What journalists can learn about Ron DeSantis
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I will not try to top Chief Justice Campos’s response to Pamela Paul’s latest round of DeSantis-curious Reactionary Centrism, but I concur to add a couple observations. First, note how differently she treats actual, direct state censorship from the right and some trivial overreaching by a random university IT staffers from the left:
Paul is an extreme but representative example of opinion writers who both treat wokeness as an extraordinary threat to free speech and as a justification for more serious threats to free speech, like the Stop Woke Act by. https://t.co/SF6Wt1d6ON— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) February 9, 2023
Within a week!
I’d also like to focus on a particularly ridiculous example of the OUTFLANKING fantasies so often projected onto Republicans. From Paul’s column:
Finally, we shouldn’t let DeSantis co-opt positions on which Democrats have historical strength and a natural advantage: education, health care, jobs. There are reasons so many Americans are relocating to the Sunshine State beyond the balmy weather. This month, DeSantis released a budget plan that featured targeted tax cuts aimed at parents, salary increases for state employees, including teachers, and significant investments in schools, including programs in civic education.
First of all, these investments were actually the result of federal spending, contained in the stimulus package signed by President Joe Brandon. I don’t blame DeSantis for taking the credit — all in the game — but a journalist should try to set the record straight. Even worse is the idea that DeSantis is co-opting progressive views on healthcare. He is opposed to taking the Medicaid expansion! His positions on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are too the right of Paul Ryan’s! This is just pure dissembling.
I suspect that we’re in for another round of pundits lying either by commission or omission about DeSantis’s views on domestic policy, just like they did for Ryan — in this case, because he gave them permission not to care about COVID anymore and sticks it to the woke mob.
I’ll give the final word to outraged Floridian Alfred Soto.