Ron DeSantis ended his presidential campaign a couple of weeks ago and returned to Florida, tail tucked between his stubby legs, having failed in his effort to be the biggest asshole in the Republican presidential primary. Though not for lack of trying!
Anyway, once he passed through America’s urethra into its limp, dangling, useless peen, he pretended to notice that while he was gone, all those wingnut parents he empowered to ban books in schools and libraries might have overdone it. So the man whose presidential PAC is named Never Back Down is backing down and asking the state Legislature to amend his book ban law to limit the number of books people can challenge.
Here is what DeSantis said in a press conference Thursday, via MeidasTouch:
[I]f you go to a school board meeting objecting. If you have a kid in school, okay. But if you're somebody who doesn't have a kid in school and you're gonna object to 100 books? No, I don't think that's appropriate. So I think the legislature is interested in limiting what the number of challenges you can do, and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not. We just want to make sure we're not trying to incentivize frivolous objections or any type of games being played."
!!!!!!! and also &%#* and also are you fucking kidding us? This whole bit was a game to raise DeSantis’s national profile ahead of the presidential primary. He’s spent the last couple of years trying to turn Florida into MAGA-land by catering to every dipshit rightwing Bethany Mandel clone who has ever whined that their kid’s school library had the gall to stock a copy of Beloved. Now he’s pretending to notice that oh, hey, all the people challenging books by the truckload might be doing it in bad faith? That they might not even have a kid in the school whose library they are going after?
PREVIOUSLY!
Of course, DeSantis won’t admit that he’s been banning books, as he said in a press release about his newfound (very, very, very slight) reasonability:
Today, Governor Ron DeSantis continued to debunk the false narrative that the state of Florida bans books. Florida does not ban books, instead, the state has empowered parents to object to obscene material in the classroom. Still, some have abused this process to object to items including books about Johnny Appleseed, The Giver and even the Bible. Governor DeSantis is calling on the Legislature to finetune this process to prevent people from taking advantage of Florida law that is designed solely to remove inappropriate material from the classroom.
“Over the past year, parents have used their rights to object to pornographic and sexually explicit material they found in school libraries,” said Governor DeSantis. “We also know that some people have abused this process in an effort to score cheap political points.”
You! You, Ron DeSantis! You have used this process to score cheap political points! It was practically your guiding light, your north star, the great sky stretching endlessly above your firmament! That even people who don’t have kids in public schools would take advantage was the most highly foreseeable result of anything ever!
It’s cute the way DeSantis is claiming that he’s not banning books, he’s giving parents the power to object to the books being in classrooms and libraries and using the law to then force schools to remove those books permanently. But it’s not a ban! Don’t you dare call it a ban!
By the way, on the off-chance that DeSantis is a Wonkette reader, Merriam-Webster defines “ban” as a transitive verb meaning “to prohibit the use, performance, or distribution of.” DeSantis is welcome to explain how prohibiting the use of particular books in classrooms is not a ban, though.
NOT A BAN!
We don’t know what happened to actually change DeSantis’s mind. Maybe someone back in Florida pointed out that the draconian regulations were already driving teachers right out of the profession and making it difficult to impossible to recruit new ones. Maybe some of the parents who were on board with his efforts suddenly realized that giving every single person who wanted it the power to ban children’s books about gay penguins or whatever was resulting in some absurd requests, as if that hadn’t been as predictable as the sunrise.
Shoot, maybe someone just took DeSantis aside and explained that Florida has long been America’s punchline and didn’t need any more help from him, thank you very much.
Then as we were writing this, we saw where DeSantis also announced this week that he wants to increase the penalties for retail theft, making it a first-degree felony, which would mean up to 30 years in prison if convicted. Ah, now there’s the Ron DeSantis we all know and loathe!
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“We also know that some people have abused this process in an effort to score cheap political points.”
I don't know what to believe. Is that asshole clueless or shameless? Or all of them, Katie?
"...he wants to increase the penalties for retail theft, making it a first-degree felony, which would mean up to 30 years in prison if convicted". Wingnut to English translation: "We need more bodies in our prison for profit enterprise." If I had the extreme misfortune of living in Florida and being called for jury duty for felony theft of a Twix, I wouldn't vote to convict even if the accused had chocolate all over their face and their pockets crinkled.