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      How the Internet Shrank Musk and DeSantis

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      If you had told me several months ago, immediately after Elon Musk bought Twitter and Ron DeSantis celebrated a thumping re-election victory, that DeSantis would launch his presidential campaign in conversation with Musk, I would have thought, intriguing: The rightward-trending billionaire whose rockets and cars stand out in an economy dominated by apps and financial instruments meets the Republican politician whose real-world victories contrast with the virtual populism of Donald Trump.The actual launch of DeSantis’s presidential campaign, in a “Twitter Spaces” event that crashed repeatedly and played to a smaller audience than he would have claimed just by showing up on Fox, instead offered the political version of the lesson that we’ve been taught repeatedly by Musk’s stewardship of Twitter: The internet can be a trap.For the Tesla and SpaceX mogul, the trap was sprung because Musk wanted to attack the groupthink of liberal institutions, and seeing that groupthink manifest on his favorite social media site, he imagined that owning Twitter was the key to transforming public discourse.But for all its influence, social media is still downstream of other institutions — universities, newspapers, television channels, movie studios, other internet platforms. Twitter is real life, but only through its relationship to other realities; it doesn’t have the capacity to be a hub of discourse, news gathering or entertainment on its own. And many of Musk’s difficulties as the Twitter C.E.O. have reflected a simple overestimation of social media’s inherent authority and influence.Thus he’s tried to sell the privilege of verification, the famous “blue checks,” without recognizing that they were valued because of their connection to real-world institutions and lose value if they reflect a Twitter hierarchy alone. Or he’s encouraged his favored journalists to publish their scoops and essays on his site when it isn’t yet built out for that kind of publication. Or he’s encouraged media figures like Tucker Carlson and now politicians like DeSantis to run shows or do interviews on his platform, without having the infrastructure in place to make all that work.It’s entirely possible that Musk can build out that infrastructure eventually, and make Twitter more capacious than it is today. But there isn’t some immediate social-media shortcut to the influence he’s seeking. If you want Twitter to be the world’s news hub, you probably need a Twitter newsroom. If you want Twitter to host presidential candidates, you probably need a Twitter channel that feels like a professional newscast. And while you’re trying to build those things, you need to be careful that the nature of social media doesn’t diminish you to the kind of caricatured role — troll instead of tycoon — that tempts everyone on Twitter.That kind of diminishment is what the Twitter event handed to DeSantis, whose choppy launch may be forgotten but who would be wise to learn from what went wrong. There’s an emerging critique of the Florida governor that suggests that his whole persona is too online — that his talk about wokeness, wokeness, wokeness is pitched to a narrow and internet-based faction within the G.O.P., that he’s setting himself to be like Elizabeth Warren in 2020, whose promise of plans, plans, plans thrilled the wonk faction but fell flat with normal Democratic voters.I think this critique is overdrawn. If you look at polling of Republican primary voters, the culture war appears to be a general concern rather than an elite fixation, and there’s a plausible argument that the conflict with the new progressivism is the main thing binding the G.O.P. coalition together.But it does seem true that the conflict with progressivism in the context of social media is a more boutique taste, and that lots of anti-woke conservatives aren’t particularly invested in whether the previous Twitter regime was throttling such-and-such right-wing influencer or taking orders from such-and-such “disinformation” specialist. And it’s also true that DeSantis is running against a candidate who, at any moment, can return to Twitter and bestride its feeds like a colossus, no matter whatever Republican alternative the Chief Twit might prefer.So introducing himself in that online space made DeSantis look unnecessarily small — smaller than Musk’s presence and Trump’s absence, shrunk down to the scale of debates about shadowbanning and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The Florida governor’s best self-advertisement in a primary should be his promise to be more active in reality than Trump, with his claim to be better at actual governance made manifest through his advantage in flesh-pressing, campaign-trail-hitting energy.The good news for DeSantis is that he doesn’t have billions invested in a social media company, so having endured a diminishing introduction he can slip the trap and walk away — toward the crowds, klieg lights and the grass.For Musk, though, escape requires either the admission of defeat in this particular arena or else a long campaign of innovation that eventually makes Twitter as big as he wrongly imagined it to be.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      DeSantis Steps Up Attacks on Trump, Hitting Him on Crime and Covid

