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My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

This blog will pay for itself.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

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When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

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If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

You are here: Home / Politics / GOP Death Cult / FTFNYT Open Thread: There Are Monsters Among Us, and Christopher Rufo Is One of Them

FTFNYT Open Thread: There Are Monsters Among Us, and Christopher Rufo Is One of Them

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Christopher Rufo and his family live in a lovely coastal community literally on the other side of the country from the most dangerous of his new-found followers. He will never be abused in person by the bigots and misogynists he gins up, nor will his children attend schools where the curriculum has been dumbed down to pander to those bigots.

And the NYTimes genuinely admires a white dude who can accomplish such a nice lifestyle with no more than a busy internet history and no sense of shame:

Christopher Rufo appears on Fox News so often that he converted a room in his Pacific Northwest house to a television studio, complete with professional lighting, an uplink to Fox in New York and an “On Air” light in the hall so his wife and two children don’t barge in during broadcasts.

“I’ll do ‘Tucker’ and then pop out and have dinner,” Mr. Rufo said recently at his home in Gig Harbor, Wash., thousands of miles from the nation’s media and political capitals.

Mr. Rufo is the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right — and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, he has emerged at the front of another explosive cultural clash, one that he sees as even more politically potent and that the left views as just as dangerous: the battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools…

On Friday, Mr. Rufo appeared with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at the signing of a bill known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which bars teaching in workplaces and schools that anyone is inherently biased or privileged because of race or sex. Mr. Rufo, who consulted on the bill, warned Disney that an in-house program it had run that urged discussion of systemic racism was “now illegal in the state of Florida.”

The signing was the culmination of Mr. Rufo’s long campaign to short-circuit corporate and school efforts at diversity and inclusion training. He has acknowledged twisting hot-button racial issues to achieve his aims. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote on Twitter last year…

His advocacy has been financially rewarding. Besides his Manhattan Institute position, he has a newsletter with 2,500 paid subscribers, and he runs a nonprofit entity to support his work, which he said had received over $500,000 in donations since late last year…

Reader Interactions

89Comments

  1. 1.

    Jeffro

    I sat in on a Zoom yesterday with some folks who are interested in about getting out positive messages about public education (as opposed to reacting to the evil work of people like Rufo). They’re proactive and have done polling on what language works well with the pro-public ed base, ‘persuadables’, and the opposition. Once I have my notes and screenshots typed up, I’ll be happy to share out.

  2. 2.

    RaflW

    I came to the conclusion quite some time ago that the Ochs-Sulzbergers have no regrets for fluffing Hitler in the 20s. This response to one of the OP tweets goes there, too.

    @Zylie
    Replying to @AdamWeinstein
    You gotta give it to the New York Times, though – They are goddamn committed to this whole equivocation theme. Replace a few names/details and NYT’s 1922 coverage of Hitler would totally pass as a current day op-ed.

  4. 4.

    guachi

    America is pretty screwed, isn’t it? With a far right Supreme Court giving cover we’ll see all sorts of awful legislation and no way to stop it because he’ll be impossible to vote them out.

  5. 5.

    trollhattan

    Think the dog grooming industry should take their clippers and scissors after all these douches. As to Rufo, I know of him solely through top-10,000 poliblogs such as this one. Let’s keep it that way.

    Also, Mark Ruffalo should probably sue him.

  6. 6.

    ian

    He (Rufo) will go down as a modern day Lee Atwater.  Like Atwater, he may regret the things he has said, done, and promoted by the end of his life, but history will not care and will remember him as a demagogue.

  7. 7.

    Scout211

    I’m beginning to think that the words “truth” and “lie” do not mean what we think they mean.

    We need new words. Merriam-Webster needs to get on that right away.

    I’ll wait. ?

  10. 10.

    germy

    A man believed to have worked with federal authorities to investigate the activities of Deutsche Bank and its ties with former President Donald Trump was found dead on an El Sereno high school’s campus Monday. https://t.co/Rht6rPnvNc

    — CBS News (@CBSNews) April 27, 2022

     
    Appears to be a suicide.

