they are and as soon as the moment has passed, everyone conveniently disregards the lather they were in and then aligns with whatever the cultural center is (which has been dragged leftward by those pesky liberals). You've seen this with vaccines - at the heat of COVID everybody had an opinion but now that there's a fairly commonplace baseline of "vax, don't vax, doesn't matter, COVID isn't really killing anyone but old people anymore" the consensus view is "jesus let it go." Normal people can have passion about wedge issues for just long enough to make up their minds and move on. We did this shit with the PMRC, we did this shit with Dungeons and Dragons, we did this shit with comics. Politicians will always outline some cultural "transgression" that they aren't a part of and declare it to be a satanic plot to warp the minds of future voters from becoming Republicans, the crisis will peak in some truly ridiculous fashion and errbody will forget. That's on a national level. On a state or local level that shit needs to be tempered by annoying things like balanced budgets. That's why nobody says anything about Bobby Jindal anymore - not because he screwed up a speech but because he screwed up Louisiana. Florida is gonna be an interesting place for the next while. For one, Latinos and Hispanics are starting to lean Republican. For another, GenZ is outvoting the over-65s. For another, the Pandemic juggled a lot of living situations and anecdotally, I know way too many people who decided that retiring to Florida was a good idea. For another, I mean, we're talking about a Florida governor who picked a fight with Disney. He's got the long game of a golden retriever. Will he make things more awful than they already are? Indubitably. But I mean... at this state of the game in the 2012 presidential race, the leading contender was Rick Santorum. I think DeSantis is playing culture war games because that's the only thing the Right has right now. I think the climate will be very different after a year of the Republican-led congress amply doing nothing. The College Board jumping on this shit does nothing except diminish the influence of the College Board... and they're the incredible shrinking test agency already.
They've already forced a sitting Republican senator (Ben Sasse) to be the new president of University of Florida, under suspicious circumstances. When the student body didn't like that, they banned protesting. Florida is screwed, and if DeSantis makes it to the white house, so is everywhere else
Sasse actually resigned from the Senate before assuming his tenure as UF president, and his opposition to same-sex marriage is the #1 thing students protested. He was fairly obviously forced in, though, yeah. He is a remarkably boring person, honestly. I finally canceled my NYTimes membership over this obscenely pro-DeSantis bullshit. "Critics of an effective banning of all books in schools say that reading may, in fact, be beneficial for some children." How could an NYT editor green-light this article? It's absolutely sickening. We are so fucked. This isn't some right-wing op-ed, either. This is supposed to be journalism.
Their retention is militant, for sure. I believe my "safe word" was "In the year of our lord 2019 you've decided to pin the blame of the whole of the world on Generation X and you can fuck right off with that shit." For whatever reason, hating on the NYTimes for content pre-Stephens hurt their feelings enough that they fucked off.
I wish I was more cultured or sophisticated to appreciate these sorts of 'here's the facts, here's what both sides say, everything is reasonable, decide for yourself' type articles. Because the ones that tell you how you're supposed to feel are really annoying too, even when I agree with them usually. But I'm with you, obviously bad things are happening, and it's so grating to see it all presented as two sides of a 'debate'
Right, didn't mean to imply that he was doing both jobs at once. It just seems so overtly political that DeSantis passes a new law allowing the president search to be less transparent, and then immediately Fuchs resigns and a senator is put in. Like, how much more political a person can you pick ? It's just such blatant hackery. And on top of that, he's previously very vocally anti-LGBT (like almost all republican politicians) and still equivocates some. I'd bet money that next thing he's going to do is ban CRT to promote 'diversity of thought.'
It's a fair question as to whether it wasn't a favor from DeSantis for Sasse's "guilty" vote during Trump's second impeachment. That's how deep and petty the Trump-DeSantis rivalry runs. Not quid-pro-quo, I mean, just something done to piss in Trump's cheerios. And you're wrong; Those Marxist CRT Socialism LGBTQ's are RUINING this once-great country, spence.