The Communist Bogeyman Returns Front And Center In Florida
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is quickly becoming the nation’s leading dog whistler and anything the Republican presidential wannabe says is filled with more hot air than the Hindenberg and hopefully, will meet the same fate.
It is a race to the bottom, an all-out battle to out DeSantis Desantis and it is a crowded field. There are dog whistles about women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, critical race theory, Democrats, socialism, liberals, even Mickey Mouse. And now DeSantis is sounding the old, stale dog whistle of communism and socialism.
Branding Democrats as dangerous socialists who want to destroy the American dream is a time-worn page in the Republican playbook. Who can forget that gold standard, capitalist Ronald Reagan’s rants that Medicare is “socialized medicine” that would doom the country. In recent years, Republicans screamed to upend the Affordable Care Act, suggesting it represents the creeping socialism. Then trump won in 2016 after promising to maintain the Medicare system and replace the Affordable Care Act with a health care law that would cover all Americans. That trump, once a socialist, always a socialist.
Forget about dealing with the scourge of deaths from fentanyl overdoses, forget about stopping the Russians from decimating Ukraine, forget about battling inflation and the consistent, monstrous economic disparity between the haves and have nots.
Previously, the governor who won’t back down has taken it upon himself to protect all of the children of Florida from the nasty Walt Disney and all of his pedophile characters. And now, DeSantis has something even more important in mind — communism. And the trumpish DeSantis is going to do something about it by mandating lessons on the evils of communism for high school students. The dog whistle comes in loud and clear for all those Cuban American exiles living in Florida who hear the word communism and think of the dictatorship of Fidel Castro and link it with socialism. DeSantis hears the sounds of voters voting.
If you listen closely to the latest DeSantis plans you can hear the ghost of disgraced late Sen. Joe McCarthy, D-Wis., whose red-baiting caused many good people to be fired or worse because McCarthy branded them to be communists. Today’s dog whistle alerts the DeSantis followers to the ongoing, nation-toppling dangers of creeping socialism and communism.
DeSantis signed a bill into law Monday establishing Nov. 7 a new state holiday known as “Victims of Communism Day,” when public schools are required to teach students about communist regimes. On that day, high-schoolers will learn about the “atrocities” that have been imposed by communist governments.
“We want to make sure that every year, folks in Florida — but particularly our students — will learn about the evils of communism, the dictators who have led communist regimes and the hundreds of millions of individuals who have suffered and continue to suffer under the weight of this discredited ideology,” DeSantis said.
For the record, the U.S. is and always has been a socialist country. . Conservatives disingenuously link socialism with a dictatorship or totalitarian government, where national leaders use their police and military forces to punish and imprison citizens. Totalitarian regimes have frequently misnamed their efforts as socialist, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Nazi party’s full name, the National Socialists German Workers Party.
Socialist services that are a cornerstone in the U.S. include the postal service, public libraries, public schools, public utility and transportation systems, public health systems like the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid, public parks, police and fire services.
The difference between communism and socialism is that communism is an economic and political system that aims to distribute resources to each person as per their needs, and socialism is an economic system that aims to distribute resources to each person as per their deeds. It is perfectly in sync with capitalism.
Milwaukee, Wis., has had several socialist mayors including Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan and Frank Zeidler while Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs won nearly one million votes in the 1920 presidential election. Self-declared Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders won 13 million votes in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary and one 2021 poll reported 41 percent of American adults had a positive view of socialism and 57 percent had a positive view of capitalism.
DeSantis is on the front line to defeat the supposed, Democratic assaults on our revered, foundational principles. So far, he has signed laws to bar discussion of sexual topics in school and to punish those potential pedophile teachers caught teaching the topics; likewise, critical race theory can not be even whispered in school, even though DeSantis and his ilk haven’t a clue about critical race theory, an academic concept taught largely in law schools that sets a framework for examining systemic racism; and then there is DeSantis’ ban on so many terrible books that have been poisoning young minds for way too long, including a number of math textbooks that apparently don’t align with state content standards. Those scandalous books about geometry and trigonometry will no longer be found in the schools. Generally, the good governor has taken it upon himself to lead the movement to keep schools safe from any subject considered to be remotely uncomfortable.