  11. 11.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    I have a solution with regard to Rufo, but cannot utter it aloud.

  12. 12.

    Kay

    He’s as thin skinned and whiny as the rest of the bullies on the Right. He had a screeching hissy fit and threatened to sue the head of a teachers union for combining two parts of a speech he made at Hillsdale College.

    So glad the NYTimes is busy promoting him with this soft-focus depiction of his work. I’d also like to thank all of the idiot center Right “cancel culture” panic-mongers for backing this creep.

    This is about abolishing public education and replacing it with low value vouchers. He’s at war against the existence of public schools. He and his fellow travelors on the far Right and center Right intend to hand each parent a 5k voucher to replace a free public education. That’s their “innovation”. A 5k voucher. This would cut public education funding by 2/3rds, which they also seek.

    They and their families will pay 60k a year for a fancy private school and everyone else will get a cheap coupon to go buy something “educational”.

  14. 14.

    ian

    @Scout211:

    Here is to hoping.  My guess to the future is as good as yours.  If 20 years from now we live in Orwell’s Oceania he might be a hero that we have always worshipped.  If the forces of sanity and tolerance prevail, then his current trajectory will put him in the trash bin of history.

  16. 16.

    Kay

    The photo with the story made me smile. Right wing online influencer ponders the future of the nation in a woodsy setting. They’re embarrassing at that newspaper.

  17. 17.

    West of the Rockies

    This strikes me as one of those articles designed to enrage liberals. I’m not biting. I have better, more productive things to do, like eat bugs.

  18. 18.

    Kay

    What’s interesting to me is how incredibly influential he is on the Right. He’s basically running the DeSantis government, to the extent that they prominently featured this far Right activist at a bill signing.

    Boy, the Right is heavily invested in Mr. Rufo. Seems risky. Seems like you’d want to put some of your eggs somewhere other than the “far Right influencer anti-public education activist” basket.

    They have a real propensity over there of following authoritarian leaders. First they all groveled before Trump, now they’re all slavishy following this guy. Wouldn’t you want to mix it up a little? Maybe get the opinions of, I don’t know, 5 or 6 people instead of 2?

  19. 19.

    Kay

    I almost forgot- now they have a new Number One Hero- Elon Musk, who unsuprisingly to me seems to be as Right wing as I thought he was. So there’s a shocker.

  21. 21.

    Old Man Shadow

    @Kay: There’s a reason why it’s popular to describe “libertarians” as Republicans who want to smoke weed.

  22. 22.

    Roger Moore

    @RaflW:

    I came to the conclusion quite some time ago that the Ochs-Sulzbergers have no regrets for fluffing Hitler in the 20s.

    Exactly.  NYT has been fascist curious for a century.  How many centuries will it take before people recognize that’s who they are as an institution?

  23. 23.

    Another Scott

    When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. – Maya Angelou

    FTFNYT does these stories all the time. Amplifying them doesn’t help.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  25. 25.

    GoBlueInOak

    @Kay: Frighteningly, Musk has eight kids (which includes a twins and triplets).   So someday there will be eight adult Musks running around with his inherited billions.

  26. 26.

    Kay

    @Old Man Shadow:

    Of course he’s Right wing. Like Joe Rogan is Right wing, which they will also deny unto their deaths. The ‘electric car” codes “liberal” to these people so from that they just made huge leaps of imagination which they sort of grafted onto this person.

    I have crushing news for them. The executives who run Subaru are not all liberals, despite the ads with the car in the woods and the “cool” parents.

    I don’t know why conservatives can’t just own it. Why we have to go through this process where they “come out” as Republicans. It’s boring. Half the country is Republican. They can skip all the “transformation” which is really just “revealing the obvious” and just slap a “GOP” on the team jacket.

    “I identify IN MY HEART as a Marxist, but also libertarian and I  just happen to recite the platform of the Republican Party in all my writings”. Whatever. We’ll just call you a “Republican” because you’re not that special. No one cares about your journey.

  28. 28.

