DeSantis' weaponization of education turns deadly
Connecting Ron DeSantis' anti-woke policies to the year he spent as a high school history teacher
By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 6:23AM (EDT)
(
Salon) On Saturday, August 28, a white supremacist armed with an AR-15 rifle murdered three Black people at a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida.
The victims have now been laid to rest, but the atmosphere of racist violence, hatred and general antipathy towards Black and brown people in the Age of Trump continues. There will be more white supremacist hate crimes and terror attacks against Black America; this is the American Way and has been so for centuries.
The Associated Press reports:
Mourners at the funeral service for Angela Michelle Carr applauded the Rev. Al Sharpton as he criticized laws that allowed the gunman to buy an assault-style rifle years after he was involuntarily committed for a mental health examination. He also denounced white supremacists who demonstrated outside Disney World a week after the Aug. 26 killings in Jacksonville.
"How many people have to die before you get up — whether you're a Republican or a Democrat — and say we've got to stop this and we've got to bring some sanity back in this country?" Sharpton said. "Have we gotten so out of bounds that we've normalized this stuff happening?"
Carr, 52, worked as an Uber driver and was sitting in her idling car outside a Dollar General store when she was shot multiple times. The gunman then went inside and killed A.J. Laguerre, a 19-year-old store employee, as he tried to flee. Jerrald Gallion, 29, was fatally shot after walking through the front door with his girlfriend, who escaped.
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DeSantis' intent is irrelevant; racism and white supremacy are not a matter of intent but of outcomes and results. For example, DeSantis has supported gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter harassment, voter intimidation, arrests for largely non-existent "voter fraud", and other policies targeting the Black community in Florida as a way of keeping him and other Republicans in power. Rolling Stone highlights how DeSantis still refuses to publicly and in direct terms condemn neo-Nazis and other white supremacists and to disavow their support of him. One of DeSantis's senior campaign staff members was recently fired after he posted a campaign video online that featured Nazi imagery. DeSantis and his spokespeople claim that they had no knowledge of the staffer's white supremacist politics. Such a denial has no credibility given the larger pattern of white supremacist and other racist behavior by DeSantis and his administration and supporters. The white supremacist mass murderer in Jacksonville envisioned himself as a soldier in that global struggle. Signaling his devotion to that evil cause, he wore a Rhodesian army patch on his tactical vest. ............(more)
https://www.salon.com/2023/09/18/desantis-weaponization-of-education-turns/
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DeSantis' weaponization of education turns deadly (Original post)
Blue Owl (47,448 posts) 