DeSantis is not the only active Republican dog whistler. Some GOP senators want new on-screen TV ratings so parents could shield their children from the terrible dangers of LGBTQ representation in shows. The effort is being led by freshman Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kans., who voted to reject certification of President Joe Biden’s victory, last summer called on Biden to “resign immediately” and has supported fake and ineffective ways to battle COVID-19.
Marshall was the lead author of a letter, sent last week to the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board and co-signed by Republican Sens. Mike Braun of Indiana, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Steve Daines of Montana, and Mike Lee of Utah. They want further on-screen warnings about the horror of LGBTQ beyond the existing notes when shows merit parental guidance and have scenes of sex or violence.
The letter to Charles Rivkin, chairman of the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board, noted that “topics of a sexual nature have become aggressively politicized and promoted in children’s programming, including irreversible and harmful experimental treatments for mental disorders like gender dysphoria.”
The letter went on to note that “Recently, a video emerged showing a prominent executive at children’s entertainment giant Disney saying she supports having ‘many, many, many LGBTQIA+ characters in our stories.’”
The letter refers to Disney’s opposition to a new DeSantis law in Florida that bars discussion in schools of sexual issues, including transgender and other gender concerns.
The letter says that “gender dysphoria has become sensationalized in the popular media and television with radical activists and entertainment companies. This radical and sexual sensation not only harms children, but also destabilizes and damages parental rights.”
“Sexual orientation and gender identity instruction often entails a discussion concerning an individual’s pattern of emotional, romantic, and sexual attraction. Parents all over the country have rightfully expressed outrage over its inclusion in the classroom,” the letter notes. “The motivations of hyper-sexualized entertainment producers striving to push this content on young audiences are suspect at best and predatory at worst.”
Marshall, 61, an obstetrician, in his first term in the Senate, opposes abortion, including in cases of rape and incest, opposes same sex marriage and has called for overturning Roe v. Wade. Marshall joined a group of Republican senators last year, led by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to support trump’s bogus claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and to support objections to Pennsylvania’s and Arizona’s electoral votes, both of which were overwhelmingly rejected by the Senate, 92–7 and 93–6 respectively.
Lee is an opponent of same sex marriage and on Oct. 28, 2020, he compared trump to a heroic figure in the Book of Mormon, telling rallygoers in Arizona, “To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” a revered military commander in the Book of Mormon. Lee also told the rally that trump “seeks not the praise of the world” and wants only “the well-being and peace of the American people.” The Jan. 6th Commission investigating the attack on the Capitol has released texts that reveal Lee’s close coordination with Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. In the weeks after the election, Lee pursued a series of strategies to overturn the election results. As a young adult, Lee served a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Braun opposes the Affordable Care Act, same-sex marriage, abortion and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Braun voted to acquit trump in the impeachment trial related to the Trump-Ukraine scandal. He also supported trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Daines opposes same sex marriage and was supportive of trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cramer opposes abortion and has called for cutting public funding to Planned Parenthood. In 2013 Cramer condemned the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade and tied an uptick in mass shootings to the legalization of abortion and a decline in religious values.
Another related front in the Republican anti-woke embarrassment targets online library databases and library management technology that catalogue millions of books, journals and articles that students use to research for assignments. The proposed legislation, already enacted in Utah and Tennessee and pending in Oklahoma and six other states, require databases to remove and block student access to material that is obscene, pornographic, sexually exploitative of children or “harmful to minors.”
Republican Rep. Joni Albrecht, a Nebraska state representative, introduced a bill to require that parents be able to view all content their children can view online.
There is “absolute obscenity on our laptops or our devices that we allow our children to take home, and they’re paid for with taxpayer dollars,” said Albrecht, who opposed state standards enacted in 2021 that include health education lessons on gender, gender identity and stereotypes and sexual orientation.
The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) enacted in 2000 already requires that schools receiving federal technology funding equip their computers with filters that prevent students from viewing Internet pornography or content that is obscene, depicts sexual acts or is “harmful to minors.” The 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act also forced library database providers to exclude pornographic and otherwise inappropriate content.