    JML

    I wonder if one of the right-wing billionaires that own the GOP is going to try and sic Mr. Rufo on Social security?

  30. 30.

    Peale

    @Kay: I think it was a few months back that Elon was spouting off about how the birthrate needs to increase and sounding like he’s o.k. with Orban on the matter. And it wasn’t just yesterday that Rogan was promoting Let’s Call Liberals Child Molesters on TikTok or whatever.

  31. 31.

    gene108

    On Don Moynihan’s Tweet in the OP: “ take down policies or institutions that have popular support by rebranding them in a negative and misleading way”, is something Republicans and conservatives have been doing for as long as I can remember.

    The estate tax became the death tax is one of the most successful rebranding exercises.

    @Kay:

    This is about abolishing public education and replacing it with low value vouchers. He’s at war against the existence of public schools.

    What terrifies me right now is that Republican policies, if enacted at the Federal level will be ruinous for this country. Right now there is some support for clean air, clean water, a minimum wage, employee rights, etc. from the federal government that it reduces the level of damage Republicans can do at the state level.

    If they get control of DC again, and enact all the radical right-wing revolutionary ideas they push, the Federal government will be as ineffective as Republican state governments.

    Then the U.S. will start slipping, with regards to being the most powerful nation on the planet. Conservatives will look for someone to blame for their screw ups, which will inevitably be LBGTQ+, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, etc., and many of whom will face violent attacks from white conservatives as a result.

  32. 32.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Jeffro: I’m guessing it will be along the lines of the work of Anat Shenker-Osario:

    Last updated September 22, 2021

     

    As some segments of our country publicly acknowledge and increasingly reckon with the ways our laws, practices and institutions harm Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the right has resorted to its usual dog whistle strategy of distraction and division. In this most recent round, they have latched onto the phrase “critical race theory” as a catch-all for their anxieties about losing power and dominance. Like with “political correctness” in the ‘90s and “cancel culture” today, they have made school and college campuses a primary battleground, stoking fears about how and what we teach our kids so they can undermine trust in and funding for schools and teachers. 

    KEY DIRECTIVES:

    1. Seize the moral high ground and engage on our terms. With attention on education, let’s talk about the teaching and curricula we support and desire.

     

    1. Ascribe motivations to the opposition. Instead of unwittingly repeating the opposition in order to dispel their claims (e.g. “we are not teaching grade schoolers about XYZ”), talk about why they’re attacking curricula and teachers.

     

    1. Bring this back – always – to what we want as opposed to leaving us on defense against their attacks. Don’t volunteer the term “critical race theory,” an academic concept the right has co-opted as an all-purpose dog whistle, but when asked directly about it, define critical race theory on our terms as the honest, up-to-date education students deserve. 

     

    SAMPLE NARRATIVES:

     

    Sample Narrative 1: For K-12 Educators, Advocates and Allies

    No matter our color, background or zip code, we want our kids to have an education that imparts honesty about who we are, integrity in how we treat others, and courage to do what’s right. But the same lawmakers who have denied our classrooms resources and demanded sacrifices of our teachers are now stoking fears about our schools, trying to dictate what teachers say and block kids from learning our shared stories of confronting injustice to build a more perfect union. They push for outdated and inaccurate lessons, redlining the realities of our history in order to justify the harms of our present. What a good teacher knows is we can’t just avoid or lie our way through our challenges; we must find age-appropriate ways to tell hard truths about our country’s past and present in order to prepare our kids to create a better future. Joining together, we can demand that our schools have the resources to meet every child’s needs with well-trained and supported teachers and a curriculum that helps them reckon with and reshape our nation. 

    Sample Narrative 2: For Parents

    Whether we’re Black or white, Latino or Asian, Native or newcomer, we want our kids to have an education that encourages them to dig deeper into who we are, where we came from and what we’re capable of being. But the same lawmakers who have blocked funding for our classrooms are now trying to turn us against our schools. They’re spreading lies about the lessons on our history, culture and political system that our teachers deliver as part of an accurate and holistic 21st Century curriculum, hoping to divide us so we don’t join together to demand all that our schools need. As parents, we know that our children must have the tools and guidance to honestly face and understand our past and present in order to create a better future. 