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed to repeal the First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice law, if elected president. He called it “basically a jailbreak bill.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalated his hostilities with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday, arguing that his Republican presidential rival was weak on crime and immigration, and accusing him of ceding critical decision-making during the coronavirus pandemic to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.In an appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, of “moving left” on criminal justice and immigration issues after winning over the party’s base in 2015 and 2016.He pledged that he would repeal what is known as the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice measure signed into law by Mr. Trump in 2018 that expanded early-release programs and modified sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.“He enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people.”This year, The New York Times reported that Mr. DeSantis and his allies saw the criminal justice bill, which Mr. Trump signed at the urging of his son-in-law Jared Kushner — and instantly regretted — as an area of political weakness, and that Mr. DeSantis had signaled he would use it in the nomination fight. The bill is unpopular with parts of Mr. Trump’s hard-core base.But for Mr. DeSantis, assailing Mr. Trump over the First Step Act is potentially complicated. Mr. DeSantis himself voted for the first version of the bill when he was in Congress, and Trump allies have sought to highlight that fact.“So now Swampy Politician Ron DeSanctimonious is claiming he voted for it before he voted against it,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement. “He sounds just like John Kerry. What a phony! He can’t run away from his disastrous, embarrassing, and low-energy campaign announcement. Rookie mistakes and unforced errors — that’s who he is.”(Mr. DeSantis’s allies note that the version of the bill he voted for looked significantly different, and that the final version passed when he was no longer in the House.)When Mr. Shapiro asked Mr. DeSantis about Mr. Trump’s recent criticism that crime had risen on his watch in Florida, the former president’s adopted state, Mr. DeSantis bristled and said Mr. Trump’s policies had undermined law and order.Mr. DeSantis stepped up his attacks on his onetime ally, whom he had avoided criticizing directly for months, less than 48 hours after he entered the race in a bumpy Twitter event.And as Mr. DeSantis seems to veer to the right on issues like crime, some of his campaign’s internal strategy is coming to light.At a fund-raising meeting in Miami on Thursday, donors peppered Mr. DeSantis’s top campaign staff members with questions about his policy positions and how they should be presented to other Republicans, according to a leaked audio recording posted online by the website Florida Politics.One donor raised a question about the rightward shift, to which a campaign official eventually responded, “We just got to win a primary in order to be in a general.”The donors and officials also discussed how to talk to Republicans who support abortion rights. (Mr. DeSantis last month signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, which contains limited exceptions, while Mr. Trump has been hesitant to support a federal ban.)A staff member offered one possible answer.“Abortion is safe, legal and rare in Florida,” he said, parroting a phrase coined by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. “It has not been banned,” he added. “It is limited.”In his interview with Mr. Shapiro on Friday, Mr. DeSantis sought to cast himself as unwavering on illegal immigration, saying that Mr. Trump had attacked him for opposing amnesty legislation while in Congress.He also faulted Mr. Trump for his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, especially the level of influence exerted by Dr. Fauci, the longtime top infectious disease expert and face of the federal government’s pandemic response.Dr. Fauci, who retired in January, has been a frequent target of Republican attacks over issues like remote learning, stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates.“He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to Dr. Fauci, and I think to terrible consequences for the United States,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way.”He said that Dr. Fauci should have been fired, but Mr. Trump had honored him.“I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trump’s last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Fauci’s lockdowns,” Mr. DeSantis said.A day earlier, in a post by Mr. Trump on his Truth Social platform, the former president slammed Mr. DeSantis over Florida’s response to the pandemic. He said that even former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had done a better job limiting the loss of lives to the virus than Mr. DeSantis had.Mr. DeSantis described Mr. Trump’s claim as “very bizarre,” and said that it suggested he would double down on his actions if there were another pandemic. More

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      DeSantis’s Administration Solicits Endorsements and Money for His Campaign

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      The appeals for endorsements from lawmakers and donations from lobbyists, which were described by several people familiar with the outreach, blur the line between the governor’s administration and his campaign.As Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida begins his presidential bid, officials in his administration have solicited donations from lobbyists and endorsements from lawmakers in the state, blurring the line between his taxpayer-funded office and his political campaign.The outreach by the governor’s office, which would normally fall to Mr. DeSantis’s campaign staff, was described by two people who said they were approached by administration officials and who insisted on anonymity. In at least one case, a member of Mr. DeSantis’s administration sent a text message to a lobbyist with a link to his presidential fund-raising platform.NBC News first reported the solicitations to the lobbyists.The people who were approached discussed the conversations only on the condition of anonymity, out of fear of reprisals by the governor’s office, and insisted that the government officials not be named so as to avoid revealing their own identities.