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The Palin-ization of Casey DeSantis — 32 Comments

1. Odd that the Daily Beast would call Casey DeSantis a “Walmart Melania,” when Walmart has gone full woke, at least with Pride merch. The Walmart website has no fewer than 10 full pages of out-and-proud/virtue-signaling rainbow stuff for customers, including plenty of items for kids: https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/pride-merch

2. The sneering attitudes toward Sarah Palin were inspired to a considerable extent on the fact that she doesn’t *talk* like members of the Elect are ‘supposed’ to talk, and did not have the expected educational background. Trump, also, didn’t talk like an approved member of the Elect, even though he had gone to Wharton.

   But DeSantis, though, seem in terms of verbal style and general presentation to fit the model. So the hate (not too strong a word) seems based mainly on perceived political threat.

3. In the above, I was referring to Ron rather than Casey. In her case, I think the hate is mostly motivated by the fact that she is married to someone guilty of Wrongthink and perceives as a threat. As was (is) the case with Melania.

4. Snobbery? You want snobbery?

   Naomi Wolf outs what she calls her tribe–which may be many who live in the NE/Acela corridors “people” as well.
   “Revenge is a dish best served cold” comes to mind.
   Having spent many years with these people, i can attest that she does nail them:

   https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/how-not-to-become-a-sociopath-the

5. It would say a lot that the two most physically attractive first wives will never be on the cover of Vogue magazine.

6. Casey DeSantis is a powerful member of the DeSantis team. She reportedly has schooled the Governor extensively on the art of public communication, particular with respect to appearing before camera. She was eminently qualified to do so as she is a former TV news host herself. (in my hometown of Jacksonville, Fl)

   She apparently is smart, organized, and tough. I doubt seriously that the author of the hit piece would fair particularly well in a head to head confrontation with her. Although not from a recognized prestige school, she has a BS in Economics with a minor in French. It may be hard to paint her as a “hick from Wasilla”.

   So, she must be attacked. She must be diminished before the public gets to know her and her story–cancer survivor, mother, etc.

   She is going to get the same treatment as her husband. My own idiot Governor just made extraordinarily vicious, and childish, comments about DeSantis. I would love to see them face to face in a debate.

   I assume that Newsom, like Trump, understands that an all out ad hominem attack is necessary before people around the country get to know DeSantis. Otherwise they might be impressed by his history. He is from a working class background; is Ivy League educated, with a BA, magna cum laude from Yale, and a JD, cum laude from Harvard; and an accomplished athlete. He is a Veteran who served in Iraq in direct support of an elite combat organization. He is a fighter who seems able to present and defend his actions in a coherent manner.

7. I have said it many times — the source of their feelings of moral superiority is their hatred. They feel morally superior precisely because they hate irrationally and insanely with exceptional viciousness and vitriol.

   These are not healthy people.

   And deep down, they know they are seriously messed up. That’s why they are so desperate to point fingers at others and accuse them of all manner of ugliness.

   It’s not possible to be a sane, rational, moral person and believe the vicious lies that Democrats peddle about their opponents. Their voters know this. But they hate so intensely that they celebrate the lies. Because the lies give them cover for hating.

8. So calling her a Walmart shopper, like a lot of middle and lower economic women. The Elites don’t and won’t vote for her Husband, but insulting the ones that do shop at Walmart might cost them. One would hope.

   My sister in law lives outside Sacramento and is Blue. Her husband died and really left her nothing. She works hard but use to shop at Wholefoods and other such stores. She was complaining once about prices and my Wife told her to got to Walmart, which she did surprising us. She told my Wow, the prices really are better.

9. the basilisk, is a ‘greater den of scum and villainy you could ever see’ look at the shreds of humanity they celebrate and or excuse,

10. There’s also the idea that she’s controlling and wears the pants in the family. What the media found acceptable and praiseworthy in Hillary Clinton is damnable in a Republican politician’s wife. So you have punching down at the Sarah Palin Walmart Mom, punching up at the supposedly arrogant and haughty Nancy Reagan or Lady Macbeth, and a large dose of misogyny.

    I’m not as impressed by Ron DeSantis as some people are, but some of the things he’s attacked for strike me as pluses, rather than minuses. I want a problem solver, not a political game player, somebody who isn’t forever playing at being something he isn’t. Unfortunately, it seems like it’s the game players and the poseurs who succeed in politics.

