Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new educational guidelines for Florida schools include mandating classes in the evils of communism. I find this silly — the Cold War’s over and our conflicts with China have nothing to do with it being communist — but lord knows, there’s certainly plenty to criticize (of course our own foreign policy has plenty of atrocities but I doubt that’ll come up). However it’s an outright lie to equate Stalin’s murderous purges with cancel culture, which DeSantis’ Education Department with suffering criticism for right-wing statements.
Oh, DeSantis has also decided sociology is a bad discipline. Unlike, say, his state’s distorted version of teaching history (More here. The one good thing is teaching about the US internment of Japanese-Americans, though I’m wondering how that will turn out in practice). Not that he’s unique: Oklahoma State School Superintendent Ryan Walters claims the Tulsa race massacre had nothing to do with race. That tells us a lot about his belief students shouldn’t be upset about race.
How about contraception? The Heritage Foundation is dedicated to stamping out women’s right to be sexually active without risking pregnancy. And things that come with it, like the high risk of maternal death or injury. However the Foundation’s Emma Waters pretends their proposed rules aren’t bans, they’re medical safeguards — they know what’s best for women! And if women think they know better what they need in their lives, well, Waters doesn’t care.
At the same link, right-winger Roger Severino lies that “the notion that there’s a formal organized movement to ban contraception across America is downright silly. I don’t know how that idea came about. But it strikes me as political posturing in the wake of the Dobbs decision to try to mislead people into thinking everything is up for grabs having to do with sex .. It’s fearmongering.”
Liar, liar pants on fire. The idea came about because that’s exactly what conservatives intend (here’s some of the plans). They’re pissed off about the idea of women having sex without consequences. And liberals and abortion activists are not “fearmongering” — they’re expressing a real fear of something Severino and others really intend to happen. Claiming it won’t happen is as much a lie as the talk of how once abortion is banned, they’ll start being nice to mommies. Or the pretense their issue with the morning-after pill is environmentalism (Jessica Valenti has more on that).
Oh, and Severino’s wife Carrie Severino lied some years back that Christine Blasey Ford’s rape accusations against Bret Kavanaugh could easily be describing boorishness. Yes, pinning someone down on a bed, covering their mouth, that’s boorish, sure. It’s also attempted rape. Lots of Republicans lied like she did.
Bullshit historian David Barton has a simple approach to lies: no matter how many times people prove he’s wrong, repeat the same lies. Never giving an inch is, I guess, one of the ways to shift Overton’s window. And he’s not unique.
Vivek Ramaswamy has had enough of the media pointing out Republican lies. He’s bought a large stake in Buzzfeed (parent of Huffington Post) and he’s demanding they hire Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens or similar right-wing propagandists to spread the gospel of bullshit. Why compete in the marketplace of ideas when you can simply buy it?
