Ron DeSantis is a fascist
Ron DeSantis, Republican governor of his self-proclaimed “free state of Florida,” has banned books and taken over a formerly progressive and successful college and university system and turned it a deep crimson blood red. He has eliminated advanced placement courses on African American history and criminalized gender-affirming care and the use of public facilities that align with trans people’s gender identities.
He has banned people’s use of gender pronouns that may vary from their sex assigned at birth, eliminated discussions of race, sexuality, and gender in schools, revoked reproductive freedoms from Florida residents, shipped undocumented immigrants hundreds and even thousands miles away, and in his Goofy war with Mickey Mouse, has eliminated thousands of well-paying jobs and physical infrastructure for Florida residents.
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He even called Jordan Neely – the man who has been charged with the unprovoked choking death of an unarmed homeless street artist with mental health issues on a Manhattan subway car – “a good Samaritan.”
Get the Daily Brief The news you care about, reported on by the people who care about you.In his campaign to turn Florida into the place “where WOKE goes to die,” he is killing his state’s economy and imposing fear and hatred of “the other,” of anyone who does not march to a patriarchal Christian white supremacist drum.
He certainly has disdain for the “Four Freedoms” outlined by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (ironically on January 6) in his 1941 State of the Union Address: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.
However original DeSantis may think his platform is, he is merely following the authoritarian fascist playbook of earlier times.
On the right-wing side of the dictatorial strongman’s political spectrum, we find the political practice of “fascism.” While also deployed as an epithet by some, fascism developed as a form of radical authoritarian nationalism in early-20th-century Europe in response to liberalism and Marxism on the left.
Historian Umberto Eco, who grew up under the fascist Mussolini regime, enumerates the characteristics of what he calls “Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism” with 14 “typical” features.
He stressed, “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
Here they are:
DeSantis, in his words, actions, and policy declarations fully embraces most of Eco’s characteristics of fascism.
For example, “the cult of tradition” (his distorted interpretation of “family values,” sex, and gender); “the rejection of modernism” (globalism); “disagreement is treason” (hence his feud with Disney); “fear of difference” (people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, etc); “obsession with a plot” (“WOKEism,” “Democrat election fraud”); “machismo” and others.
I don’t believe it mere coincidence that as I’m writing these words, on my radio comes the sounds of Jean Sibelius’s Symphony #3, final movement subtitled: “The Crystallization of Chaos.”
In his run for the Oval Office, DeSantis promises to crystallize this chaos, this hatred and reversal of rights, to every village, town, and city across this nation.
While he may have found a limited degree of short-term success in the once-great state of Florida, he will ultimately fail – bigly. For in the inimitable wisdom of Caesar Chavez, civil rights advocate and co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association: “Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.”
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Originally posted on: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/05/ron-desantis-is-a-fascist/