    Sample Narrative 3: Connecting to the Big Lie

    No matter our color or background, most of us believe in handling challenges with integrity, focusing on solutions, and reckoning with our past so we can create a better future. But certain politicians are trying to teach our kids to confront problems the only way they know how: lying about it. The same grifters who have peddled lies about our election want to force our teachers to peddle lies about our history, hoping to keep us divided and distracted so they can take away our freedom to vote and deny us the resources our schools, families and communities actually need. By joining together, we can make this a country where every child has an honest education that sets them up for success and every one of us has a say about the leaders we elect to make key decisions that affect our lives.

  33. 33.

    SmallAxe

    Yes indeed, been onto him since he hit the seen with his smug grin as he knowingly goes after race and public schools in this country. He’s despicable

  35. 35.

    Kay

    @Peale:

    It’s not cool and interesting to say you are Republican so we get these endless circles around it. I would settle for “conservative”. I would give an award to the first one who admits they are “traditional”, even better “conventional”. If you want things to stay the same there’s a word for that, and it isn’t “progressive”.

    What is the “electric car manufacturer = liberal” based on? What is the thinking behind this? I love reading it because it’s like the middle is missing. He makes electric cars…..liberal.

    Ford makes an electric truck. Are they liberal now too?

  36. 36.

    Nicole

    @Kay:

    What is the “electric car manufacturer = liberal” based on? What is the thinking behind this?

    I think it’s because electric cars are associated with being better for the planet.  I finally had to pop my 11-year-old’s bubble about Elon Musk yesterday.  The 11-year-old thought he was a good person trying to save us from climate change.

  37. 37.

    Captain C

    @ian:

    Like Atwater, he may regret the things he has said, done, and promoted by the end of his life, but history will not care and will remember him as a demagogue.

    If Atwater actually cared about anything other than himself, and possibly his clients, he would have willed all of his assets to the NAACP or suchlike as part of his repentance.

  38. 38.

    Kay

    @Peale:

    They’re in the midst of a “math panic” right now. They decided the Leftists have taken over math.

    If it were me I would just say “I would prefer if math were taught exactly as it has been for the last 60 years” – that’s a perfectly defensible position, but it’s a traditional position, so they can’t own it. They have to pretend they’re fighting some raging liberal math conspiracy. If you don’t like the ORDER in which Algebra is taught in San Francisco public schools just complain about that. Mathematics ITSELF is not at risk. It’s self aggrandizing, really. Like petty, boring details aren’t worth their while so they have to invent a crisis. It couldn’t just be “I find masks annoying”. It had to be “LIBERTY!”

  40. 40.

    trollhattan

    Meanwhile, in Alta Texas.

    April 27, 2022 at 12:04 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard

    “Oklahoma GOP Chair John Bennett (R), who is running for Congress, said he wants to put Dr. Anthony Fauci in front of a firing squad ― and the crowd at a campaign event clapped and cheered,” the HuffPost reports.

    Then he added: “And for the Secret Service, if they’re listening, I’m not advocating we kill Anthony Fauci… until he’s convicted of his crimes through a court.”

    I’ll remind John Bennett that it was a find young Republican who bombed the Murrah Building, not a medical doctor.

  41. 41.

    Kay

    @Nicole:

    Is he though? Trying to save us? It’s great that an 11 year old thinks that – age appropriate, nothing sadder than a wizened 11 year old – but these are grown ass men.

    Is it maybe just because he’s a celebrity and really fucking rich? Not the first time for that. That’s as common as dirt.

  43. 43.

    Dee Lurker

    The modern GOP is the party of Idealism. They believe that there innate qualities, behaviors, and ideas that make up a human being. That means that a human should live towards those ideal qualities, otherwise they are less than human. Right now, the GOP just happens to think those ideal qualities are white, cis, heterosexual consumers ordained by God to perpetuate a moral code derived from a combination of Exodus and Tacitus. Anything else is failing to act in accord with Truth. Failing to act in accord with Truth brings on cultural collapse. This is the ideology of people like Mussolini and Franco.

