DeSantis's Illusions of Sense and Consensus

more from the fascist playbook

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This post fits into my series on Florida politics and education written in connection with my book in progress, “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative.

Narrative Nation stories reflect on how the American story is told, revised, and sometimes manipulated in significant places and contexts.

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Right now as I am writing, it is late. Truly, it is getting late. Hurricane season is nearing its end, and I feel the atmospheric pressure changing, but I know we can easily get another bad storm in November. It happens fairly often. We’ve been in this space for so long we know how to live in it, or at least how to breathe, but this year is different.

I mean all of this in the sense that we are increasingly threatened with fascism on numerous fronts. Maintaining the best potential of this society is hard and constant work: the free speech protections we treasure also allow a dirty tide filled with disinformation, scapegoating, and false representation to rise in front of our eyes. While the presidential election about a week away is enormously important, the danger of the Trump-Vance ticket is hardly the only thing voters need to understand. Every state will be in some measure defined by the raft of culture war battles we’re fighting through this election, and in some cases and places there’s no way to really overstate the drama.

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Illusion of Sense

The first section of this post looks at how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has taken pains to provide confusing “explanations” of the most important state-level measure on the ballot, the Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion.

Last Monday here in Northeast Florida, my younger son and I reviewed my sample ballot before driving to an early voting location together—it was his first time voting. In the car I bored him with a sermon about how our individual votes can count so much more on state-level issues, and even more at the local level in places like Duval County where turnout is abysmal. And how therefore—mom is always angling this direction—it’s so important to understand what the nearby far right is getting up to.

As I ran through our six amendment proposals, my 18-year-old was naturally more interested in #4. The amendment intends to guarantee abortion access up to the point of fetal viability—consistent with the protections guaranteed by Roe since 1973—and beyond that point in cases of maternal health risk. It does not change Florida’s parental notification requirement for minors.

Some highly partisan commentary provided by a staunchly anti-choice DeSantis administration is printed right beneath the amendment summary. Fear-mongering rhetoric projects “significantly more abortions” that will destabilize the state budget as voters foot the bill, not only for the abortions, but for the untold lawsuits this amendment will generate by preserving rights we have had for over 50 years. Though the proposed amendment does not say parental consent and physician qualification rules will be changed, those possibilities are thrown in for a couple of extra bogeymen.

There is even an outrageous complaint that guaranteeing abortion access will “reduce state and local revenues” by reducing the number of live births (taxpayers). It’s good to finally know humans are born to replenish the state coffers. I thought this was the party that would throw off the shackles of government or something.

To inexperienced eyes, the sources and perspectives of these two sections of disparate text are not easily distinguishable. That confusion is deliberate. I can’t think of another important public document that includes unmarked and undermining commentary immediately below the core text. Where readers might expect help making sense of the amendment summary, there is only a stack of the hypothetical adverse effects of passing it.

This is how the far right has been using chaos to distort the national conversation across the board—people end up talking about things that aren’t really on the table, like children receiving gender reassignment surgery during the school day, a phantasmagore Trump has continued to repeat.

Desantis is practiced in this false art. In early September, he went on conservative Christian radio to put his greasy spin on Amendment 4. On a show called Focus on the Family, he spoke very confusingly about the issues, implying that the fetal viability clause “would allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth.” But viability—and I am sure DeSantis knows this and has been told this—is not a medical term with a single definition. It describes a state of fetal development, different for each situation, when a baby could survive outside the womb. This stage is reached many weeks before “the moment of birth” DeSantis likes to dramatize. As stated above, extensions past the point of viability would only be permitted in cases of risk to maternal health. DeSantis seems to be aware of it all, but his language obscures, conflates, and generally makes a mess out of the discussion, leaving the issue so unclear that voters with concerns about the implications will simply take his word that the amendment is bad.

DeSantis also repeated another scare tactic I’ve been hearing. He complained that the amendment’s phrase, “as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider,” is intentionally general enough to permit any employee of any health industry business to approve an abortion, even for a child:

A healthcare provider? That’s a massage therapist! That could be a clerk at Planned Parenthood! That’s not the same thing as a physician. So if any of those people say that this is appropriate, so that basically means that there are no limits.

So that basically means there are no limits: no part of this holds up. Here is DeSantis, a grown-ass man supposed to be providing clarity and guidance to the state, going on the radio with a puerile slippery slope fallacy. The country’s most powerful eight-year-old.

Adding another layer to the conspiracy against the unborn, DeSantis opined that Florida would become an abortion hub in the midst of other states in the region that have strengthened their anti-abortion legislation. If Florida healthcare providers are performing the only abortions, he warned, “They’re gonna get rich off of this.”

Rolling back women’s rights to reproductive healthcare is presented as the only way to keep Florida from becoming a “death state” like California, New York, and Minnesota. DeSantis is a defender against Florida’s immoral and financially ruinous slide into “one of the most radical abortion regimes in the world, similar to China [and] North Korea.”

