Once upon a time, “the shot heard around the world” referred to the beginning of the American Revolution or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that sparked World War I. Now, in the postmodern fantasies of Ron DeSantis, “the Florida equivalent of the shot heard round the world” refers to his equally great war against Mickey Mouse.
This kind of bombastic kitsch pervades the Florida governor’s 100-percent-not-part-of-a-presidential-campaign opus The Courage to Be Free. Assessed against other read ’em and dump ’em conservative books like James Lindsay’s Race Marxism or Charlie Kirk’s The College Scam, DeSantis’s screed isn’t the most self-defeating of the bunch (that honor still goes to Mark Levin’s American Marxism). But it is undoubtedly the most smugly self-congratulating — Trumpese with a bigger thesaurus and half the charm.
It is the kind of book where lines like “it fell to me to protect the people of Florida from the destructive biomedical security state” or “nobody handed me anything; I simply had to earn it” or “while it was common for rising freshmen to spend their summer enjoying themselves on the beach and sleeping in until noon, I was up at the crack of dawn to start work” are tantrically repeated to convince the reader that DeSantis doesn’t just set up playdates to dress up as Tom Cruise characters — he is one.
Late in...
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