Ron DeSantis in the Groove in Osky
And a protester makes troubling allegations...
Republican Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was at Smokey Row in Oskaloosa on Sunday and he was at the top of his game. I was at the first DeSantis event at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines last spring, and have been at several other events since then. Governor Kim Reynolds was at the fairgrounds and displayed what looked like a schoolgirl crush on him, and the crowd of about 1,000 Iowans was equally enamored. Troubling to me, their loudest cheers were when he was at his most cruel—bragging about bussing immigration asylum seekers from the Texas border to Martha’s Vineyard.
I missed the moment when Iowa Republicans started loving government officials trafficking humans, but here we are.
I can’t say how large the crowd was for sure in Osky because it was fragmented. Maybe 100 people? His staff had put up room partitions in anticipation of a smaller crowd to make it look like he filled the room for the TV cameras, but they didn’t think to take them down when it was clear they didn’t need them. You can see the partition marked by the American flag on the left and the Iowa flag on the right.
If I suspend all logic, compassion, and democratic norms and put my Republican hate goggles on, DeSantis is at the top of his game. He’s relaxed, seemingly thoughtful, and willing to take on the world. To my mind, he’s never been better. Sharp as a tack. Messaging clear and crisp. The fighter we need as America “rots.”
If elected president, he will tear through our institutions like Godzilla through Tokyo. On day one, all Biden policies end, build the wall, and drill baby drill. Public schools will be gutted, he’ll bend the higher education system to his will and if they resist, no more funding, end tenure, no more federal employee unions, fill federal government positions with his lackeys, no DEI, CRT, and break private companies who support our greatest enemy, WOKENESS!
Boom! Smack! Pow!
The crowd loved it. Except for one woman.
When she started yelling at DeSantis, I started filming. You can’t really understand what she is saying, but I followed her out because I was curious about what her concerns were. They were for women’s rights, and public education, and that DeSantis allegedly knows that a registered sex offender is teaching at a private school in Florida and that she is worried that private schools won’t be held accountable for their actions. She has family with kids at that school.
Here is part of our brief interview, with a transcript below. If you listen to this, you will hear how upset she is, which you might not get from the transcript. I have redacted all names of people and the school since I have no proof of the allegations:
I asked her why she was protesting. Here is a lightly edited transcript:
I came here because this man has no regard for female rights. He wants to take everybody or do Christianity and his Bible says in Genesis 3:16 that he should be the master. He's forking over all this money, private money. He's got our governor to do it, over two billion dollars in our taxes that they've sent over to religious schools that indoctrinate our children. They're allowing men to be employed at private schools in Florida and just send out an email to the parents saying hey, we have this…we have we've employed this guy, who's his name? Who's his credentials? What are you gonna do about it, are you gonna put your kids out of school and a private school has nowhere else to put your kids? He knows about it.
So there's something wrong with the man or men?
He is. No, he's just a sex offender. Oh, registered sex offender his name (redacted), once I'm gonna say (redacted) great school, he was hired in by a special lady that has a lot of freaking money. I have family down there. So I know this for a fact and I know I know petitions have been sent around, he needs to get in his private schools and look at sex offenders that are incorporating themselves in the private schools because they get cover of it's a private school and all we have to do is send out an email to the parents.
Are you from Oskaloosa?
Here in Oskaloosa. This used to be such a progressive State and we're getting squashed by all these Christian people who all this, I can't all this war that is going on and all these women. There's no women's rights anymore.
He doesn’t care about women's rights. Nobody cares about the women. It was the children that are getting raped in molested and over there or over here.
Nothing is ever said about that. He thinks he's king of his own wife per his religion. Everybody does nothing to protect our children, my family goes to that school in Florida…this has been going on for a long time and he knows about it.
I almost didn’t publish this because of the serious nature of her allegations. But, I realized that the national media were there, it was on camera in multiple media outlets, and who am I to be her gatekeeper? Who am I to silence her? And why was I the only member of the media who decided to follow her to get more information?
Plus, watch it again. Look at how DeSantis treated her. Is that just anger when he tells her to stop it, or is it fear?
One more thing.
As I left, I turned back and saw the statue of Chief Mahaska looking toward the DESANTIS 2024 FIGHT. WIN. LEAD. NEVER BACK DOWN bus.
“Hey, Chief Mahaska!” I asked. “What do you think of Governor DeSantis making it illegal in Florida to teach the uncomfortable part of our history, including the near-genocide of your people by European colonists?”
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Bob, you are a gem. Thanks for this original reporting. Your point about people cheering when DeSantis was at his most cruel reminded me of a little book by Carol Bly, in which she wittily recalls turning into a Republican briefly during an injury, when she suffered from such great pain that she quite literally could care only about herself. The book seems positively quaint, but I think you'd really like it: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/941161.
I like your closing, but it also captures how hardened our rhetoric about history has become. I agree with you that banning critical approaches to history is to be resisted at all costs. And I myself have used the term Native American Holocaust to capture the scale and the genocidal nature of many European-indigenous relations. But there is also some nuance in intertribal relations and in figures like Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards, who sought to redress some of that colonial violence early on. James Welch captures much of this in Fools Crow. I guess I find it equally depressing to imagine Native American history being reduced to a political sound bite. There were some matriarchal nations, but tribes like the Blackfeet and Sioux were rigidly patriarchal, socialized their young men in what we might recognize as toxic masculinity, and socialized young women in ways that the woman you interviewed would reject. That is not the only story about those peoples, but it's the kind of thing that gets lost when genocide is the only story told. In truth, a lot of Native Americans, like Latino Americans, skew more conservative than liberal, are either Catholic or Protestant Christians, and own their fair share of firearms. I don't mean this in an adversarial way, but isn't there a fair chance that Chief Mahaska would have seen more of himself in a conservative leader like DeSantis than in someone like Joe Biden or even Nikki Haley?
Thank you for your coverage.