    They want to make it impossible to point out that these so-called ideals are a recent and novel invention. More than impossible… evil. Evil and worth destroying because corrupting Truth is a crime against God,

  45. 45.

    kindness

    So many awful people that should be shunned.  The asymmetrical dynamic at play is Rufo et al think most of us should be put up against the wall and thin the herd.  Where as we just think he should be ignored.  If Trump or DeSantis does take power in 2024 we have a lot to worry about.

  46. 46.

    SmallAxe

    @trollhattan: agreed. Rufo can’t control the smugness, Luntz almost presents as a sympathetic figure at times, he’s much better at the propaganda polishing game.

  49. 49.

    FelonyGovt

    @Kay: Some friends were wondering what could possibly be “woke” or “CRT” about math, and I said I suspected the textbooks had math problems with pictures of Black kids, or something similar. I was so sad when I found out I was right.

  50. 50.

    WhatsMyNym

    @trollhattan:
    via yahoo!

    If you want to get behind the wheel of Ford’s first-ever all-electric truck dubbed the F-150 Lightning, you will have to wait at least until 2023.

    “Even if you know Jim Farley it probably wouldn’t matter, we are sold out for at least a year or so,” Farley told Yahoo Finance. “And we stopped taking orders unfortunately — in theory, a customer can make an order and then wait for two years, that doesn’t make sense.”

    Farley says Ford has 200,000 reservations for the Lightning.

  51. 51.

    Martin

    @Kay: Mostly its because Democrats have taken up climate change as an important issue, and Democrats threaten white christian culture, therefore climate change needs to be resisted because Democrats need to be denied authority.

    That’s what ‘own the libs’ is. Anyone who is sympathetic to addressing climate change is sympathetic to Democrats which means they’re sympathetic to BLM which means they’re a race traitor. In so many words.

    A lot of people are getting hung up on policies. It’s not about policies. It’s about who gets to make policies.

    You’d think conservatives would love Tesla given their appreciation of poorly made vehicles.

  54. 54.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Kay: At one point, I remember, Musk said that he identified with the politics of Iain Banks’s “Culture” series of space operas, which he interpreted as techno-libertarianism, but anybody over the age of ten who reads those books knows it’s fully automated luxury space communism, as written by a labor socialist. Musk glommed onto the “I can do whatever I want” part and ignored the “within the bounds established by a pathologically peaceful and life-respecting society” part.

    None of these people know how to read a damn sci-fi book.

  56. 56.

    Ruckus ??

    @kindness:

    The asymmetrical dynamic at play is Rufo et al think most of us should be put up against the wall and thin the herd.

    Their concept is that if they managed to do that they could easier control those that remain, which increases their profit, their value. Because they have, in actual human terms, zero value. They are totally useless, they provide nothing but hate. Those comparing them to totalitarians are correct, that is their concept of everything. They like vova because they agree with his premise of life, that the spoils should go to them. All of the spoils. This concept of equality that we hold, that rubs them the wrong way, pisses them off, robs them of the riches that they want to steal from everyone else. They have no other way of fame, glory, bigness. They bring noting to the party but a  thirst to drink all the liquor, eat all the food, hog all the spotlight, be something special.

    Because otherwise they are nothing but greed and hate. And they prove it by the minute.

  59. 59.

    NotMax

    @WhatsMyNym

    Reservations do not directly translate to orders. Too, the Lightning ordering system is somewhat bizarre in that a select few (relatively speaking) have after that received “invitations” via one of a half dozen different scheduling “waves” to move on to confirmed status. The people who put in reservations but did not receive a subsequent invitation are SOL for ’22 model year.

  60. 60.

    Captain C

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Musk said that he identified with the politics of Iain Banks’s “Culture” series of space operas

    By now, were he in the Culture, Musk would either be living in full-immersion VR, or one of the Minds would have yeeted him into the nearest sun* on general principle.  Musk completely does not get the Culture, but given his track record, that’s not surprising.

