RON DESANTIS: PHILOSOPHER-KING, POLYMATH, AND THE WORST ANGELS OF OUR NATURE.

Trying to figure out how Ron DeSantis got to be such an expert on slavery, its aftermath and lingering repercussions.

It’s not like he was there for the 13th Amendment, Reconstruction or the installation of Jim Crow.

And it is unlikely he has spoken to anyone with an overview who has.

That leaves an understanding based in at least some scholarship. Whether this scholarship is firsthand or second hand, the consensus conclusion would be that DeSantis conclusions are incorrect and his point of view unsupported.

DeSantis doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He just knows what he wants to say and then blames it on research and reason.

One of the reasons that MAGA bangs on the 1619 project is that, for some reason, people can be confident about what’s in it without having read it. Let alone read it with any kind of individually developed comparative perspective.

Just as a parakeet in the coal mine, how many political critics can tell you Schuyler Colfax was Vice President during Grant’s first term.

How many have read the professional critique by folks like Guelzo. Not enough to carry boxes of classified documents from a truck to a storage room in Florida in a single trip.

Ron DeSantis doesn’t know what he is talking about. He can’t give you any dispassionate summary, based in scholarship, that accounts for his viewpoint. He doesn’t care. He’s looking for hot buttons. He is putting feelings before facts!

DeSantis, like Cruz, Hawley, and Cotton are smart folks. They know they don’t know what they’re talking about or choosing to ignore. That makes unscrupulous. Carlson, Souza, Coulter and the gang are commercial artists, in it for the money, useful idiots.

When these folks spew, they ought to be asked not what they mean but why the know that and how.