11. The Left is like the Russian Bolsheviks in 1918. They will meet their own, self-imposed, just ends. We must see they do not impose their ultimately suicidal irrationality upon the rest of us, which is a tough hope, given the MSM biases.The vote for Biden is evidence enough of Democratic irrationality.

12. On Robert Bork and the mean girls, I was at Stanford University during his Senate review. There were pictures of the face of the overweight, scraggly bearded jurist with the words “Would you put this man on the Supreme Court?!” printed underneath posted all over campus. And that was about the full depth of the discussion from the left; he was old, ugly, paunchy, and therefore out of touch and therefore it would not be cool to have him on the Supreme Court.

13. “Hate is apparently fun”

    I’ve pointed this out many times over the past twenty years or so. Progressives never recognize it in themselves. They feel the pleasure but don’t recognize its source and nature, so they feel no compunction or need to control the impulse. They are remarkably un-self-aware.

14. Mac on June 7, 2023 at 10:21 pm said:
    “Hate is apparently fun”

    I am coming to the conclusion that the real opposite of Love is Indifference, not Hate. Hate is just the expenditure of great emotional attention in a negative vein rather than the positive one of Love. So if Love is fun (and of course it is), then your comment that Hate is fun might well be true, too.

    I wonder if Hate could even involve the same flood of “love” chemicals (at least 8 and counting?), but in different mixes and timing?? Probably involves dopamine for that “fun” feeling?

    Leaving people completely alone does not involve such emotional investment. Even ridiculing them might give them attention that they crave?

15. R2L: I don’t disagree with what you said, but just for clarity: I’m not making an abstract argument that hate is fun, but describing what I observe. And, I have to admit, experience.

    I’ve heard that about the true opposite before, long ago. Martin Buber, maybe?

16. I hate; therefore I am.
    I demonize; therefore I am virtuous.
    I despise; therefore I am superior.
    I dehumanize; therefore I am moral.
    I calumnate; therefore I am clever.
    I prevaricate; therefore I am cunning.
    I subvert; therefore I am the cutting edge of ethical.
    I revel in character assassination; therefore I am invincible.
    I destroy for the greater good; therefore I am unassailable.
    I am supremely intelligent; therefore I am indestructible.
    “I WILL BURY YOU…”

17. Oops. Should be “…calumniate…”.

18. “I hate; therefore I am….etc., etc., ” continued….

    Fresh from “The New [Bolshevik] Republic”…comes this steaming pile of pure hatred and unadulterated, if PROUDLY SPEWED, dishonesty.
    Are we surprised?
    NO.
    Though once upon a time, all good people—across the political spectrum—would have been utterly gobsmacked…
    NOT ANY MORE, alas…

    “The Supreme Court Is Corrupt Because It’s Conservative;
    “It isn’t a coincidence. The court is corrupt, both judicially and ethically, because of the extreme ideology six of its justices serve.”—
    https://newrepublic.com/article/173228/supreme-court-corrupt-its-conservative

    They have no idea—no concept—of how disgusting they truly are. But ya’ gotta keep that “24/7 Hate” ALIVE and FROTHING on the front burner…electric stove, of course…

    File under: Just another problem….

19. I look forward to Casey becoming America’s First Lady in 2025.

20. ““Hate is apparently fun” See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57600.html

21. David Foster: That’s a good piece. All the pictures and diagnoses of this phenomenon remind me very much of what I observed among ’60s radicals. Not only observed but participated in, I’m sorry to say. Of the leftists I knew back then and still have some knowledge of, not one seems to have ever changed his or her mind about the movement. As far as I know I’m the only one who did.

22. one striking thing, where palin was a signpost was how they reacted to her child, there was something demonic in the way the democrats showed their pagan instincts which have become policy,

23. It is because Casey DeSantis is slender and beautiful, and from what little I know about her, classy, that the left feels they must say the opposite and destroy her. Of course, her husband, and her military and Catholic family upbringing are major factors as well.

    So I believe that the opinion writer Katie Baker is motivated by the above more than literal hate. However, the “hate is fun” factor is what makes the article promulgate.

24. Maybe.
    I still prefer the “hate is virtuous” meme.
    Especially since demonizing one’s political opponents has evolved in the US and other places in the West into being supremely virtuous.
    Hmmm… Now where have we seen THAT before?
    (Scratches head…. Oh yes! Democrats, TAKE A BOW!!)

