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DeSantis’ culture war shot o’ the day

Doesn’t he ever take a day off?

It’s certainly fair to warn people about various substances being laced with fentanyl. But this approach never worked in the past and it won’t work now. I think politicians (who aren’t as dumb as Trump) know this but they do it thrill their voters with lurid imagery.

And preaching abstinence, as this one seems to do, is just a waste of breath. He should be talking about Naloxone and those fentanyl test strips. But he’ll never do that because this isn’t really about helping people struggling with substance use disorders or making a deadly mistake. It’s just pandering to conservatives. As usual.

As Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republican leaders explore alternatives to the College Board’s AP classes and tests, top state officials have been meeting with the founder of an education testing company supporters say is focused on the “great classical and Christian tradition.”

The Classic Learning Test, founded in 2015, is used primarily by private schools and home-schooling families and is rooted in the classical education model, which focuses on the “centrality of the Western tradition.”

The founder of the company, Jeremy Tate, said the test is meant to be an alternative to the College Board-administered SAT exam, which he says has become “increasingly ideological” in part because it has “censored the entire Christian-Catholic intellectual tradition” and other “thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

As DeSantis’ feud with the College Board intensified this week, Tate had several meetings in Tallahassee with Ray Rodrigues, the state university system’s chancellor, and legislators to see if the state can more broadly offer the Classic Learning Test to college-bound Florida high school students.

“We’re thrilled they like what we’re doing,” Tate said. “We’re talking to people in the administration, again, really, almost every day right now.”

It sounds like Florida wants to secede from the modern world and literally create an alternate reality.

And DeSantis isn’t the only one. If you want to hear a really stomach churning right wing pander, listen to Nikki Haley’s rap in New Hampshire about the good old days (she actually uses that phrase) when kids learned reading, writing and arithmetic and that was it, and neighbors looked out for each other and everybody was happy and the world was perfect. I think she’s been binging the (all white) Andy Griffith Show again. And it gets worse:

“There was all this talk about the Florida bill — the ‘don’t say gay bill.’ Basically what it said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade. I’m sorry. I don’t think that goes far enough,” Haley said to applause from the crowd packed into the historic town hall in Exeter.

“When I was in school you didn’t have sex ed until 7th grade. And even then, your parents had to sign whether you could take the class,” Haley said. “That’s a decision for parents to make,” she added to more applause.

You expect it from Trump and DeSantis. But it looks like the race to demean gay parents and deprive kids and teachers of the ability to talk about the world in which they live is going to be joined by all the candidates.It’s going to be an ugly race to the bottom.

Here’s how it looks to Tim Miller who is gay and has a kindergarten age daughter:

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