We Need to Talk About Ron DeSantis’s Fascist Paradise
The Big Lie That They’re Coming for Your Kids Is Fascism at It’s Most Dangerous and Sinister
It sounds like something you might have seen a sign for, cruising down a golden, sunlit highway, in your convertible, once upon a time. A motel, perhaps, in shades of seafoam blue-green. Ron DeSantis’s Fascist Paradise. (Well, except for the fascist part, that is.) And yet that appears to be what Florida’s becoming, and no, I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating.
Perhaps you read a recent series of articles and tweets that went viral. One by Amanda Marcotte, worth reading in full, is an excellent summary. Let me cite a little bit of it, which is shocking.
A Florida law signed by DeSantis requires that every book available to students “must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid educational media specialist certificate,” in most cases, the school librarian. This may sound reasonable on its surface, but as the situation in Manatee County shows, in reality, it’s about creating a bottleneck preventing books from getting into the hands of students.
How bad is it? Just how dystopian are we talking? As the journalist Judd Legum pointed out, “Teachers in Manatee County have been told to remove all books from their classroom libraries. On Monday, for example, teachers at Bayshore High School in Manatee County received the following message: ‘Remove or cover all classroom libraries until all materials can be reviewed.’”
Did you get that? Teachers are removing or covering up…all the books. Until they can be “reviewed.” For what, precisely? We’re about to get to that, but first: if that sounds a whole lot like the Taliban, that’s because it is. We should never, ever see — in a modern society, a democracy, a liberal state, and I don’t mean that in a partisan sense, just as in “one founded on notions of liberty”…something like all the books in classrooms or libraries being covered up. (Like, for example, the way women are, under the Taliban, who also do things like ban books, which are dangerous and subversive, because they…enlighten people.)
We should never see books being covered up. This is literal, actual, very real Nazi style stuff. One of the…
