He made me do it... DeSantis showing his true colors.

 By Hal Brown

Another blog on DeSantis, Dumbo Dumps DeSantis, posted Friday, May 19 here.

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Yesterday I read 

Ron DeSantis Signs Draconian Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill Into Law

and  I was inspired to spend almost the entire afternoon making the snarky irreverent illustration above in reaction to this news.

DeSamtis is wearing shorts in the colors of the transgender pride flag. The large flag is the LGBTQIA+ Progress flag. Of course, it's of Bud Lite he's drinking.

If you haven't followed the Bud Lite brouhaha here's the story.

However as much as I enjoyed sticking it to DeSantis by making him look like he and his wife were on an LGBTQ+ party boat, his relentless attack on what he calls woke and what I call compassionate and enlightened culture is serious business. It is downright cruel, and utterly devoid of empathy. Not only that, it is dangerous and a public health hazard.

I looked through a hundred photos of DeSantis like these to put together the illustration until I found one where he wasn't wearing a buttoned dress suit. Note here that his idea of warm weather casual is wearing jeans and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

You can find many casual photos of Trump relaxing, mostly playing golf. However DeSantis is almost always pictured wearing a suit. I finally found one I could use from this tweet.

It is difficult to see the awkwardly stiff DeSantis partying down in any way, shape, or form whether on a gay party cruise or anywhere. I have a feeling that if he tried to dance to a pop song like Trump does to YMCA and Macho Man he'd make the former president look like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever" in comparison.

Here are more illustrations of DeSantis. I made them for my blog about him going after Disney:

 I asked ChatGPT to make an image of him wearing an anti-woke Superman style costume. This was the result:

I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot create visual images. However, I can provide you with a written description of Ron DeSantis wearing an anti-woke Superman-style costume.

Ron DeSantis stands tall, clad in a bright blue and red costume reminiscent of the iconic superhero Superman. The costume is emblazoned with the phrase "Anti-Woke" in bold white letters across his chest. The suit is form-fitting and muscular, accentuating DeSantis' physique.

The blue material of the costume is covered in stars, representing the American flag, and the red cape flowing behind him in the breeze. DeSantis wears a pair of blue tights and red boots that reach up to his knees. His face is stern and focused, with a determined expression. As he stands with his fists on his hips, a symbol of strength and confidence, the people around him look on in awe. With his Anti-Woke Superman-style costume, DeSantis is ready to fight against the forces of political correctness and cultural Marxism that threaten the values of the American people.

Someone posting on Mastodon found this picture which I modified:

Whether it's going after Disney or what has been dubbed by critics his "don't say gay" law the anti-woke war DeSantis has been waging is seems to be resulting an a be careful what you wish for outcome.

For example, a story which has been getting substantial national attention, as I write my blog this, is on MSNBC:

The teacher, Jenna Barbee, who is under investigation has put a very human face on the DeSantis insanity. I am not sure what an evil and scary groomer of children is supposed to look or sound like but I rather doubt many people who see her interviewed will think she fits this image.

You can watch the Morning Joe interview here:

The latest news is that Florida investigators want to interview some of Barber's fifth grade students. What are these children supposed to make of this?

So not only is DeSantis out to lure the Mickey Mouse into a killer trap (sensitive readers don't click here), but he's after elementary school teachers for daring to show a Disney film, the 2022 movie "Strange World,"  the first Disney movie with an openly gay character.

Read "Florida teacher investigated by state for showing Disney cartoon movie in class" from CNN.

The latest news is that DeSantis will probably announce his candidacy next week. This should be a fun race to watch. He's clearly the undog, and I don 't mean the cartoon superhero. It will be interesting to see how he combats the perception that he has the charisma of a stick in the mud. Watch for photo ops where he appears in shirtsleeves like everyone else does during a Florida summer.

He's staking his chances of beating Trump on two discreet hopes. First is that he's a saner younger and possibly more intelligent version of Trump. Second, that enough voters in the primary, and eventually the general election, care about his anti-woke war. Arguably the first is true. I rather doubt that second isn't. Even Trump doesn't particularly seem to care about being an anti-woke warrior. 

Update:

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Toxically masculine men boycotting Bud Lite fear the Babadook, as so do many women...

Hal Brown's Blog

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

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If it's a word or if it's in a look you can't get rid of the Babadook. Movie poster above in center.

The monster design for the Babadook movie poster was inspired by The Man in the Beaver Hat in
 London After Midnight (1927) above. Public domain 
"For some, trans people represent just the latest
 Babadook, a complex fear they cannot tolerate." Wash. Post essay

Glass on right added by Hal Click to read article (subscription

I knew there was a controversy involving Bud Lite somehow endorsing through their recent advertising the dreaded acceptance of members of the LQBTQ+ community as just being plain regular folks. Bud Lite became a target of the frothing at the mouth rabid woke warriors.

I wasn't following the story until I saw and read the opinion essay by Brian Broone, an author I wasn't familiar with, in this morning's Washington Post about toxic masculinity. The article focuses on men. There are, of course, many women, perhaps just as many as men, who buy into the woke fear mongering.

Here's an excerpt: 

Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer with more than 10 million followers, documented her transition over the course of a year. To celebrate Day 365 of her journey, Bud Light sent her some personalized cans of beer. She unveiled them on TikTok in a partnership with Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch.