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis’s office and campaign did not respond to requests for comment.Mr. DeSantis has yet to sign Florida’s $117 billion budget, over which he retains a line-item veto — meaning he can, with the stroke of a pen, eliminate spending projects sought by lobbyists and legislators in Tallahassee, the capital, where he has exerted firm control over the Republican-controlled Legislature.The outreach to lobbyists gave the impression that donations would be tracked by the governor’s office, according to two people familiar with the matter.In addition to the efforts to secure support from lobbyists, the main super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis’s bid announced last week that 99 of Florida’s 113 Republican state legislators had endorsed Mr. DeSantis for president. Several lawmakers said privately that they feared he might veto their bills or spending projects if they did not support him. Two said they had been contacted by members of the governor’s administration about making endorsements.As governor, Mr. DeSantis has sought to expand the power of his office and has relied on the specter of political retribution, bending legislators to do his bidding or else face primary challenges and targeting corporations like Disney that he has clashed with.The unusual outreach to lobbyists and lawmakers highlights the careful line that Mr. DeSantis and his allies must walk as he seeks the nation’s highest post while governing its third largest state.Under Florida law, state employees are generally allowed to participate in political campaigns if they do so during their personal time, with their personal devices and without making reference to their official duties or authority, among other factors.Ethics experts said the accounts of DeSantis administration officials’ aiding his campaign merited further scrutiny — but the members of the Florida Commission on Ethics, which looks into allegations of ethical violations by government employees, are appointed by Mr. DeSantis and his allies in the Legislature.“The conduct raises very serious and substantial questions,” said Anthony V. Alfieri, founding director of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami School of Law.Juan-Carlos Planas, a Florida elections lawyer, said the governor’s executive staff and political team should maintain clear boundaries.“Government is not supposed to be overtly political,” Mr. Planas said. “People have to be able to deal with the government knowing that the campaign is a separate entity. When you start blurring the line, it becomes autocratic.”Mr. DeSantis has made urgent efforts to raise money for his campaign to take on former President Donald J. Trump, who boasts an army of small donors. On Thursday, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign said it had raked in a record $8.2 million in the first official day of his run for the White House. The remarkable dollar amount helped quiet criticism of his glitch-filled campaign announcement on Twitter a day earlier.At least some of the haul came from Florida lobbyists. Many of the lobbyists and their clients have projects within the state budget that Mr. DeSantis could choose to veto — giving them a clear incentive to contribute when asked. Several state lobbyists attended a daylong fund-raising session with Mr. DeSantis at the Four Seasons hotel in Miami on Thursday.Aided by the event, which was called Ron-O-Rama, Mr. DeSantis raised roughly twice as much money as Mr. Trump did in the 24 hours after his criminal indictment this year. The sum broke the previous one-day record of $6.3 million set by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2019.Mr. DeSantis is also under pressure to wrench key Republican endorsements away from Mr. Trump, who scored an early victory last month by securing the support of a majority of Florida Republicans in Congress.Maggie Haberman More

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      Prosecutors have evidence Trump showed classified papers to people – report

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      Federal prosecutors have evidence Donald Trump showed classified documents to people, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing unnamed sources, as the investigation into his handling of national security materials and obstruction of justice approaches its conclusion.The development could raise the stakes for the former president as it exposes him to serious action under the Espionage Act, of wilfully communicating national security materials rather than simply retaining them, which is rarely charged.The movement of boxes in and out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort, has been a key focus for prosecutors because that was where Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, concentrated when he searched the property for classified documents.Corcoran found roughly 40 classified documents in the storage room and told the justice department no further papers remained on the property. But that assertion was called into question when the FBI seized 101 classified documents months later, including from the storage room in question.The central question for the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been whether Trump arranged for classified documents to be removed from the storage room before Corcoran searched there, to illegally retain them, even though he had been told he could not, as the Guardian first reported.When the chief US judge Beryl Howell forced Corcoran to testify to a grand jury, she opined in a 86-page legal memo that she believed when Trump went through boxes to give materials back to the National Archives last year, it was “apparently a dress rehearsal” for the subpoena.The Post attributed the “dress rehearsal” line to officials, though it was in Howell’s legal opinion that was reported in March.More importantly, it remains unclear if the special counsel has evidence that Trump’s response to the archives was a dry run to commit obstruction of justice.Prosecutors have also developed evidence in recent weeks that Trump employees at Mar-a-Lago last year brought boxes of documents back to the storage room the day before justice department officials came to collect classified documents that had been subpoenaed, the Post