Hmmmmm…
I know Republicans are masters of projection but I must admit that I didn’t expect that Ron DeSantis’s obsession with teacher “grooming” would hit so close to home. This NYT article about his year as a high school history teacher is … illuminating:
With about 750 students from kindergarten to 12th grade, the school’s students are not just from well-to-do local families but also from liberal enclaves like New York and California. In Mr. DeSantis’s history and government courses, that made for spirited debates.
Danielle Pompey remembers Mr. DeSantis, a Florida native and recent Yale grad, being an outsider like her, a New Yorker with a thick accent to match. But Ms. Pompey, who is Black and was on an academic scholarship, said she felt that Mr. DeSantis treated her worse because of her race.
“Mr. Ron, Mr. DeSantis, was mean to me and hostile toward me,” said Ms. Pompey, who graduated in 2003. “Not aggressively, but passively, because I was Black.”
She recalled Mr. DeSantis teaching Civil War history in a way that sounded to her like an attempt to justify slavery.
“Like in history class, he was trying to play devil’s advocate that the South had good reason to fight that war, to kill other people, over owning people — Black people,” she said. “He was trying to say, ‘It’s not OK to own people, but they had property, businesses.’”
Ms. Pompey said she saw parallels between Mr. DeSantis’s views as a young educator and his policies as a governor 20 years later.
“He had a good opportunity to enrich people, to come there from the Northeast and show people in the South that we can blend,” she said. “It seemed like he didn’t want to do that.”
Ms. Minis, who is white and was in the same history class as Ms. Pompey, also remembers debating issues around the Civil War. Mr. DeSantis wasn’t so much politically opinionated, she said, but, in her view, factually wrong. She remembers him claiming that every city in the South had burned, even though she knew her hometown, Savannah, had not and she called him out on it.
Another student who requested anonymity because he feared repercussions for his job said Mr. DeSantis’s takes on the Civil War were the subject of so much talk that students made a satirical video about him at the time for the video yearbook.
The video, which was reviewed by The Times, includes a short snippet in which a voice purporting to be Mr. DeSantis is heard saying: “The Civil War was not about slavery! It was about two competing economic systems. One was in the North. …” while a student dozes in class. (A student voiced the role of Mr. DeSantis, because students did not have any actual footage of him, according to a student who helped put it together.)
Abortion was another issue that came up in class at least once, according to Matthew Arne, a former student. Mr. Arne, who was a senior, said students talked among themselves about Mr. DeSantis expressing his strict belief that abortion was wrong. He said it troubled him when his girlfriend, who was in Mr. DeSantis’s history class, told him about what Mr. DeSantis had said. He had grown up in California, he said, and disagreed with Mr. DeSantis’s stance.
“He’s pretty much held fast to what he believes in,” Mr. Arne said. Ms. Minis added that he always seemed to have his eye on the future. “He seems like someone who, as a young person, was in it for the long game,” she said.
Several students described Mr. DeSantis as having an air of superiority.
“Mr. DeSantis was kind of a smug guy,” Mr. Arne said. Students were well aware that he had just graduated from Yale, he said. “It was like a, ‘I’m kind of better than you,’” he said. “And we were all just kids.”
Several students recalled that Mr. DeSantis was a frequent presence at parties with the seniors who lived in town. Most spoke about socializing with him on the condition of anonymity because they feared backlash for speaking publicly about it.
“As an 18-year-old, I remember thinking, ‘What are you doing here, dude?’” one former student said.
Ms. Minis said that when she was a senior, the fall after Mr. DeSantis left, she found a memo on a teacher’s desk reminding the staff that fraternizing with students was inappropriate, even after they graduated.
“‘That’s got to be about Mr. DeSantis!’ That’s what I remember everyone saying,” she said. Other students remembered at least one other teacher who had socialized with students that year.
Last year, Hill Reporter, a blog put out by a Democratic super PAC, published a photograph of Mr. DeSantis taken with several female students from Darlington in 2002, one of whom was holding what appeared to be a bottle of beer.
Two former students, both women, remembered him attending at least two parties where alcohol was served, but they said that the parties took place after graduation and that they were not bothered by his presence at the time, although they question it now. “It was his first job out of Yale, he was cute. We didn’t really think too much about it,” one of the former students said.
Two other students remembered a prank involving Mr. DeSantis and a student who had bragged about how much milk he could drink.
They said Mr. DeSantis challenged the boy to guzzle as much milk as he could in one sitting. The boy did, and threw up as dozens of students watched.
“I think about it, now — I’m a teacher now in public school,” said Adam Moody, who was a freshman on the baseball team and witnessed the incident. “I put myself in that moment, and it’s just unthinkable. There’s a cruelty to the sense of humor. There’s a cruelty to the mentorship.”
Nothing to see here. Move along.