The Fog of Culture War

Suppose you waged a war, and no one came?

That’s kind of the way my snowbird winter in Florida has felt since Ron DeSantis’s spectacular flop of a run for the Republican presidential nomination. We’re talking a loss so public and spectacular that it’s meme-worthy: “My governor spent over $160 million, and all he got was 23,420 votes and a lousy T-shirt.”

DeSantis toiled for over two years cultivating his “War on Woke.” It was supposed to be his ticket to the White House: slamming gays, dragging drag queens, banning books, purging academia, airlifting refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, killing off thousands with COVID in order to hawk Florida as open for business.

DeSantis stomped his white-booted feet. He stacked committees and whipped the Republican supermajority legislature into submission, garnering an endless stream of Fox News appearances to promote himself along the way. And he prostituted himself, his wife, and his children in the name of Trump.

It worked well enough to give him a resounding victory in 2022, when the red wave washed out across the rest of the country, which catapulted him further into the national spotlight.

DeSantis used the backs of the most vulnerable Floridians as a launching pad to “Make America Florida.” But no one was buying it. And, meanwhile, the people of Florida have been left with the wreckage.

New College of Florida, a once highly regarded liberal arts school where geeks, queers, nerds and misfits could feel comfortable enough to excel, has been so purged that, after an extensive investigation, it has been sanctioned by a national union of university professors.

Woke War shrapnel has hit schoolkids, too. The overly broad and vaguely written Parental Rights Act has left school administrators and parents confused and frustrated, leading one school to notoriously require permission slips for children in order to “listen to a book written by an African American.”

As if prejudicing kids’ views of African American literature weren’t enough, DeSantis’s form of right-wing political correctness severely risked their health, too.

In response to a recent measles outbreak at a school in Broward County, DeSantis’s quack of a surgeon general went against widespread medical guidance and advised parents that it was okay to send their unvaccinated kids to school instead of quarantining for 21 days.

In an “only in Florida” move, while the state has banned the teaching of content that it considers threatening to white children, it’s proposing requiring teaching the “evils” of communism — in kindergarten.

Say what?

Even homeowners devastated by hurricanes have become collateral damage of the entirely foreseeable consequences of the War on Woke. DeSantis’s draconian immigration law has led to undocumented workers fleeing the state, leaving a shortage of workers to repair storm-ravaged homes. At least one guy ferrying four fellow undocumented roofers to work was arrested on “human smuggling” charges.

Another item on the health care casualty list is undocumented women, who are avoiding mammograms or prenatal care because of the new requirement for hospitals that receive Medicare dollars to ask patients about their immigration status.

Meanwhile, Florida recently changed its child labor laws. As originally proposed, the law would have allowed 16-year-olds to work 40-hour weeks, without parental permission and past midnight on school nights without breaks.

If I were more cynical, I’d say that the right-wing legislature, which is so hellbent on the “sanctity of life” that it enacted a six-week abortion ban, doesn’t care about kids’ welfare after they leave the womb — they want them as a workforce to replace the migrants they caused to flee. It’s a perfect unvirtuous circle. Deport ’em and grow ’em!

In the fog of this culture war, little makes sense. The Republican legislators who kowtowed to DeSantis seem to be breaking loose of him after his withering loss, but it’s not as if they’ve found their humanity.

In the first two days of the legislative session, they initiated 20 anti-LGBTQ+ proposals, including banning the pride flag from schools and college campuses. As reported by The Guardian, another proposed bill would “make accusing someone of being homophobic, transphobic, racist or sexist, even if the accusation is true, equivalent to defamation, and punishable by a fine of at least $35,000.”

Put that in your First Amendment pipe and smoke it.

(A quick update: After I wrote the column, there was a settlement in a lawsuit brought against Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” statute. While the law will remain on the books, students may discuss LGBTQ issues in the classroom so long as they are not part of the formal curriculum.)

The legislature even wants to risk raising already prohibitively high insurance rates within the state by requiring carriers to cover conversion therapy, the scientifically discredited practice of purportedly converting gays to straights.

At the same time Republicans and DeSantis persist in fanning the waning embers of their hate-filled crusade, the more rational half of society has been left to clean up the battlefield.

Recently, the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals slammed DeSantis’s crowning achievement, the Stop WOKE Act. Among other things, the law prohibits workplace trainings about race.

In declaring this portion of the law unconstitutional, a Trump-appointed judge wrote in his 72-page opinion that by penalizing viewpoints, the law was committing “the greatest First Amendment sin.”

Florida taxpayers have been footing the bill for defending this legally doomed hate and folly.

In the midst of this dispiriting fog of culture war, there are some indications that the front line is crumbling.

As reported by The Guardian, DeSantis’s policies may be backfiring. A survey by the grassroots voter registration and advocacy group Mi Vecino “found 58 percent of Republican respondents rated as ‘very poor,’ and an additional 18 percent as ‘poor,’ the effectiveness of Florida’s political leaders to handle issues that mattered most to them: in order, the cost of living, health care and gun violence.”

Democrats are taking heart in wisps of hope emerging from the ballot box.

A Democrat won the mayoral race in historically Republican Jacksonville. Another Democrat ousted a Republican for a state congressional seat. A petition to get the constitutional right to abortion and another on recreational marijuana each have collected far more than enough signatures to be on the ballot, pending Supreme Court approval of the language.

Each is seen as potentially driving Democrat-friendly voters to the polls. Breaking the Republican supermajority would be a victory for normalcy.

As I contemplate my return to the East End, I look back and think what a weird, weird winter it’s been, and not just because it seemingly rained all January and February in the Sunshine State. It’s also because, in the land where Ron DeSantis proclaimed that “Woke goes to die,” it feels like woke — or, as I prefer to refer to it, responsible social consciousness — is on life support and struggling while at the mercy of the gnawing anti-woke zombie.