reported.Trump has denied wrongdoing, though his defence is framed around his near-unfettered ability as president to declassify documents. That argument is being viewed by the justice department as a straw man, because he is actually under investigation for retaining national security materials.The statue at issue is section 793e of the US Code, which makes no mention of whether documents are classified. If prosecutors were looking to charge Trump with classified documents retention, as he claims, the statue at issue would actually be section 798.A Trump spokesperson has previously said of the investigation: “This is nothing more than a targeted, politically motivated witch-hunt against President Trump.”Trump is not the only public figure being investigated over the retention of classified documents. Joe Biden and Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, have also been found to have retained records after leaving office.But Trump faces unprecedented legal problems.The clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination faces trial on 34 criminal counts related to his hush-money payment to a porn star; was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a case brought by a writer who alleged rape; faces state and federal investigations of his election subversion; is the subject of the classified records investigation; and faces a New York state civil suit over his business practices.He denies all wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of political persecution – a stance that has propelled him to a 30-points-plus lead in primary polling. More

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      DeSantis appears to back woman who led Amanda Gorman poem school ban

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      Ron DeSantis on Friday appeared to defend a woman who got Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem The Hill We Climb removed from a Miami school, even though she has attended events alongside white supremacist and far-right groups.The Republican Florida governor, who entered the race for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination with a botched launch on Twitter on Wednesday, said parents such as Daily Salinas were saving children from political ideology “the left [is] trying to jam in” to schools.“They don’t want the parents involved in education because they view you as an impediment to their ideological agenda,” DeSantis told the Florida parent educators association homeschool convention in Orlando.“They view you as an impediment to their ability to indoctrinate kids with their beliefs and their agendas. I’m sorry, I choose our beliefs as parents over the beliefs of the ideological left.“We want parents to be armed with the ability to make sure their kids are in a safe environment, and yet you have narrative, and you have the left trying to jam this in.”Salinas, a parent of two children at the Bob Graham education center in Miami Lakes, who has been photographed attending rallies by the neo-fascist Proud Boys group, admitted she had read only “snippets” of several books she sought to have banned from the campus.They include the ABCs of Black History, poetry by Langston Hughes and books on Cuba, all of which she has criticized for “indirect hate messages”, references to critical race theory and gender indoctrination.Salinas also posted antisemitic memes on Facebook – for which she later apologized.“I’m not an expert. I’m not a reader. I’m not a book person. I’m a mom involved in my children’s education,” Salinas told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement.Salinas is also aligned with Moms for Liberty, a rightwing activist group committed to the removal from the nation’s classrooms of books relating to sex education, LGBTQ+ rights and racism in American history.In his speech on Friday, DeSantis alluded to coverage of the removal of Gorman’s work from the school’s elementary school library, a decision made by the Miami-Dade school district following a single complaint, from Salinas, as a “ridiculous poem hoax” fomented by what he called the leftwing “legacy media”.“This is some book of poems, I never heard of it, I had nothing to do with any of this, that was in an elementary school library and the school or the school district determined that was more appropriate to be in the middle school library. So they moved it,” he said.“These legacy media outlets are … trying to create a political narrative that is totally divorced from the facts and if they’re going to do something like this ridiculous poem hoax and actually put that out there and think that you’re going to believe it, they’re insulting your intelligence and our country.”DeSantis, who is trailing far behind former president Donald Trump in the race for the Republican 2024 nomination, repeated the falsehood that no books had been banned from Florida’s schools.“The media, when they talk about ‘book ban’, understand that is a hoax. They are creating a false narrative,” he said.Yet in April, the writers’ organization PEN America that has been tracking public school book bans for two years, produced a report showing Florida was one of the most prolific states for educational book bans, with 357 separate bans across 12 school districts in the first half of the current school year.Nationwide, the group recorded 1,477 book bans, with 20% attributed to complaints from Moms for Liberty.“These groups pressured districts to remove books without following their own policies, even in some cases, removing books without reading them,” the report said.“That trend has continued in the 2022-23 school year, but it has also been supercharged by a new source of pressure: state legislation.”This month the Guardian reported on the harmful impact on Florida’s teachers of a range of new education laws introduced by DeSantis, including vague legislation without defined criteria that requires school districts to remove “inappropriate” material from campus libraries. More

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      Will DeSantis Destroy Conservatism as We Know It?

