Has DeSantis Become More Dangerous to Democrats Than Trump?

Has DeSantis Become More Dangerous to Democrats Than Trump?
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to the media about the cruise industry during a press conference at PortMiami in Miami, Fla., on April 8, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Roger L. Simon
4/9/2021
Updated:
4/10/2021
Commentary
You would think it was summer 2024 and presidential polls were showing Democrats ten points behind the way they and the media (“Democrats with bylines” as Glenn Reynolds put it) are coming after Ron DeSantis, hurling any ridiculous accusation they can find at the proverbial wall, hoping one will stick.
The other day it was “Sixty Minutes”—Dan Rather’s old stomping grounds before he was caught in some big time fibbing, speaking of presidential elections—trying to smear the Florida governor, asserting he had favored Publix in lucrative COVID vaccine distribution because the supermarket chain gave him a campaign donation. (As is the corporate custom, Publix did the same with virtually every other politician, including, apparently, Bernie Sanders.)

About five minutes serious research would have unearthed the absurdity of this charge—since debunked by several Florida Democrats—but with the anti-DeSantis zeitgeist at the ultra-establishment “Sixty Minutes” five months wouldn’t have been enough, even with the myriad producers and assistants working at CBS.

The need to “get” DeSantis overwhelmed all, including, as has been noted everywhere except for most of the mainstream media, cherry-picking the governor’s remarks to turn them inside out.

We could call this behavior the dawn of DDS—DeSantis Derangement Syndrome—but that would confuse the governor with a dentist. (The yet more accurate DSS—DeSantis Stupidity Syndrome—is unfortunately the acronym for Department of Social Security.)

This derangement syndrome or whatever it is was on display only a day or so later from our friends at YouTube whose proclivity for censoring their opponents has grown to the extent they are often compared to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. This would seem merely another instance of Godwin’s Law (“as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler becomes more likely”), but in the case of YouTube and their Alphabet parent this putatively outrageous accusation is beginning to have some validity.

Unlike, say, Albert Einstein who did not “settle” for Isaac Newton, the powers that be at YouTube evidently believe in that oxymoron “settled science.” They have removed, lest we ignoramuses be misled into believing or even being exposed to anything that was said, a panel discussion on the response to COVID-19—the masks and the lockdowns—with four public health experts from Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School.

Why censor then, given the impeccable backgrounds of the participants? The unspecified medical experts at YouTube/Google/Alphabet could undoubtedly spout some reasons the science in their “humble” opinions is settled on these matters (until Anthony Fauci changes his for the umpteenth time).

But the views of the four panel experts are readily available elsewhere, so why bother to block them?

Well, that may be true, but these experts appeared in a lengthy panel discussion led by Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Imagine a long and serious panel on something scientific led by the current president of the United States. For that matter, imagine the current president passing a high school physics test.

So the Democrats are seeing a problem down the road, a problem with the potential of growing even bigger than Donald Trump, if such a thing were possible, a Republican presidential candidate who is considerably smarter than they are and, thus far, keeps his cool and is willing to punch back at their excesses.

Besides that, he might be more appealing to the “soccer moms” than Trump.

Better to wipe him out now. And who better to do that than Big Tech? DeSantis doesn’t like them—he’s initiating legislation to diminish their power—and they, for that and other reasons, certainly don’t like him.

Interesting here is why Big Tech is the way it is, why its leaders—with the exception of Peter Thiel and a few others—so uniformly think the way they do.

They’re extremely bright (largely) guys who have reinvented the way we communicate and even live and made giant fortunes in the process. They used to be nerds, but now they’re big shots, inhabiting expensive homes in the most expensive place in America, Silicon Valley.

Given their history and the monomaniacal, focused manner in which they got there, I would wager many of them suffer from Asperger’s—“a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.”

They get technology, they get business, but they don’t really get people. They don’t read widely, only within their world. Their machines have revealed the truth and they want to make sure the world follows their orders, which are, after all, politically correct.

When they censor they are doing what they are convinced is the right thing. They are what we may call Asperger’s Fascists.

It is my contention what is developing, actually has developed, in our culture is a war between the people-oriented freedom-loving types, represented for the moment increasingly by DeSantis, but augmented by others who think his way, including the independent media and some of the Republican Party (the more libertarian wing) versus the technological diktats of the AFs of Silicon Valley supported by the Democrats and the mainstream media.

We shall see (and live) where this goes.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on Parler as @rogerlsimon.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, columnist for The Epoch Times. His latest book “American Refugees” can be ordered on Amazon. “Roger Simon is among the many refugees fleeing blue state neoliberalism, and he’s written the best account of our generation’s greatest migration.”—Tucker Carlson.
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