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Zorro

(18,695 posts)
Fri Aug 11, 2023, 09:48 PM Aug 2023

As paradise burned, DeSantis fiddled with climate-change education

While the world watched in horror as Maui burned, Florida educators were busy adopting a new climate-change curriculum that minimizes teaching about the dangers of global warming and distorts scientific information.

If only Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) were stupid enough to believe all this, but a Yale- and Harvard-educated military veteran can’t pretend he doesn’t know better. Far worse than a stupid governor is an intelligent one who plays dumb and down to voters.

DeSantis didn’t invent the strategy; it’s a tried-and-true approach that goes back (at least) to Richard M. Nixon and a 1966 stump meeting at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C. Campaign aide Pat Buchanan recalled in a New Yorker interview that the room was “filled with sweat, cigar smoke and rage,” and the law-and-order rhetoric “burned the paint off the walls.” Leaving the hotel, Nixon said, “This is the future of this party, right here in the South.”

A generation or two later, the GOP institutionalized willful ignorance when Sarah Palin walked onto the vice-presidential debate stage, winked and asked then-Sen. Joe Biden whether she could call him “Joe.” (During debate rehearsals, she kept saying “Joe O’Biden.”)

DeSantis has watched Donald Trump bamboozle and flatter his supporters by glamorizing their worst instincts. If the governor was once considered Trump’s understudy, it’s clear by now that DeSantis is Trumpier than Trump. Think of him as a modern Don Quixote: He’ll teach Florida’s children to hate windmills and love fossil fuels.

https://wapo.st/3OQNTF1

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As paradise burned, DeSantis fiddled with climate-change education (Original Post) Zorro Aug 2023 OP
Featuring a new major in Extinction Studies, courtesy of Prager University!!! hatrack Aug 2023 #1
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