Kerr: Candidate Ron DeSantis is one-woke pony

The entire presidential campaign platform of Ronald Dion DeSantis can be summed up in a single 21-second video.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s the infamous segment in which the Florida governor invokes the term “woke” seven times in that short span. At one point within this clip, DeSantis states:

“We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the corporations, and we will fight the woke in the halls of Congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.”

This is the candidate’s primary (perhaps even sole) argument for becoming the next president of the United States when he visits New Hampshire and other politically key states. It’s not really so much of a platform, or even a plank, as it is a splinter.

Of course, this viral moment was intended to echo the immortal words of Winston Churchill, generally considered the quintessential wartime leader of the past century.

“We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds,” Churchill said back in 1940.  “We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”

The distinction obvious to everyone but DeSantis and his most ardent supporters is that Churchill was rallying his embattled country against a possible German invasion. His speech before the British Parliament occurred during the early years of World War II, when the tiny island nation was essentially all that stood between Nazism and Western civilization. The German military had just steamrolled over most of Europe without much difficulty and the United States hadn’t yet stepped into the ring, with many Americans arguing “it’s not our war.”

Churchill was fighting Adolf Hitler; DeSantis is fighting Mickey Mouse. And the governor seems to believe this alone should earn him the Big Chair in the Oval Office.

His strategy in these “woke wars” was most recently demonstrated by the Florida Board of Education’s decision to teach middle school students that enslaved people were allowed to develop skills which they could then use “for their personal benefit." Seriously. I’m guessing this class will be entitled “The Sunnier Side of Slavery” and will at some point emphasize that slaves were also provided room-and-board and free health care.

Personally, I don’t understand the whole “woke” thing, and I don’t think DeSantis does either. I’ve yet to hear any explanation how the term differs from good old-fashioned political correctness, which has always just been a matter of perspective.

The same person who objects to the political correctness of referring to someone as a gender different from the one designated at birth can be triggered by teaching schoolkids that slavery once existed in America. Conservatives who complain about cancel culture are quick to ostracize Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem, Bud Light for sending beer cans to a transgender person, and Target for whatever reason they’re in a tizzy about Target.

Do they really not see the irony here?

DeSantis is a master practitioner of what I call “stokeism,” which is basically seizing every opportunity to stoke the fears and hatreds of the embittered. He’s made stoke politics the centerpiece of his administration down in what used to be known as the Sunshine State, which these days seems pretty damn dark to me.

Given the candidate’s obsession with Disney, I can’t help but think of Shrek’s angry and diminutive villain Lord Farquaad now every time I see DeSantis. Which I guess by extension could mean DeSantis is trying to shape Florida —  and now the country —  into his own version of Farquaad’s superficially sparkly kingdom of Duloc, where those who don’t fit into his definition of “normal” are marginalized and his subjects applaud on cue.

But Florida is far from perfect, which DeSantis might know if he spent more time home and less time on the campaign trail.

At one point, DeSantis visited big cities across the country to criticize their crime rates, apparently unaware of the stream of horrific shootings being reported out of his own state. Just this past week, a man shot his ex-girlfriend and her sister to death on what was described as a quiet Sunday afternoon in a residential Tallahassee neighborhood, as neighbors rushed their children to safety. Then the shooter killed himself while streaming on Facebook following a police chase.

Just a couple of days before that, a transgender man who was eight months pregnant was killed by his fiancé in Winter Haven — also resulting in the unborn baby’s death — before the fiancé killed himself. Over the Fourth of July holiday in Tampa, a 7-year-old boy was killed and the grandfather trying to protect him was wounded when a nearby dispute over jet skis escalated into a shootout, and the gunman has yet to be identified.

When I was visiting my mother in Florida back in February, a man shot a woman to death near Orlando while she was sitting in a car. When a TV news crew arrived at the scene to cover the story, the same man killed the reporter and wounded the cameraman. Then he went into a nearby house and killed a little 9-year-old girl, also wounding her mother. Just a month before that, 11 people were wounded in a drive-by shooting in Lakeland.

Florida is also getting hit with an insurance crisis right now, just ahead of tornado season. I have family members who say soaring insurance costs in Florida was the “icing on the cake” in their decision to move out of the state, although they also cited the political climate. The DeSantis response to this crisis from the campaign trail was “knock on wood, we won’t have a big storm this summer.”

And I’ve never understood why DeSantis brags about a COVID response that saw nearly 90,000 Floridians dead under his watch.

But yeah, those Disney folks are definitely the most dangerous foe facing our country today.

D. Allan Kerr is an ex-dockworker, former newspaperman and U.S. Navy veteran living in Kittery, Maine.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Kerr: Candidate Ron DeSantis is one-woke pony