Someone I am acquainted with who says he is a Republican, but has been disillusioned with the direction of the party has taken under Donald Trump, just waived off the suggestion that Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is a “serious” contender for 2024 Republican nomination if Trump doesn’t run. He is just too “crazy” for even the “crazies.” Yet as Politico pointed out in July, straw polling of Republican voters suggests that for the moment, DeSantis is currently the overwhelming favorite over potential rivals like Mike Pence if it comes to that.
That is why people should be taking what a potential DeSantis presidential candidacy would mean. Of course there could be some obstacles in the way; he barely won the 2018 governor’s race, and polling suggests that a slight majority of Floridians are becoming disturbed by his behavior in the run-up to his 2022 reelection bid. Since mid-July, more than 12,000 Floridians have died “officially” during the state’s deadliest period during this pandemic, and since Florida’s death numbers are not recorded “day and date,” but are published in random backdated lump figures, the true death figures in the past two months will likely be at least 15,000.
Yet through all of this DeSantis’ words and deeds during the current Delta surge suggests a man who doesn’t just suffer from megalomania—defined by The Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a mania for great or grandiose performance” and “a delusional mental illness that is marked by feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur,” or an extreme form of “narcissist,” defined as “an extremely self-centered person who has an exaggerated sense of self-importance.”
No, he could be something a lot worse. The website Mental Health America tells us that while the terms “psychopath” and “sociopath” are not well-defined in research literature, both tend to share “a pervasive pattern of disregard for the safety and rights of others. Deceit and manipulation are central features to both.” Neither condition necessarily involves violent behavior; they can appear to some to be “perfectly normal.”
The DSM-5 states that psychopaths and sociopaths share traits like “regularly breaks or flouts the law,” “constantly lies and deceives others,” “is impulsive and doesn’t plan ahead,” “can be prone to fighting and aggressiveness,” “has little regard for the safety of others” and “doesn’t feel remorse or guilt.”
The main “difference” between the two is believed to be that psychopaths are “born,” and sociopaths are created by an abusive environment. Psychopaths tend to be manipulative in their relationships, but also fool people into believing they are “charming and trustworthy,” and otherwise live “normal” lives. Sociopaths, on the other hand, are “erratic” and “impulsive.” Although sociopaths are prone to “fits” of anger, psychopaths are regarded as more dangerous because they feel less guilt about how their actions affect others, and usually feel nothing at all.
Yet the “mainstream” media has been loath to speak the truth about how DeSantis' behavior suggests that he suffers from these "illnesses." Instead, after in September 2020 DeSantis decided to “reopen” Florida, the media declared his pandemic “response” a “victory” despite the fact he repeatedly expressed “no confidence” that COVID mitigation efforts like mask-wearing had anything to do with it. There was of course the “seasonal” uptick in cases during the winter, but by June 2021 cases, hospitalizations and deaths were at near pandemic lows. But then came the Delta variant, and suddenly Florida was seeing its highest number of cases and deaths, and at one point (before Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and the other usual suspects joined in) was where one-quarter of the new numbers in the entire country were originating from.
Yet what was DeSantis’ response to this? Threatening school districts by withholding money if they required face masks, claiming it was the parents’ “choice.” Threatening businesses with a $5,000 fine per person if they demanded customers or employees wear a face mask in their establishments. DeSantis “inexplicably” downplaying getting vaccinated with the Delta variant raging even though the numbers were saying that nearly all new patients in ICU wards were unvaccinated. Instead, DeSantis has been taking advice from anti-science fanatics like Dr. Scott Atlas and others who “assured” him that something like the Delta surge would never happen, and now that they were proved terribly wrong, he has been in denial and pushing “magic bullets” like monoclonal antibodies to save his arse, while medical experts were warning that the procedure must be used immediately upon diagnosis of the virus, and was ineffective if used ten days after the initial infection. Being vaccinated was far more effective because the antibody only remained useful for a relatively brief time.
Because many anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers even denied the existence of the virus, many naturally would delay treatment until too late, and still the fanatics looked elsewhere for blame other than DeSantis; take for example GOP official Greg Prentice, who had been a vocal opponent of COVID mitigation measures—that is “had been” because he is no longer in a position to spread wild conspiracy theories. Late last week was “forced” to go to the hospital with serious symptoms and died the next day. His virus-denying colleagues and friends are so “shocked” by his sudden demise that instead of taking stock of their wrong-headed thinking, they are claiming that the Tampa hospital “murdered” him by “injecting” him with the “engineered virus.” This is the kind of insanity that DeSantis has wrought, and he just doesn’t care because it bloats his megalomania and allows him to escape any guilt over what he has done.
There has to be something done to expose this psychopath before he threatens to become Trump’s “heir apparent.” There are others who believe that there is something “wrong” with DeSantis; a post last month in Daily Kos by someone calling themselve’s “Blue Tuesday” thinks DeSantis is a sociopath, although his behavior fits more the profile of a born psychopath as defined above. To that poster, DeSantis has become a “quasi-dictator with genocidal ambitions.” Maybe, but the main thrust of the post was the “structural flaws” in American journalism “that are enabling his reign of terror.”
The post accuses most of the media establishment of showing “deference to power” and allowing the “normalization of madness.” The author states that from personal experience, “journalists are taught to offer an unceasing respect to public officeholders, who are in theory representatives of American voters. They’re also supposed to be dispassionate chroniclers of the moment, recording objective facts and betraying little opinion or bias as possible.” This “generally leads to news coverage that conveys information but not urgency, flattening events into concise capsules no matter how absurd or unprecedented they may be.”
Furthermore, instead of putting DeSantis’ bizarre behavior in the context of complete insensitivity to all the death around him that he seemingly does not care about, most of the media frames his actions within the context of “politics.” The poster notes how even a recent New York Times story asserts that DeSantis’ actions merely represent a “risk” to “his rising political career.” That people in Florida have been dying in droves because DeSantis is a homicidal maniac is not the principle “issue” here; it is whether he will survive politically.
It is just beyond reasonable comprehension to look at DeSantis and not see someone who is seriously impaired psychologically and emotionally. He is a man with zero empathy for anyone but himself, and he is doing everything in his power to prevent those people who do feel the need to act to protect their constituencies the ability to do so. He acts like someone who needs to be beaned on the head with a pile-driver to knock some “sense” into him. Outside some local media outlets and newspapers which have been exposing DeSantis’ crimes, the media—and the national media especially—has been treating the surge in Florida as just another news story.
The surge is supposedly “receding” now, but that doesn’t “excuse” all the death that DeSantis has allowed to occur on his watch. The fact that DeSantis has at no time in the past two months said anything that suggests that he is at all “disturbed” by the number of deaths in his state while he has done nothing to stop it suggests that he is a clinical “psychopath.” The sooner we accept that reality, the sooner that DeSantis will no longer be the “favorite” in 2024—and if elected president, to send this country into terrain that even Trump would fear to go.
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