    *Given his politics and attitudes, I suspect that he would have departed the Culture for the Affront at first opportunity.

  61. 61.

    Martin

    @WhatsMyNym: This is starting to implode. The cost of batteries has gone up the last 2 years. That wasn’t supposed to happen. They’re supply constrained. We’re going to use batteries in the most wasteful manner possible (6500 lb F150, 9100 lb Hummer) and ensure that only the wealthy have access. We’re already starting to fuck over plans for grid storage due to the rising cost.

    To be clear, the battery in the Hummer is large enough to power my house for 2 weeks. And people are buying it to go get McNuggets. They’re going to kill the auto industry entirely. Median car price is up to $43K. That’s absurd.

    The auto industry is overserving the market (too much utility, too high price) and the bike industry is underserving it (too little utility, too low price) and the gap is growing large enough for market disruption to take place.

  62. 62.

    RaflW

    @Martin: Kinda veering off topic, but I’d welcome info on a good e-bike for this summer from any jackals who care to opine or link to quality reviews (googling yields a bewildering assortment of ‘review’ sites that have urls that look trashy).

    It drives me nuts to drive to the co-op (about 0.9 miles one way), but I have a wonky knee and we live at the top of a hill. A nice power assist is likely all I need, and a relatively ‘cruiser’-like upright riding position. My mountain bike from 1996 seems to punish my wrists now, bending over and putting too much weight on ’em so I need different geometry. TIA.

  65. 65.

    NotMax

    @Martin

    Couldn’t agree more that the primary focus on high end, high profit vehicles is misguided. The EV market will remain patchwork until such time as sufficient dedicated in-house battery production facilities are up and running, and even then will be playing catch-up for several years

  68. 68.

    Gretchen

    @RaflW: husband says get a step through because ebikes are tall and heavy especially if you’re carrying bags. Bikes with a top tube are harder to get on when they are loaded.

  69. 69.

    NotMax

    @RaflW

    So very many outfits entering the e-bike market that it’s increasingly segmented and confusing. AFAIK the gold standard is still VanMoof.

  70. 70.

    cain

    @ian: What is the chances that he’s an in-the-closet manchild who like a number of other  repressed folks lash out as part of trying to deny who they are.

  75. 75.

    Jeffro

    @UncleEbeneezer: the session did not mention Mr. or Mrs. Shenker-Osario, but it did cover some of the themes you’ve noted here, such as being proactive and using our language not theirs.

    It drilled down a little more than this, too (ie, use ‘fix’ instead of ‘change’, ‘equitable’ sounds better if you explain what that actually means, and so on).  But I’ll be happy to look up S-O’s work!

  76. 76.

    StringOnAStick

    @RaflW: Have you tried replacing the handlebar stem with one that is taller?  Both my husband and I had to do that because of lower back issues and I noticed it was easier on my wrists too.

    I see people using electric “carbo hauler” bikes around town here and I have some interest in them.  They are seem to be step through and have smaller diameter wheels with fatter tires and seem to come with a rear fender with fold up carry panniers attached.  The technology appears to be rapidly improving.

  78. 78.

    Kim Walker

    I bought a Cube (German) that was used for one season by a local bike touring company. It was $1700. Has a little platform on the back to mount my panniers. Weighs 45 lbs. Four levels of assist. It’s pretty good.

  80. 80.

    The Truffle

    Right now, DeathSantis and Roofie-O are headed for the “find out” part of you-know-what. They are going to be facing lawsuits over an unconstitutional law, and the taxpayers will be footing the bill. And then there are the property taxes.

    The funniest part is that Governor Polis of Colorado called their actions “socialist.” Regardless of how you feel about the use of the term, this is a great way to flip the script. Rick Wilson, of all people, compared DeathSantis to Fidel Castro.

    I think Disney should call their bluff and announce plans to leave the state. At least say they are looking into other locations that might be “more business-friendly and reflective of Disney’s values.”