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      Ron DeSantis’s botched, awkward entry into the G.O.P. presidential primary highlights that there are two important internecine Republican conflicts unfolding at once. First, there is the obvious argument about Donald Trump’s suitability for the presidency. But there’s a second, less obvious question that is closely related to the first and often mistaken for it: What is the nature of contemporary conservatism? Or to put it another way, if Trump loses, what will take his place? And when viewed through that prism, DeSantis is particularly significant. More than anyone else in the race, he has the potential both to defeat Trump and to end conservatism as we have known it.But first, let’s define terms. What is a conservative? It’s a hard question to answer, and it gets harder each day. Since the second half of the 20th century, conservatism as an ideology has been largely synonymous with something called “fusionism,” an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians. In the Cold War era, the additional commitment to a strong national defense resulted in what was often called the “three-legged stool” of the Republican Party.Under this formulation, the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity. That’s certainly how I perceived it before Trump, and it’s why I mistakenly believed it would reject him as a standard-bearer. Though he pledged to be socially conservative as president, he was a thrice-married libertine who kept a framed photo of himself on the cover of Playboy in his office. His economic program was more populist than libertarian, and his foreign policy was far more isolationist than those of previous G.O.P. presidents and presidential nominees.In other words, I looked at him and thought, “He’s not a real Republican.” Trump, by contrast, correctly perceived that the party was not — or was no longer — primarily an ideological party. It was more clearly defined by what it was against than what it was for. While Trump’s vision of Trumpism was primarily an extension of his personal ambition, the ideological definition of Trumpism became something else entirely: a full-spectrum political and cultural opposition to the left, however it might be defined.This transformation was also tied to a change in the way that Republicans perceive government. Fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our “unalienable rights.” Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.By contrast, the nationalist conservative movement that Trump has helped bring center stage has different priorities. In its view, the right should — to cite the words of David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College — use the power of government to “reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law).” In an excellent 2022 piece, Philip Klein, the editor of National Review Online, called this “fight club” conservatism and raised the obvious alarm. Any government strong enough to reward friends and punish enemies is also strong enough to do the reverse, to wield the same power to punish you and to reward your opponents. The legal instruments you create to combat your foes can just as easily be turned to attack you.Which brings me back to DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference and the ultimate example of fight club conservatism. His primary victory would signal that the transformation of conservatism since 2016 wasn’t a mere interruption of Republican ideology — one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene — but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.That does not mean that Trump and DeSantis are the same. There’s at least one key difference. Trump fights for himself above all else. His political impulses are selfish, sub-ideological and subject to revision at a moment’s notice. He is equally content attacking Democrats and any Republicans who get in his way.DeSantis is likewise ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition: He fights the left. When you understand that distinction between the two men, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.Trump, fighting for himself, relentlessly attacks DeSantis, including with gross and unsubstantiated rumors. DeSantis, hoping to fight the left and not Trump, largely ignores his competitor and instead doubles down on attacking his progressive enemies, including “woke” universities and “woke” companies such as Disney.But whom DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it. Republicans, after all, have long fought the left, but DeSantis does it differently, in part by abandoning fusionist commitments to free speech and limited government.Thus, DeSantis punishes Disney for merely speaking in opposition to a Florida law that restricted instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida public school classrooms. DeSantis likewise attempts to regulate social media moderation, intruding on private corporations’ decisions about who to platform and what kinds of speech to moderate. He attempts to restrict speech about race and racial equality in public universities and private corporations. He’s banned even private employers from imposing a Covid vaccine mandate.When you view DeSantis as more anti-left than conservative in the classic sense, then other aspects of his rhetoric begin to make sense. Once a Covid vaccine advocate, he has since asked the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongs in Florida related to the Covid-19 vaccines.” A strong supporter of lethal aid to Ukraine during the Obama administration, he recently and notoriously referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” Why the flip-flops? Because support for vaccines and for Ukraine are now seen in populist right circles as “coding left” or — equally unacceptable — as positions of the “regime” or the “uniparty” or the “establishment.”For conservatives like me who want both to defeat Trump and to begin a restoration of the fusionist principles that once defined the G.O.P., DeSantis presents a dilemma. As I’ve written before, I disagree with DeSantis on many things, but I see Trump as an entirely different order of threat — one who is demonstrably willing to help precipitate mob violence to sustain his hold on power. So should someone like me quiet his critique of DeSantis in the interest of defeating Trump?I say no. I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.Moreover, suspicion of state power should extend beyond the protection of