This attempt on Bud Light’s part to be forward-thinking about how its customers live and love has been met with a backlash by one group of people who seem to believe that another group of people should not exist. Kid Rock used his gun to shoot several cases of the beer; another guy destroyed a can of Bud Light with a baseball bat in a typical digital tantrum.

For some, trans people represent just the latest Babadook, a complex fear they cannot tolerate.

A note to those folks who are upset that Anheuser-Busch relied on a trans woman as a quasi-spokesperson: Whether you like it or not, queer people have been drinking “your beer” for decades. In fact, as long as there’s been beer, queer people have been drinking it.

Mulvaney’s celebration for some reason threatened the very existence of a whole bunch of guys who aren’t ready for that reality. This will surprise no one who has ever been a small boy. Every boy knows the sting of being called a sissy. Boys are raised to believe that so-called feminine traits represent a danger they must avoid. Boys learn early that they can expect to be punished if they stray in any way into risky, weakening feminine behaviors. These lessons take root deep in our psyches as youngsters, and they stay there forever.

This is from Fox Business News:

We can thank one far-right extremist for what has come to be called the culture war and it, perhaps amazingly, isn't Donald Trump. 

When you come right down to it, the fact that Ron DeSantis, a deadly dull Florida stocky stick in the mud man, managed to demonize all things LGBTQ+ is dumbfounding.

I also like to depict the governor who thought it would prove how ballsy he was by going after Disney because of their LGBTQ+ supportive position this way:

I adapted an image posted by someone else.

Of course his floating the nudnik notion of building a prison next to Disney World or trying to find a corporation willing to invest in opening a competing amusement park when the Orlando Universal Resort is already nearby reeked of hot Floridian flop sweat.

He also has done after everything related to historic American racism as a dire and imminent threat to the very existence to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of everyone who really matters.

While Donald Trump makes fleeting references to how bad being woke is I doubt all that many of his supporters think he gives 1 ½ shits about this.

Yet across the country there are enough people who used to drink Bud Lite to heed the call to stop doing so and cause a decrease in sales. In fact, calling this a bloodbath as Fox Business News does, isn't far off if the plummeting orders in the bars they surveyed reflect a national trend.

The anti-woke movement has had incredible success in lumping together a group of fears many people have into one Babadock.

Who knew? 

This is from Wikipedia:

 LGBT community

In October 2016, a Tumblr user joked that the Babadook is openly gay; in December 2016, another Tumblr user posted a viral screenshot showing the movie classified by Netflix as an LGBT film.^[62][31] Despite the absence of overt references to LGBT culture in the film, fans and journalists generated interpretations of queer subtext in the film (dubbed "Babadiscourse"^[62]) that were often tongue-in-cheek, but occasionally more serious, highlighting the character's dramatic persona, grotesque costume, and chaotic effect within a traditional family structure. In June 2017, The Babadook trended on Twitter and was displayed as a symbol during that year's Pride Month.^[63][64] The social media response became so strong that theatres in Los Angeles took the opportunity to hold screenings of the film for charity.^[65] Michael Bronski said to the Los Angeles Times: "In this moment, who better than the Babadook to represent not only queer desire, but queer antagonism, queer in-your-faceness, queer queerness?", and drew comparisons to historic connections between queerness and horror fiction such as Frankenstein and Dracula.^[66]

Jennifer Kent said that she "loved" the meme, saying that "I think it's crazy and [the meme] just kept him alive. I thought ah, you bastard. He doesn't want to die so he's finding ways to become relevant."^[67]

Donald Trump legitimized the bigotry of a large swath of white Americans against people of color. He allowed people who kept their racism secret to be open about it. 

Trump may or may not be kicking himself for allowing DeSantis for  taking advantage of the homophobia in so many people and adding his turning the teaching about American racism into a war against the new Confederacy.

The good news, reported in a 2019 article, is that Americans Are Becoming Less Racist and Homophobic (link).

Excerpt:

The resurgence of openly racist attitudes in the Trump era has led many observers to question whether the apparent reduction in prejudice in recent years was an illusion. New research provides a reassuring answer.

Researchers find that both conscious and unconscious bias regarding race and sexual orientation declined significantly between 2007 and 2016. For racial attitudes, this change was largely generational, whereas the more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality were found in the population as a whole.

What this tells us is that Americans are less racist and homophobic than they used to be. Because of this, that only having a few policies like being Latino anti-immigration and enacting voter fraud laws to run on, far-right politicians like Trump and DeSantis are taking advantage of cultural issues, gut issues. They want to scare the bejesus out of their base telling them to be terrified of the Babadook.

Addendum:

A poem by DAMETRIAS, 2014

The Babadook

If it's in a word, or if it's in a book you can't get rid of the Babadook. He wears a hat he's tall and black but that's how they describe him in his book. A rumbling sound, than three sharp knocks you better run, or he'll hold you in his locks. ba-ba-ba-dook-dook-dook... Your closet opens and your honestly hopin' that he won't hear a sound but that's when you know that he's around. The book close you have an itch under your nose and that's just how the story goes. So close your eyes and count to ten better hope you don't wake up again. 'Cause if it's in a word, or if it's in a book you can't get rid of the Babadook .... you'll see him if you look

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