This is an extreme vision conjured from the governor’s pulpit so he can save us from it by taking our rights. I’ve got the pitch right here. DeSandystopia, 2025: millions of women from across the Southeast queue up for free abortions in CVS parking lot surgery tents, after getting the part-time custodian’s approval. The only condition is getting the “jab” on the way out. Some of the aborted are 8-pound babies with full heads of hair, just about to be born. A VIP line accommodates women already in labor so their abortions can be performed before another live birth is permitted in the state of Florida. With a woke physician’s approval, or really with anyone’s approval, infants who accidentally survive the procedure are killed on the birthing table.

The far right’s misleading narrative and presentation is the subject of the book I have been developing, and I am especially interested in the way textual materials are deployed in the pursuit of their agenda. State government providing a misleading counter-text to distort the meaning of an amendment on the ballot, combined with the governor’s energetic months’ long public misinformation campaign, should alarm us all.

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Illusion of Consensus

The second part of this post enumerates several other examples of DeSantis’s text-based misinformation strategies. What they have in common is the governor’s effort to create an illusion of consensus from professionals while he continues locking in pieces needed for a far right takeover of our institutions, laws, and rights.

I wrote about several of these stunts a few months ago as part of my series about the far right attack on Florida education, and here I only want to briefly collect them in one place and connect them to an election-related story I read about earlier this week. I have no doubt this is happening more broadly and impacting a variety of institutions across the state; I expect this post to mark the beginning of a longer list. Today I only want to flag this and remark the DeSantis strategy of providing pre-written texts, exerting pressure for signatures, and creating an illusion of professional consensus in the public eye. I’ll highlight four examples here.

the fake Department of Health letters

On Monday, Oct 21, Lawrence Mower and Ana Ceballos of theTampa Bay Times published a story that connects to the struggle over Amendment 4. DeSantis wanted to prevent television stations from running paid political ads in favor of the amendment, so his henchmen pressured a state lawyer into participating in an intimidation scheme.

Florida Department of Health general counsel John Wilson said he was given prewritten letters from one of DeSantis’ lawyers on Oct. 3 and told to send them under his own name, he wrote in a sworn affidavit Monday.

After being directed to send more letters and participate in some other related behaviors violating the free speech rights of stations running perfectly legal campaign ads, Wilson resigned earlier this month. Floridians Protecting Freedom has filed a lawsuit and U.S. District Judge Mark Walker has filed a temporary injunction against sending the patently illegal letters. The judge put it this way: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

the fake University of Florida English Department letter

In March The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Emma Pettitt ran a story about the University of Florida, where the highly problematic new Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education has been installed by the right wing FLDOE. The faculty chairperson of the English Department was given the contents of a letter to recopy on department letterhead, sign, and submit to the college administration. The gist of the letter—which the department chair did not submit or sign—was an assurance that he was glad to have the new Hamilton Center on campus because it would “complement the department’s offerings nicely.” He did not comply, and the Chronicle’s coverage drew attention to the state’s effort to mislead the public with a false show of consensus.

the fake General Education Course Outlines

Also in March, schools in Florida’s state college tier were forced to replace internal document language that is traditionally generated by faculty with boilerplate provided by the state. Targeting some important institutional guidelines commonly called “master course outlines,” the state’s replacement course descriptions supported one of the most alarming legislative incursions into higher education anyone has seen, SB 266. Some courses that can be developed in a wide variety of ways are now mandated to include materials from the “Western canon” and to train proper citizens of the Republic with documents such as the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Aside from the problematic content of some of these new course descriptions, this was a state effort to create the illusion of consensus. The signatures can look like proof that even the subject-matter and teaching experts wanted these changes.

the fake State College Presidents’ Statement

My fourth example involves the statement signed by all 28 Florida State College System presidents on January 18, 2023 and read aloud in a Board of Education event by the president of my own college. In the statement, the college presidents effectively pledged to assist in the governor’s sworn removal of DEI initiatives and concepts such as critical race theory and intersectionality. Later that day, the Florida DOE posted a story celebrating the supposed unity of the college presidents and their support of DeSantis’s definition of “academic freedom.” You can read the DOE’s propaganda piece here:

“FLORIDA COLLEGE SYSTEM PRESIDENTS REJECT ‘WOKE’ DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION (DEI), CRITICAL RACE THEORY IDEOLOGIES AND EMBRACE ACADEMIC FREEDOM.”

In a later discussion with college employees, FSCJ President John Avendano said the statement was altered to align with DeSantis’s requirements not long before it was delivered and that he and others felt cornered into participating. Now, almost two years later, this semi-forced public statement looks like the launch of a campaign of controlled communication composed by DeSantis officials and placed in the mouths or on the letterhead of professionals, experts, and administrators whose own institutions stand to be eviscerated by those same initiatives.

By making ideas appear to come from the institutions instead of the governor’s office, DeSantis sells the public an important lie: that experts across the state support his initiatives. To look at the truth is to recognize that he is a fascist imposing his extreme reforms through a small cadre of followers who are often not well qualified for the posts he gives them. Their qualification is loyalty.