Ron DeSantis: Lessons and Dangers

Aug 06, 2022

Like everyone else, I’ve been watching with interest as Ron DeSantis gets bolder in wielding his executive power as Governor of Florida. This past week he suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney, Andrew Warren, after Warren signed a defiant woke letter stating he would not prosecute new laws on abortion and – in one of the most sinister phrases used by the left – a ban on ‘gender-affirming care for transgender kids.’ DeSantis is doing everything right: using his power with ruthless efficiency to punish enemies while protecting friends. In many ways, he is doing everything Trump did not, and somehow, in Florida – unlike in Washington – the apparatus of the state enforces his will rather than ignores or resists it. In other words, he has de facto executive power as well as de jure power. It is as if DeSantis has read my best-selling book, The Populist Delusion (still available in all good book stores), and understood exactly what he must do. However, I have talked many times both on this substack and on my YouTube channel about my fear that DeSantis represents containment, a Regime rear-guard action with which to dissipate genuine dissident energy through hollow yet based-sounding victories.[1] But as DeSantis continues to wield his executive power, people are starting to doubt my containment thesis.[2]

I continue to be wary of this long-time political operator. There are many reasons not to trust DeSantis. First among them is that, more than any other governor in the USA, he has empowered one of our biggest enemies: the ADL. He has promised to be ‘most pro-Israel governor in America’,[3] and was the recipient of an award called, quite literally, the Zionist Hero Award in 2019.[4] That year, he signed into law the CS/CS/HB 741 — Anti-Semitism Protection Bill.[5] Let’s have a little read:

The bill prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion in the K-20 public school system. Additionally, the bill requires public K-20 educational institutions to treat discrimination ‘by students or employees or resulting from institutional policies motivated by anti-Semitic intent in an identical manner to discrimination motivated by race.’ The bill provides that, for the purposes of the anti-Semitism provision, anti-Semitism includes:
·         A certain perception of the Jewish people, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jewish people.
·         Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism directed toward a person, his or her property, or toward Jewish community institutions or religious facilities.
The bill also provides many examples of anti-Semitism, including:
·         Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews, often in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
·         Accusing Jews as a people or the State of Israel of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
·         Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interest of their own nations.
The bill also provides that examples of anti-Semitism related to Israel include:
·         Applying a double standard to Israel by requiring behavior of Israel that is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, or focusing peace or human rights investigations only on Israel.
·         Delegitimizing Israel by denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist.
If approved by the Governor, these provisions take effect upon becoming law.

This bill speaks for itself. I need not spell out in full what its implications are, if you cannot already see them then you’re probably reading the wrong substack.

Next, it is worth considering who are DeSantis’s principal cheerleaders. There is a new old false opposition in waiting on the scene made up of 2016 Never Trumpers who have, miraculously, become populists. People like Matt Walsh, for example. Robert Greene once wrote of William Shakespeare that he was ‘an upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ – and this strikes me as an apt description of Walsh in 2022 – a Bush conservative, who would have preferred Mitt Romney to Trump in 2016, walking around in a Giant Populist Chicken Suit. But has Walsh, who was one of the cringiest, wettest cuckservatives in 2016,[6] really changed his views? No, he hasn’t, especially not on Trump. Recently he called on Trump to step aside and let DeSantis run in 2024. He said:

Trump can do the best thing for the country and get behind the next generation of conservative leaders, campaign for DeSantis and ensure victory in 2024, or he can try to regain power as he enters his 80s, shoving the younger generation to the sidelines. There is one right choice.[7]

Who else backs DeSantis? Ben Shapiro, Steve Deace, The Daily Wire, and The Blaze. These people are not censored, they are pushed relentlessly. I mean front page of Amazon or Audible pushed. These people are not dissidents, they are recognisably stooges of the Regime. I have long railed on Ben Shapiro – The Net Negative – a snake of the lowest order, who is the definition of controlled opposition, and someone who is pushed by The Regime at the expense of genuine conservatives and genuine dissidents.

To help make clear the move that is taking place with DeSantis and the cadre of career cowards and weasels who are backing him in the conservative media, I have devised this table.

Note that, where the Regime is concerned, anything below the 25-percent line is the Danger Zone. Anything above this line you might call The Reservation and the Regime wants to keep you on it. If you study the activities of DeSantis and the positions of, for example, Walsh and Shapiro: they want to keep you above that 25-percent line. A lot of DeSantis’s stuff has been in the first three areas, although he did also vocally oppose the lockdowns and opposed the vaccine for kids, which is probably his ‘edgiest’ position to date. Incidentally, Donald Trump – another big friend to Israel and who I have reason to believe was run to crush Buchananism – would also not touch anything below the zero-percent line. The key difference between the DeSantis faction and the Trump faction in 2022 is over the malarky of the 2020 Election. For example, Trump has run anti-Regime candidates such as Kari Lake in Arizona, who has been branded an “Election denier” in the media. Her defeat of Karrin Taylor Robson was huge news, but neither Shapiro nor Walsh tweeted about it and The Daily Wire gave it extremely scant coverage. Their brand of false opposition is unenthusiastic when establishment GOP picks are defeated by Trump picks. In fact, Ben Shapiro counter-signalled Lake in his recent show. In true cuckservative fashion he said, ‘famously William F. Buckley suggested that the art of politics when it comes to primary voting is to select the right-most candidate who can win.’[8] This is the bullshit politics of the imagined centre; it is the politics of a lifelong gatekeeper. Shapiro has an idea that Robson would be more appealing than Lake in any general election, yet ignores the fact that he has personally had to move his show and his lame politics rightwards in order to maintain his viewership and relevance. The public is – everywhere and always – to the right of the political establishment. The pull to the centre only applies to the left: the public will never vote in a full-blown communist so people like Tony Blair or the Clintons or Biden had to triangulate and present more moderate masks to hide their radical faces. This principle simply does not hold for the right. Everyone knows this in their heart when they repeat lines like: ‘if you left it up to the public, they’d bring back hanging.’ The public is socially conservative which is why they must be managed and manipulated by a scheming liberal ruling class. In Pareto’s terms, the public always has class 2 or ‘lion’ tendencies, whereas the ruling class must by necessity contain more class 1 or ‘fox’ elements. The fact that Shapiro thinks otherwise – whether wrongly or through the habitual dishonesty that courses through his veins – means he will always act as a leftwards pull on the political gravity – gatekeeping to the right and seeking approval from the left.