    Really, they thought they could take on DISNEY? Much as I dislike corporate monoliths, I think this is a self-own on their part. They will make the state’s brand not just toxic, but radioactive.

  81. 81.

    Roger Moore

    @The Truffle:

    I don’t think DeSantis is too worried about lawsuits, because the goal isn’t to hurt Disney.  The whole thing is a performance.  The important point is to be seen doing something today to help with the next election and his goal of running for president.  By the time the lawsuits are over, he will have moved on to his next job.

  82. 82.

    Downpuppy

    For anyone wondering if FTFNYT style will change post Baquet – CJR did an interview  and Kahn made it clear it won’t

    At the same time, I think we also have to keep in mind that politics hasn’t died. It’s still alive. There is still politics in the country. The Republicans did not win the governorship of Virginia because they killed democracy in Virginia. They won the governorship of Virginia because they outpoliticked the Democrats, right?

    All the Rufo lies & racism are just a game to him.

  83. 83.

    The Truffle

    @Roger Moore:

    He needs a record to run on. This is going to raise property taxes in Florida. Disney should make a big show of thinking of move out of the state, and taking its employees with them. Between increased property taxes and lost income from tourism, it will look bad.

    @Downpuppy: Funny how they never say Biden won because he outpoliticked the Republicans.

  84. 84.

    Brachiator

    @Downpuppy:

    For anyone wondering if FTFNYT style will change post Baquet

    Some businesses have an institutional culture that is hard to fight or change. And Kahn has moved up from the ranks. He probably is comfortable with the way things work.

    And some companies take readers or customers for granted. They think that they are doing them a favor, not providing a product or service. The Times believes that they are talking down to the stupid,  who should feel grateful for the attention they are receiving.

    ETA. I once worked for a company which had a VP who was exceptionally proud that they company regularly won some industry awards. But I got to see this guy get brought up short by a senior executive  who said “awards don’t mean a goddamm thing unless we put a great product into our customers’ hands.”

    Some years later the company lost focus and got overtaken by a competitor.  Later they got bought out by a bigger company.

  85. 85.

    Kay

    @redoubt:

    It really is the plan. The GOP governor of Michigan put together a group to work on replacing public schools with a 5k voucher in 2013, but it was revealed to the public (inadvertently) so they had to drop it.

    The key element of the vouchers is they do not actually cover the cost of school.  Republicans leave that part out- that you’ll be kicking in 3k per student from your own money just to get what you get now.

    Of course, most people won’t have 3k to contribute, so they’ll just get cheap, cut rate shit as a replacement for public schools. I actually think they’ll start a new student loan market, beginning at 5 years old, because they wo’t be able to resist that new market. So you’ll borrow the 3k a year to add to your coupon from the state.

  86. 86.

    debit

    @RaflW: I just bought a Momentum Lafree + after much research.  It’s very nice.

    Step through, mid drive motor (Yamaha I believe) and nice levels of assist.

  87. 87.

    Brachiator

    @The Truffle:

    Really, they thought they could take on DISNEY? Much as I dislike corporate monoliths, I think this is a self-own on their part. They will make the state’s brand not just toxic, but radioactive.

    DeSantis and the people around him really believe that they can force Disney to capitulate by poisoning the Disney brand and undermining their reputation for being kid friendly.

  88. 88.

    Bill Arnold

    The guy is literally a mass groomer to the bigotry lifestyle. He is nurturing the bigotry of millions of Americans. Poisoning minds, at scale. People should be (at least) regularly spitting on his clothes/shoes, and/or insulting him verbally to his face.
    (And no; they are not all already bigots; bigots are taught, at all ages.)

  89. 89.

    Ruckus ??

    @Brachiator:

    This sounds like a lawsuit in the making.

    It’s not like Disney isn’t iconic or anything. I mean good/bad/indifferent Disney has a somewhat longer, just a bit better reputation than deathsantis, even in the state of FL. I wonder if they could break the rethuglican party if deathsantis pushes too far? And it’s not like they don’t have a few employees, at least some of whom may not like having their job screwed over.

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