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 cant pretend he doesnt know better. Far worse than a stupid governor is an intelligent one who plays dumb and down to voters.
DeSantis didnt invent the strategy; its 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 OBiden.)
DeSantis has watched Donald Trump bamboozle and flatter his supporters by glamorizing their worst instincts. If the governor was once considered Trumps understudy, its clear by now that DeSantis is Trumpier than Trump. Think of him as a modern Don Quixote: Hell teach Floridas children to hate windmills and love fossil fuels.
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