ron desantis

Please Clap for Meatball Ron

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSanctimonious, Ron DeSanctus, Meatball Ron, and my personal favorite, Ron DeSpectrum. He was built up to be the The Man…but he was not the man.

Unlike the many terminally online over-paid tradcath mutants on his campaign, I saw this from the start. Indeed, before he even declared he was running I knew he would be an abject failure. The reason? GOP voters want Trump sure, but more importantly, this interview: That face. The smug hubris immediately crumbling into deer-in-the-headlights-soyfacing the second an unscripted question appeared. You can complain all you want about politics and how they should be substance over surface and yet someone still has to be the public face of a campaign. And surely it couldn’t be…that face.

‘Folks, folks. I never called Meatball Ron “Meatball Ron.” I would never call him that. I call him Ron DeSanctimonious, the Florida Virgin. Just look at his face! It’s a meatball! That screaming rictus, no good. Very bad!’

His official rollout on XXXtwitterXXX was a technical flop and embarrassment, immediately and easily parodied by the Trump campaign. This bizarre behavior wasn’t just shaking of the national spotlight adjustment problems and would continue throughout the campaign.

A cope phrase you will hear from DeSantis fanboys is that ‘well, he was a good governor.’ I’m not a rightoid so I can’t say if I am fit to judge here by their standards. But what I can say is that I do think his tenure as governor must be at least overrated. Everything seems to have been targeted from the start to pander to national culture war headlines. His state was effectively a laboratory for clickbait. And it didn’t even work most of the time because even when he rightly went after the special Chinese-Concession-Port-like legal exemptions of Disney, he still got his ass beat.

DeSanctimonious really lived up to his name when this opponent of cancel culture decided to attack what little independence educational institutions have by instituting pro Israel cancel culture. This hero opposed to affirmative action took it upon himself to impose affirmative action for Jewish students. Partisan hypocrisy is always off the charts in election cycles, but the timing and obvious attention-grabbing of these policies are craven even by the low standards of the trade. So craven even republican primary voters could see through them as transparently pandering and two-faced.

While not personally invested in the Republican primary, I was personally invested in seeing DeSantis’ strategy fail. Had he succeeded, the horrible Woke Era would have been replaced by an equally horrible Anti-Woke Era and the endless cycles of media driven grievance identity politics would have continued forever. This may still happen, but it won’t be with its flagship pioneer at the helm. I think many politicians on the right are misreading the long-overdue rebellion against puritanical progressivism by thinking it means their form of religious fundamentalism allied to 4chan phrenology is in the ascendant. In actual fact I think (and hope) it means culture war itself is on the way out for the time being. The two factions of elites sought to distract everyone with these obnoxious parlor games while they continued to pillage the country, let infrastructure rot, and continue to bloat the military industrial complex for use in endless and unwinnable wars. But it is impossible to ignore.

Trump and Biden have both been failed Carter-esque Presidents. Nikki Haley is the demonic reincarnation of John McCain. And DeSantis was the harbinger that maybe people want substance over style. He set himself up as the substance, but he was only the style. And what an awkward style it was, too.

So Please Clap for Meatball Ron. Maybe Trump will make him Secretary of Transportation. It seems to be the holding tank for failed overhyped presidential candidates.

The Ouroboros of Cancellation

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

The Left Sowing:

‘Yes, yes censorship and cancelling! This is how we get revenge on society for being the bullied losers in school! We are the cool kids now! You’re cancelled, you’re fired! No one will ever be made uncomfortable by words ever again when we abolish all bad things to protect victims everywhere!’

The Left Reaping:

‘Wait no, tyranny, censorship, how could I have known the culture of civic repression and empowering HR in society I took part in for a decade could one day revert back to the neoconservative and evangelical pro-Israel militancy from which it first spawned? What about my rights to dissent and not be fired for diverging from mainstream institutional thought?’

I always have despised the impact on public discourse by the Israel Lobby. Not one to enjoy taking part in ethnic strife halfway around the world in which I have no attachment to either side, I deeply resent the most effective group organization at entwining my country into a dispute which I think it should not be involved in at all. Israel is, of course, correct to follow its own interests in curating American support. But the United States is not correct in assuming its interests and those of Israel are the same, particularly since the end of the Cold War.

But I cannot help but laugh at the hole leftist activists have dug for themselves. Anyone with even a modicum of (fairly recent) historical knowledge knows that cancel culture in its modern form was pioneered by right wing Christians and their often-allies in AIPAC in a process that began in the 80s and continued without interruption through the 2000s. The left, subsumed by its own evangelical revivalist religion of wokeness, adopted all of these tactics for its own increasingly unhinged goals starting in the early 2010s. In a country where everything except some of their economic and socially libertarian ideas was deeply unpopular, this was always going to create a backlash. The question was simply when. As the former proper social justice causes of erasing legal inequalities got replaced by more and more ever-escalating demands which invaded people’s lives in the most horrifying of panopticons (workplace surveillance, censorship, ideological motivated firings, college campuses eschewing open inquiry for rigid conformity, victimhood grievance as the pinnacle of progressive activism, mandatory pronouns on work signatures, etc) a turn against the left-puritans was not only necessary, but inevitable. The linear-progressive view was such a blinker that it blinded the left activists to this obvious reality just as much as the same world view has blinded centrist liberals to the dangers of financial globalization and liberal internationalist diplomacy. It is dangerous to believe there is such a thing as a ‘Right Side of History.’

Ron DeSantis, or as I prefer to call him, Meatball Ron, was the first big figure to really exemplify this pivot back to the old pre-Occupy normal. A censorious culture warrior who governed an entire state seeking national media headlines, he pioneered (if not successfully for his own personal campaign so far) the return to right wing cancel culture by building off the very untenable situation created by the North American left. Even now he and that absolute horror show Nikki Haley are demanding mass censorship of universities and public spaces to defend the feelings of pro-Israel students. Cancel culture for me, but not thee. The right’s posture against censoriousness was always a canard.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. The left absorbed and regurgitated the right’s old bugbears of sex entitlement, sex panic, the idea that people can become morally corrupted by entertainment media, and the cosmic battle of good vs evil to bring about the End Times. It merely repackaged them for different audiences. So why shouldn’t the right learn from professional managerial class and activist cancel culture? One form of slave morality meeting another in an Ouroboros of victimhood and cancellation.

I lament the canary in the coal mine that is mass censorship targeting critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance and will always advocate for the freedom to dissent from the establishment, as I always have. But I can’t help but laugh when it targets the American activist left. If anyone deserves this, it is them. Those of us who have remained consistent on these issues get nothing but our own peace of mind. But those others who are so insecure they are threatened by mere words will never know the confidence and satisfaction we feel to explore the world around us unburdened by their insecurities.