civil liberties. Conservatives have long raised proper concerns about the ability of the government to achieve the economic or cultural outcomes it desires when it institutes sweeping, large-scale government programs. And this concern is not exclusive to conservatives. My colleague Ezra Klein has done outstanding work, for example, demonstrating how in California many of the best-intentioned progressive government programs are simply not working well.Here it’s worth repeating the pragmatic concerns about wielding government power. Any government strong enough to suppress my opponents’ speech is also strong enough to suppress mine, and any G.O.P. effort to erode American liberty will hand the same powers to the party’s political opponents. Republicans could live to rue the day when they rejected economic freedom and scorned free speech. This is particularly true if — as many advocates of DeSantis-like measures attest — liberalism is otherwise dominant in American culture.I’m reminded of a memorable scene in the 1990 movie “The Hunt for Red October.” A Soviet submarine captain, in his eagerness to sink a defecting Soviet submarine, recklessly launches the very torpedo that sinks his own ship. His executive officer’s final words hang in the air. Condemning his superior for his arrogance, he tells him, “You’ve killed us.”Speaking of exceptional colleagues, I want to close with a brief note about Ross Douthat’s latest column. He expertly outlines the competing arguments of pro-Trump and Never-Trump Christians:When religious conservatism made its peace with Donald Trump in 2016, the fundamental calculation was that the benefits of political power — or, alternatively, of keeping cultural liberalism out of full political power — outweighed the costs to Christian credibility inherent in accepting a heathen figure as a political champion and leader.The contrary calculation, made by the Christian wing of Never Trump, was that accepting Trump required moral compromises that American Christianity would ultimately suffer for, whatever Supreme Court seats or policy victories religious conservatives might gain.Ross is right, but there’s something else worth considering. Christian credibility is important, but not as important as Christian character. I opposed Trump for many reasons, certainly including concern over what such overt moral compromise would do to the witness of the church. I also opposed Trump because of what loyalty to Trump would do to Christians.To put it another way, after years of engagement with Trump, has Trump influenced the church more than the church has influenced Trump?The verdict is in. I see it with my own eyes. Trump has influenced the church. You see it in casual Christian cruelty online. You see it in the conspiracy-addled ReAwaken America rallies that are packing churches from coast to coast. You see it when genuine Christian candidates such as Mike Pence and Tim Scott struggle to gain traction even though they purportedly share the faith and values of tens of millions of American evangelicals, while Donald Trump self-evidently does not.Trump’s influence should not be surprising. After all, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “Bad company corrupts good morals.” Trump has been bad company for evangelicals since the day he rode down the escalator. And he has corrupted the morality of all too many American Christians. More

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      ‘Ron DeSantis Has a Jekyll and Hyde Persona’: Our Columnists and Writers Weigh In on His Candidacy

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      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who announced his bid for the Republican nomination on Wednesday.How seriously should we take DeSantis’s candidacy?David Brooks Ron DeSantis was overvalued before and is undervalued now. He’s still the most likely Trump alternative since he spans the Trump wing and the non-Trump wing of the G.O.P. But it would take a Trump implosion to bring that about. I doubt there’s much that DeSantis can affirmatively do to control his destiny.Jane Coaston Extremely seriously, and very literally.Michelle Cottle About as seriously as a moderate to severe case of shingles. (So, pretty seriously.)Ross Douthat More seriously than any Republican not named Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis’s weaknesses are obvious — social awkwardness above all — but even as his poll numbers have sagged, nobody else has emerged from the pack, so he enters the race as the only currently plausible vehicle for Republicans who don’t want Trump again.David French We should take Ron DeSantis more seriously than many pundits are taking him today. He has struggled under Trump’s relentless attacks, but he’s still the clear second choice, and it’s way too soon to write his campaign obituary.Michelle Goldberg A few months ago, before it became clear what a problem his personality was going to be, I thought he was very likely to be the nominee. And until 6 p.m. on Wednesday, I still thought he had a decent chance. But I don’t see how he comes back from that catastrophic Twitter launch.Rosie Gray Ron DeSantis is the only Republican so far who appears capable of putting up a credible challenge to Trump. But his pre-candidacy wasn’t very encouraging: He’s allowed Trump to define him as a personality-challenged weirdo, and he has made politically questionable moves like the six-week abortion ban he signed.Katherine Mangu-Ward He’s a capable governor of a successful state who has a good eye for the places where political points can be scored — mostly authoritarian culture-war stunts — even if he isn’t always successful in scoring them.Daniel McCarthy He would be the front-runner any other year. He’ll be the front-runner next year if luck somehow takes Donald Trump out of the race. As things stand, Ron DeSantis is as serious a contender as anyone can be with the ex-president in the contest.Bret Stephens Three months ago, I would have predicted that Ron DeSantis, fresh from his resounding re-election as governor of Florida, would beat Trump for the Republican primary. Now he looks more like the Ted Cruz of this electoral cycle, pompous, mean and not nearly as clever as he seems to think he is.What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?Brooks DeSantis’s problem is that he can’t attack Trump, because a chunk of his support is Trumpy, and he can’t not attack Trump, since Trump is flailing him day after day. I can’t think of a candidate who took