When Ron DeSantis finally announces his run for the Presidency, he will, according to the media, be the candidate selected over Trump to be the likely GQP Nominee in 2024.
The battle of the racists is all the chatter recently. This potential contest makes so many journalists get that tingle up their legs. What a horserace! What an opportunity to make the presidential race fun! What an economic opportunity for the journalists and their media overlords to take to the bank!
So many are salivating over the possibility. That certainly was the strategy in the 2016 race. Trump received billions of dollars worth of free advertising from the corrupt ass-kissing media. At the same time, Hillary Clinton was slimed and pilloried about her emails, honesty, and whether a woman could control her emotions enough to handle a crisis. And that is only when the media even bothered to cover her. Such a depressing lost opportunity.
An opinion piece in Al Jazeera written by Yannick Giovanni Marshall, a scholar of African studies, highlights what such a race will look like from both of the racists’ battles to win the white nationalist vote.
I think Trump will be in prison at some point, so I am not convinced he will be a formidable candidate. Ron DeSantis is currently doing his best strongman role, blaming the people of color and the LGBT community that both he and Trump and their voters hate.
It was easy for DeSantis to win reelection in Florida. The GQP has transformed the state into a MAGA paradise mainly by outplaying the state's democrats with the non-stop propaganda fed to the public on radio stations targeting Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans with fear-mongering over socialism. Democrats don't have the funds to fight back, so it was evident that DeSantis's landslide was inevitable, even in Miami-Dade. You can't come to a gunfight carrying a chantilly cake.
So fuck Trump; he won't be in contention, and I will not cover Marshall's discussion of him; after all, everybody knows his demented personality, cruelty, and endless crimes. So this diary will highlight the brilliance of the Al Jazeera piece on DeSantis.
We are in a newly built coliseum. It is wide enough to hold millions. Comfortably seated among us is a lynch mob jeering at the people in shackles being exhibited at the centre of the arena. These are the colonised brought out to be trashed.
It is the final show. Two demagogues are jousting for power. Each is attempting to prove to all of America’s New Nuremberg now standing atop their seats, cheering (if not outright straight-arm saluting), that it is he, not his opponent, that should be awarded the racists’ vote.
On one side is a governor. He promises a refined, Ivy League-educated, more methodical racism. A new and improved version. One less vulnerable to outbursts and legal challenges but still with enough markers of klan country – a “monkey” here, a “woke ideology” there – to be admired by the “silent majority”.
He raises his lance, offering the crowd his exhibition. A spectacle of Black seniors being manhandled by police officers and arrested for allegedly voting as felons. The point here isn’t to prosecute but simply to march out to the middle of the arena confused and worried Black people. To offer their heartbreak as red meat to the hungry mob.
Other, smaller, politicians follow suit. They ban classic works of African-American literature. They expunge anti-racist ideas from the schools. They call up armed citizen poll watchers to return Black voters as near as they can to a moment in history when the White League and ex-Confederate white soldiers placed pistols at Black voters’ temples to “ensure electoral integrity”.
Then, from one end of the coliseum to the other this governor sends brown and Black survivors of odysseys through jungles and deserts, fleeing the roving warlord of American imperialism, to “Democrat cities”. He orders them to be dumped in front of liberal politicians’ houses as if to say – but also plausibly deny saying – “you deal with this trash”.
I am stretching the rules of fair use, but the closing excerpts on the DeSantis part are critical to Marshall's piece.
The sight of dishevelled, travel-worn refugees stuffed into buses and dropped off on to the curb with nothing and no one excites the hearts of the racist spectators. The governor – in his bid to win their support – offers them the sight of “foreigners” forced to drink from toilets in the borderlands that once belonged to their ancestors.
What is offered to the racists – what is always offered to the racists – is nostalgia. The stealing of babies and distributing them across the country without record and without any hope for their parents to find them reassembles the slave auction sites. With “family separation” the mob is treated to their own modern version of the scenes of wailing in slave quarters.
Ripping babies away from migrant women while they breastfeed them mirrors the ripping of hundreds of thousands of Black children from their enslaved mothers’ arms so they could be auctioned off. Instead of selling Black babies “down river” they send Brown babies up-road as punishment and as deterrence for the “rest of them” – warning that they should never try to cross colonialism’s fictitious border.
It is a worthy read, with much more insight in the article.
DeSantis is as dangerous as Mussolini, and another European fascist leader of the same vintage, who, by using his name, would distract from the diary and get me banned.
He must not get the fawning and cooing reporting that Trump received in an electoral system built on slavery. He is a blank slate for most people outside Florida. Let's keep pressure on the media to make sure that their reporting needs to do to DeSantis what they did to Hillary Clinton.