The GOP wants power and control and they have little use for, or love of, democracy. They want to dumb down the electorate so they are easier to manipulate. Underfunding education, or using vouchers to siphon money away from public schools, or changing the curriculum so people won't be educated enough to understand how they are being used or what is the actual historical context. DeSantis is a small man who wants all the power to always get his way and lavish rewards on his obscenely wealthy donors and the fundamentalists that support him. Fortunately for us, he has zero charisma, doesn't play well outside Florida and has no real strategy to become an effective dictator.

New op-ed sarcastically shatters Ron DeSantis' accelerating mission to 'make Florida dumb' - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/ron-desantis-make-florida-dumb/

#GOPFascism
#DeSantisFascist
#GOPDemagogues

"A new op-ed is taking aim at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) describing his political initiatives as efforts to "make Florida dumb."

According to HuffPost, the piece was inspired by DeSantis' recent press conference where he announced a proposal to prohibit the teaching of an AP African American studies course due to "queer theory" and prison abolition being included in the curriculum.

The governor argued that excluding the course would save children from being subjected to "a political agenda."

"We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don't believe they should have an agenda imposed on them. When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes," DeSantis explained.

In response to DeSantis' arguments, HuffPost's Michael Arceneaux did not mince words offering a critical perspective of the Republican governor.

"DeSantis is not an especially talented politician. He has very little charm, even fewer skills as an orator, and whether his fans care to admit it or not, he is largely foreseen as a successor to Donald Trump solely because he is the only decent knockoff of the real thing readily available.'"

He added, "Still, for what he lacks as a politician, DeSantis, like Trump, is a shameless bigot willing to punish communities for headlines — and there is constant reason to worry about how much damage a politician like that can cause."

Arceneaux went on to explain how DeSantis has used bigotry to promote and advance his political platform.

"DeSantis, like many of the aspiring Republican presidential nominees before him, has turned to bigotry to gain a national following, hence him treating queer and trans people as political pawns," he wrote.

Arceneaux's op-ed comes weeks after DeSantis also faced criticism from the College Board over his decision to take aim at the African American studies course.

"There is always debate about the content of a new AP course," the board wrote on Feb. 12. "That is good and healthy; these courses matter. But the dialogue surrounding AP African American Studies has moved from healthy debate to misinformation."

While the attack on the course is DeSantis' latest ploy, Arceneaux also explained why it is particularly problematic.

"DeSantis' attack on AP Black studies is the latest stunt of a familiar con, but the problem has now spread as other Republican governors — some with their own higher political aspirations — have taken cues from the Florida governor and are now targeting Black studies," he wrote.

Arceneaux concluded with cautionary advice about what could go wrong by enabling a man like DeSantis.

"It is a dangerous power to give to someone as small-minded as Ron DeSantis," Arceneaux warned, "and if he's granted it, the strategy will likely be replicated, and we are going to become a much dumber country because of it."'

Wow, you can't make up stuff like this. Just to provoke outrage from a base that couldn't care less about facts, she makes up this "it's Biden's fault" even when it can't be. She wants to be taken seriously, yet she continually makes that impossible. And her aides are just as bad!! That she has followers, McCarthy's ear, time on Fox News, and coverage by the mainstream media, is a shocking revelation of how low some will go.

Marjorie Taylor Greene says Joe Biden is to blame for fentanyl deaths under Donald Trump https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/1/2155649/-Marjorie-Taylor-Greene-says-Joe-Biden-is-to-blame-for-fentanyl-deaths-under-Donald-Trump

#GOPDemagogues
#GOPLies
#GOPFauxOutrage
#GOPManufacturedScandals
#MTGIdiot

"In Greene’s tweet, she wrote, “Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s from murdering Americans every day by Chinese fentanyl.” It’s hard to follow even the general conspiracy theory here—Chinese fentanyl is being brought in by people on the southern border of our country because of Joe Biden.*

But as many people pointed out, regardless of what you believe about how secure our border is, and no matter your opinion on “war on drugs” policies, President Joe Biden wasn’t even a Senator in 2019, when this poor woman lost her children to overdose. In 2019 the Senate and the Presidency were controlled by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s party.

The internet and reporters brought up this fact (even Twitter’s dubious moderation team had to flag her tweet), and the MTG team’s response was wild.

Before getting into the response, the reason that Rep. Greene wanted to showcase Rebecca Kiessling is that Ms. Kiessling has become a conservative activist on the fentanyl subject. She believes that the problem with fentanyl in the country is an issue of immigration. She also believes that the COVID-19 stimulus package, which provided financial relief to millions of families and children needing financial assistance during the pandemic, is to blame for her children having the money to buy drugs, and subsequently, tragically dying from overdose.

This story is not about arguing whether or not her thoughts on the matter make sense or are true, or are an actionable policy plan for mending our public health crisis in the field of addiction. Ms. Kiessling has suffered the kind of brutal loss that millions of Americans have suffered. It can only be an unimaginable amount of pain to endure. How she manages her grief is not something I’m interested in discussing here.

However, Marjorie Taylor Greene is interested in using Kiessling’s grief as an emotional prop to score political points. The moment she chose to blame President Biden, instead of simply pushing for her decades-tested (and failed) “war on drugs” policies, she helped cheapen Ms. Kiessling’s grief in the public sphere. She turned the deaths of these three young people into a crass and truly ignorant political statement.

Daniel Dale is a senior reporter for CNN who runs fact-checks on the president and other high-profile political figures. On Wednesday morning, he wrote, “I asked Greene’s office last night about her tweet blaming the Biden administration for these deaths in 2020 under Trump. Spokesman Nick Dyer responded by saying lots of people have died from drugs under Biden and ‘do you think they give a fuck about your bullshit fact checking?’”

But that’s not all from the classy organization of civility in discourse that is Marjorie Taylor Greene and her staff, writing, “I also gave Greene congressional spokesman Nick Dyer an opportunity to comment regarding Greene’s multiple false claims yesterday about the 2020 election, such as the lies that Trump won Georgia and that there were thousands of dead voters there. His response: ‘Fuck off.’”