down a front-runner without criticizing him. DeSantis has locked himself into a posture in which he looks weak and passive.Coaston He is in almost every way a standard presidential candidate — a successful governor of a big state looking to make the leap to the national stage. That seeming regularity makes him seem familiar, recognizable, even.Cottle He has long been the great hope of the many, many G.O.P. donors and other establishment Republicans desperate to move the party beyond Trump. As the cliché goes, they see him as Trump without the crazy — a hard-edge conservative who has a gift for playing to the base’s angriest, most revanchist tendencies, but isn’t totally cracked.Douthat Almost alone among the not-Trump candidates, he has a case that could actually work in a G.O.P. reshaped by Trumpism: namely, that he fought the key battles of the Trump era more effectively than Trump himself. That line may not be enough to win, but it’s an argument that actually meets Republican voters where they are (or, for now, seem to be).French He’s the most likely Trump alternative in the race.Goldberg Anti-wokeness is the glue that holds the modern right together, uniting people who disagree about economic organization or foreign policy. DeSantis — who loves to say that Florida is “where woke goes to die” — is betting that anti-wokeness alone can power a presidential campaign. But his official campaign launch suggests he’s so far down the right-wing rabbit hole that he can’t communicate with people who aren’t upset about college “accreditation cartels” and central bank digital currency.Gray DeSantis will be the clearest test so far of how much Trumpism without Trump actually appeals to voters.Mangu-Ward In his self-published 2011 book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” DeSantis writes like a normie Tea Party conservative — and much of his record in Florida is consistent with those values, including during Covid. But the title, which tweaks Barack Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father,” is a hint that the Trumpish troll always lurked within and may be all voters care about. The DeSantis candidacy is a test of whether there is anything left of the G.O.P. besides Trump fandom.McCarthy DeSantis is as much an heir as a rival to Donald Trump. He shows that the changes Trump began as president will continue and expand under the next generation of Republican leadership, with DeSantis at the fore. The governor is an immigration restrictionist and foreign-policy restrainer, and he’s more systematic than the former president about attacking progressivism’s institutional strongholds in corporate America and higher education.Stephens DeSantis is running on the theory that the best way to beat Trump is to imitate Trump, minus the obvious personal flaws. But it might just be that the only way to beat Trump is to run directly against him, pointing out all the ways in which he has been a disaster for the Republican Party and a disgrace to the United States.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about his vision for America?Brooks The modern G.O.P., like many populist-right parties across the West, is built around one idea: The progressive highly educated elites are awful; they serve themselves and condescend to everyone else. DeSantis has embraced this belief up and down the line. It’s served him well politically.Coaston His belief is that America is a problem that must be solved by the state. He appears to believe that American companies, business and schools and universities were once deserving of freedoms and liberties, but some of them have failed (in his view) and thus must be punished until they submit to the will of the state. He reminds me of Woodrow Wilson, another former governor who believed in the perfectibility of the American populace by government intervention.Cottle He is just as thirsty for power as Trump — and just as cruel and cynical in pursuit of that power. Fly planeloads of hapless migrants to Martha’s Vineyard? Make schoolteachers pawns in his culture war? Use the levers of government to threaten and punish those who say things he dislikes? It’s all good in DeSantis Land.Douthat The thing that many of his critics loathe most about DeSantis, his willingness to use political power directly in cultural conflicts, represents the necessary future of conservatism in America. The line between politics and culture is always a blur, and a faction that enjoys political power without cultural power can’t serve its own voters without looking for ways to bring those scales closer to a balance. There are good and bad ways to do this, and DeSantis’s record is a mixture of the two. But the project is a normal part of democratic politics, not an authoritarian betrayal.French Ron DeSantis has a Jekyll and Hyde persona. He ran an extremely MAGA first campaign for governor, then governed as Dr. Jekyll, squarely in the mainstream. Even his divisive Covid response was within the norms for Southern G.O.P. governors. Then, as his star rose, Mr. Hyde emerged, and he began to run to the edge of the populist G.O.P., trying to outflank Trump from the right. He’s now the avatar of a more authoritarian G.O.P., eager to wield state power against his ideological enemies, often in unconstitutional ways.Goldberg Of all the Republican candidates, DeSantis is the most likely to govern as an American Viktor Orban. He’s been relentless and at times very effective — despite his Twitter broadcast — in using the power of the state to persecute his enemies and impose his ideology. A DeSantis presidency would represent a more orderly and disciplined kind of authoritarianism than we saw with Trump.Gray His vision is an America under dire threat from woke teachers and Disney. He’s spent his time as governor engaged in emotionally charged culture war by wielding executive power (with the assistance of a Republican legislature) — something that raised his profile in the conservative media.Mangu-Ward I love to hear a candidate talk about freedom, but it would be more exciting if I believed his policies would match his rhetoric. For someone who has a lot to say about liberty, DeSantis has scored his biggest hits on the national scene in an overwhelmingly authoritarian vein — book bans, border walls, punishments for dissenting speech, restriction on the internal policies of private companies and more.McCarthy Higher education wields enormous power over American life but is disproportionately the preserve of a single party and political outlook. DeSantis has a vision of greater representation, balance and intellectual diversity in Florida’s universities, and ultimately America’s. It’s an inspiring vision that shifts conflict from the culture, and all its private and public institutions, back to the realm of ideas. More ideological balance on campus means more of it in corporations, journalism and beyond.Stephens DeSantis minus the bombast could be an effective governor, never more so than when he defied conventional wisdom and required public schools to open up in the fall of 2020. But his pinched view of democracy — whether it comes to freedom of speech, abortion rights or the importance of supporting Ukraine in its struggle for survival — disqualifies him as someone I could think of supporting.