The woke derangement syndrome

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been touted as the presidential candidate who offers Trump without the drama, a Trump who can win rather than lose

- Jesse Jackson

He was supposedly able to forge a majority by uniting Trump’s MAGA base with disaffected Republican suburbanites. In recent weeks, he’s rolled out his presidential campaign platform, promising Americans a “war on woke.”

Say what? Americans face declining life expectancy – a product of a health care system that is failing despite costing about two times per person what other industrial countries spend. We suffer debilitating inequality and increasingly pervasive corruption – a product of the big money that distorts our democracy. We face a literally existential threat in catastrophic climate change already costing lives and billions from extreme weather. We lost over 1 million people to a pandemic and ended with a public health system more discredited than when we started. We’ve made college education and advanced training more and more unaffordable even as they are more and more, important. We are threatened by over 12 mass shootings a week, with schools now doing drills on how to escape. We’re spending more on our military than the next nine countries combined and still find ourselves in wars without end and without victory.

These are not, however, what DeSantis thinks ails America. Instead, he plagiarizes Winston Churchill taking on Hitler in World War II, saying: “We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of Congress. We will never, ever surrender…”