DeSantis Rising?

I’ll freely admit that I know next to nothing about Ron DeSantis. As far as I can tell he seems to be a very effective governor and is getting good advice—which I presume is in anticipation for a possible presidential run.

You may have noticed that I quoted Tom Luongo in that regard:

The vestiges of US Federalism still function at a high enough level to thwart all of their plans. c.f. the SCOTUS decisions last week and Ron DeSantis’ track record as Florida Governor.

Speaking of DeSantis, he’s rapidly emerging as the front-runner for the GOP nomination in 2024.

As it happens, I was reading Alex Berenson on DeSantis earlier today. Berenson makes some smart observations and, tellingly, quotes a New Yorker article at some length. Liberals are pretty obviously terrified of DeSantis:

On Covid, schools, and the death of the liberal expert class

The New Yorker just ran its second big negative piece on Ron DeSantis in a week, proof of how much the woke media fears the governor of Florida. (Yes, I read the New Yorker so you don’t have to.)

The article is nominally about DeSantis’s support for age-appropriate teaching of gender and sexuality in public schools. Or, as the Democrats like to call it, “Don’t Say Gay.” The wokesters have not figured out that label is not quite the devastating comeback they think.

Plenty of parents of six-year-olds are fine with not having teachers say “gay” - ... Then again, these are the people who thought “defund the police” was an electoral winner, so their political instincts may not be the best.

... As you would expect, the article treats DeSantis as a political opportunist. But, unlike most woke media reporters these days, the author actually took the time both to talk to conservatives who support DeSantis’s views and to try to understand why those views are gaining so much ground right now. …

The result was something close to the truth - and the best explanation I have seen for the way Covid continues to drive our politics, even if no one is talking about it anymore. I urge you to read these three paragraphs - especially the sentence I have bolded - closely:

In what follows—the extended quote from The New Yorker—the emphasis is of my own choosing. My point is that parents finally got woke to what has been going on in schools for quite some time. The author, tellingly, speaks of “a moral panic about gender identity” as somehow “anachronistic.” It might be so to New Yorker readers, but it certainly isn’t to normal parents:

When I asked Republican activists and operatives about the rise of the school issues, they told a very similar story, one that began with the pandemic, during which many parents came to believe that their interests (in keeping their kids in school) diverged with those of the teachers and administrators. As Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, put it to me, parents who were in many cases apolitical “became concerned about these overwrought lockdowns, and then when they asked question after question, there was no transparency about them, which led them to pay more attention when their kids were on Zoom. They overheard things being taught. They asked questions about curricula. They were just stonewalled every step of the way.” The battles regarding the covid lockdowns, Roberts told me, opened the way for everything that came after. “This is the key thing,” he said. “It started with questions about masking and other aspects of the lockdowns.”

Both parties right now are trying to answer the question of how fundamentally covid has changed politics. “From 2008 to 2020, elections were decided on the question of fairness—Obama ’08, Obama ’12, and Trump ’16 were all premised on the idea that someone else was getting too much, and you were getting too little, and it was unfair,” Danny Franklin, a partner at the Democratic strategy firm Bully Pulpit Interactive and a pollster for both Obama campaigns, told me. But the pandemic and the crises that followed (war, inflation, energy pressures) were not really about fairness but an amorphous sense of chaos. “People are looking for some control over their lives—in focus groups, in polls, once you start looking for that you see it everywhere,” Franklin said.

Both parties had shifted, in his view. Biden had sought to reassure Americans that the government, guided by experts, could reassert its control over events, from the pandemic to the crisis in energy supply. Republicans, meanwhile, had focussed on assuring voters that they would deliver control over a personal sphere of influence: schools that would teach what you wanted them to teach, a government that would make it easier, not harder, to get your hands on a gun. A moral panic about gender identity might seem anachronistic, but it served a very current political need. Franklin said, “It’s a way for Republicans to tell people that they can have back control of their lives.”

To me, Franklin is exhibiting an extremely typical Left misunderstanding of normal people. People of that sort simply can’t comprehend people who want their children to grow up normal. Franklin thinks there’s a panic going on. People think they’ve lost control of their lives—one assumes that Franklin believes that’s a misperception brought on by the “amorphous sense of chaos” during the “pandemic”. It simply doesn’t occur to him that these people have had an awakening. They’ve realized that they really have lost control over some of those aspects of their lives that are most dear to them—the upbringing of their children. Not only that, but they’ve seen the evidence of that and they know exactly who’s responsible for that.

To show how clueless the Left is, check this out:

Democrats unveiling ‘Transgender Bill of Rights’

A group of House Democrats on Tuesday announced they would move to codify federal protections for transgender people.

The proposal, dubbed the “Transgender Bill of Rights,” would codify the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision that protects employees against discrimination for being gay or transgender.

The proposal would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to explicitly include protections for gender identity and sex characteristics, expand access to gender-affirming care and ban conversion therapy.

That’s right. The Dems are actively seeking—and not for the first time, as these parents now know only too well—to take control over children away from their parents. That’s not a misperception—it’s reality.

The more Dems draw attention to DeSantis’ record on these issues, the faster DeSantis will rise.