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a DeSantis candidacy?Brooks Many fast-growing states are run by Republicans — Texas, Georgia, Florida. Florida has passed New York in population, Miami is becoming a tech hub, times are good. We need a president who has a record of economic success, not someone a majority of Americans have already rejected.Coaston He’s like Donald Trump with a plan.Cottle He knows how to use theatrical jerkiness to own the libs without getting himself impeached.Douthat He turned Florida a deeper shade of red. He knows how to govern. And nobody else who can win is walking through that door. If you don’t get behind DeSantis, you might just as well get behind Trump.French He’s the only man who can unite every faction of the party. Anti-Trump or Trump-weary Republicans will vote for him despite their reservations, and he’s the only other candidate who can pry the populists from Trump’s grasp.Goldberg He’s still the leading Trump alternative, so if you don’t want an insurrectionist loser who’s fighting off felony charges, it’s time to coalesce.Gray DeSantis has shown that he can run a state that attracts hundreds of thousands of new residents while at the same time making the MAGA right feel good.Mangu-Ward DeSantis: He’s Trump, but also not Trump!McCarthy Ron DeSantis is sternly disciplined, strikes an irresistible contrast between his own youth (44) and vigor and Joe Biden’s age (80) and infirmity, and can serve two consecutive terms if elected. He’s primed to be the most transformative president since Franklin Roosevelt.Stephens To beat a creep takes an even bigger creep.Jane Coaston (@janecoaston) is a staff writer in Opinion.Michelle Cottle (@mcottle) is a member of the Times’s editorial board.Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) is a political reporter.David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Bret Stephens are Times columnists.Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Daniel McCarthy (@ToryAnarchist) is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The NAACP says Florida isn’t safe for Black people. Unfortunately, they’re right | Tayo Bero

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      The NAACP has advised Black people to take precautions when traveling to Florida. In a move typically reserved for places experiencing war, social unrest or natural disasters, the group said that it was issuing the Florida advisory in direct response to “Governor Ron DeSantis’ aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools”.“Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color,” the NAACP wrote in a press release issued last week.It’s one of many public rebukes of Florida’s current war against inclusion, in which schools have inevitably become a battleground. Along with slashing funds for diversity and inclusion initiatives at institutions of higher education, DeSantis also recently blocked a new high school AP African American studies class, calling it “a political agenda” and “woke indoctrination”. Some of the offending topics in the course outline included intersectionality, the Black Lives Matter movement, reparations and prison abolition.The NAACP’s warning is important because it’s a stark reminder of how Black erasure is weaponized in the project of white supremacy. History has taught us that any attempt to assert the dominance of whiteness necessarily involves the subjugation, destruction and erasure of Black people. Whether it’s preventing Black people from voting, or blocking access to vital educational material that would teach kids why Black people once couldn’t vote, Black struggle has always gone hand in hand with its own un-remembering.Still, DeSantis’s war against “wokeness” is operating alongside a larger effort to make Black people feel unwelcome, their identities inherently un-American. And in a country where white victimhood has become a powerful motivator, and where misinformation is regularly used to further the cause of white supremacy, it’s not difficult to see how dangerous it is to implicate children and young people in that system of ignorance.Excising Black Americans and their historical struggles from the larger story of the US also lets the country off the hook for the ways it continues to owe an immeasurable debt to its Black people. Yet as the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates highlights in his 2014 essay The Case for Reparations, for every noble effort to figure out how the US can right its wrongs, there have been forces waiting to explain why reparations for Black people are either impossible to achieve or unnecessary to even attempt. Erasing the very knowledge base that helps us remember why these reparations are important only helps further that agenda.Unsurprisingly, rightwing white Americans are responding with jest to news of the NAACP advisory. “Maybe they had a travel advisory because of the humidity, I know that it gets frizzy,” podcast host Steven Crowder said on his show on Monday, apparently referring to the tendency for Black people’s hair to respond to humidity.He and his co-hosts lobbed racist jokes back and forth before Crowder finally said the quiet part out loud: “After the advisory went up, 49 governors called the NAACP asking if they could be added to the list.”This banter is disturbing not because of how uninspired it is as far as “comedy” goes, but because of just how close to reality their jokes come. DeSantis is, after all, launching his presidential bid.The US has never been fully safe for Black people, and as the country shifts toward a very frightening time in its history, it’s taking specific aim at the very people upon whose backs the country was built.
      Tayo Bero is a freelance writer More