Sex And Common Sense In The Free State–Florida, DeSantis, And ‘Woke Dies Here’

Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, is on a roll.  He has solidified conservative support in almost all counties of the state, has been outspoken in his rejection of woke, cancel culture, is the young darling of the Republican party, and a strong contender for President of the United States.

‘Woke dies here’, he announced in a recent speech to his constituency.   There will be no capitulation to the arrogant, self-serving lackeys of the radical Left, he said. Statues of American heroes will remain standing, patriotism will once again be the ethos of the land, and the the mad dog advocates of sexual aberration muzzled.  ‘Their howls will no longer be heard in the State of Florida’.

Of course DeSantis has been labelled a racist homophobe, an ignoramus with political ambitions, a dope with a title, and a retrograde nothing soon to be relegated to nowhere.  

A recent column in the Washington Post suggested that all MLB spring training in Florida should be cancelled because of the Governor’s transphobic policies.  MSNBC and other sympathetic media outlets have followed suit. DeSantis, said one, was Donald Trump in disguise, a hate-spewing MAGA terrorist, an ignoramus, and a traitor.  Another cited his systemic homophobia and thinly-veiled fascist cleansing of all transgender and other-gendered individuals from the state.  DeSantis is evil said a third, an expression of the worst, most despicable nature of man.

Of course, all this is nothing but nonsense and political balderdash.  DeSantis, like many Americans, is simply fed up with wokism.  A recent publication of the Sierra Club advised its members to avoid using ‘offensive’ language directed at the less-abled.  To stand up for something, to take a principled stance, to stand firm are loaded, prejudicial, disrespectful terms for those confined to wheelchairs.  ‘To see, to hear, to smell, and to feel’, seemingly innocent expressions of sentience are offensive to the blind, the deaf, and the sensory impaired. You can’t make this up.

‘Their’ must be used when referring to transgender individuals in recognition of their bi-gender sexuality.  Obesity is a naturally-occurring, benign, acceptable expression of individual character. All people are of equal ability.  There is no such thing as dumb and nothing innate about intelligence. 

The issue in Florida is not simply a defiance of wokism and a rollback of the most outlandish claims of the radical Left, but a reality check.  No amount of political intent or philosophical purity can change sex at birth.  No good will, inclusivity, or generality can demote genius to a matter of environmental influence. 

The brilliant mathematician Ramanujan was born in a poor, rural village of South India.  Without instruction, books, or guidance, he was able to solve complex mathematical problems, prove heretofore unproven theorems, and to exhibit a numerical creativity unseen in even the most renowned universities.

Florida is about calling a spade a spade, refusing to acknowledge the emperor’s new clothes and deny the obvious.  It has nothing to do with racism or homophobia, but all to do with the bell curve – acknowledging life on the asymptotes but never ignoring life under the bell.

The notion of ‘Inclusivity’ suggests that there is no such thing as a normal curve, that everything is flatline with ironically no diversity at all.  Equality under the aegis of ‘diversity’ is a zero sum game.  Championing blacks means derogating whites.  Promoting  transgenderism means ridiculing straight men. Diversity means divide.

There is no such thing as reality say post-modern deconstructionists  All is a matter of perspective, and history makes sense only if looked at through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity.  There are no such things as works of genius, they say, but only deterministic reflections of the past.

Shakespeare was no creative genius but a product of Elizabethan elitism, royal influence, literary competitors, and bad digestion. We are all the same, neither geniuses nor dopes, able to do great things, unable to avoid falling, the same, identical, misfortunate players in life’s comedy.

Tolstoy was a determinist.  As he wrote in his epilogue to War and Peace, Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the Russians at Borodin was due to a bad cold and a series of insignificant antecedents which made the general’s valet forget his gumboots and which then led to a clouded mind.  

However, Napoleon was still a genius, a one-in-a-million strategic thinker, an unusually adept leader, and a man of insight and courage.  You can have both, Tolstoy said.  Innate, unique, unusual talent cannot be denied.

So DeSantis’s position on the woke culture has nothing to do with some right wing conspiracy to overturn progressive distortions in social thinking.  It is only about what is, what happened.  No matter how much progressives may attempt to airbrush the past, ignore history, and to rewrite it in their image, it cannot be cancelled.  

The South, slavery, the War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow existed, and the legacy of that long period is still with us.  One cannot look at the dysfunctional, socially aberrant truancy of the inner city without a perspective of the past.  Once the South is cancelled, all that remains is the soulless inhumanity of the ghetto.

The DeSantis cultural counter-revolution will not be short-lived.  He will take it on the national stage.  If we are lucky, woke will die in the White House.