25. I am actually quite glad that Ms Baker published the piece.
    The left love to cloak themselves in the tropes of compassion, fairness, justice, dignity, etc.
    But every so often the mask slips and they expose themselves for what they really are: Envious, jealous, frustrated, embittered, and cruel.
    This somewhat reminds me of the “deplorables” speech by the loathsome woman. It may well have the same effect; far from demonizing Casey DeSantis, it may actually enhance her appeal, I certainly hope so.

26. When I was in college over fifty years ago, the campus left believed, or at least claimed to believe, that good-looking women, women who took care with their looks (and sorority women) were shallow and superficial.
    Far as I could tell, it was jealousy from leftist women and resentment from leftist guys who knew they didn’t have a chance, the both having chosen scrubby and frumpy as political statements, not to mention lacking the actual material
    I participated in some projects mostly run by and filled by leftists. The good-looking women who participated appreciated an environment in which the foregoing was not in play. At the very least, I made some good friends simply by not being a jerk to them.
    I see no reason to think the same is not in play here, if only in the putative audience for such writers, if not amongst the writers themselves who may know their audience,

    During Palin’s prominence, a feminist website–wish I could remember it, now they’ve folded up–was devastated at feminist attacks on Palin.

    Quite a lot going on in this area and not all necessarily undiluted politics.

27. lee.

    I read Wolf’s piece. Interesting discussion of a devastatingly dry lifestyle.

    Howsomever; never having been within shouting distance of such a place, I can say such things as the Covid response exist elsewhere.

    You don’t need to be the upper crust to find people begging to be made to do stupid stuff. Or to find people wild to see others made to do stupid stuff. Although four democrat governors put infected patients into nursing homes, killing thousands, the villain is Di Santis, who failed to make people do stupid stuff.

    In addition, those in places of authority know they must be seen to do “Something”, as if Something is a proper noun having actual, positive effects.
    A school superintendent who does not shut down the school system is guilty if a kid dies of something which, under Birx’ rules, can be coded as a Covid death. He’s a murderer from one end of the state to the other.

    If he does shut the schools down and two kids die of accidents in the home because their parents cannot meet the unexpected need to make their schedules match, nobody knows or cares.

    And whatever the super believes about the issue itself, he knows how it works.

    Still, the screaming urge to see people made to do stupid stuff has to be experienced to be, barely, believed. Unfortunately, it’s also part of the global warming issue. Have to have global warming or you can’t make people do stupid stuff.

28. David Foster’s post at ChicagoBoyz (Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism) includes a reference to an address by C. S. Lewis that is, in an abstract way, remarkably similar to what Naomi Wolf describes with concrete personal details in her post (How not to become a sociopath; h/t lee). Lewis includes much more than this excerpt, which only hints at his exposition.

    https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
    C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. “The Inner Ring” was the Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of London, in 1944.

    In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

    There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline.
    …
    Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognised the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the Russian Army, or perhaps in any army. But you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the school ring was almost in touch with a Masters’ Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of an onion.
    …
    All this is rather obvious. I wonder whether you will say the same of my next step, which is this. I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
    …
    I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of you may already be compromised. I must not assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable.
    …
    My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort.
    …
    I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. But you may have an open mind on the question. I will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I do. It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.

    And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

    And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

    That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
    …
    The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it.
    …
    And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

29. AesopFan

    Fascinating piece from Lewis. One might think he was projecting from his own, presumably less wise earlier years. Or that he thought, correctly or not, that he was talking to a pathetic and sad cohort of younger people.

    I recall class structure in high school. There was the in-group, socially at ease, probably a bit more money, parents educated so better grammar in conversation, dressed well (given the context). And the jocks and the greasers and the nerds and those not in any particular class. I don’t recall seeing any “rings”.
    Same in college. Perhaps more sharply differentiated than in my high school.

    I think 90% of my classmates lived in the immediate post-war subdivisions; thousand square foot house, 90 by 120 lot, single-car width driveway (garage was up to you), Pretty much everybody’s father was a WW II and there were very few kids whose parents were divorced. Almost all of us were first-born,

    So, yeah, in-groups and not. Some folks desperate for getting “in” for all it signified. Status was probably not it, social opportunity was more likely the thing most envied.

    But rings? Never saw one. Maybe too dumb.

    But something occurs to me. In a parenting class, the instructor asked me how my folks handled peer group pressure. I said, “My parents didn’t think their kids had any peers.” I was sort of joking but in retrospect….yeah.

    Didn’t need peer-group approval if you don’t have peers.

    So, following; Lewis’ audience, if he’s reading them right, had been made to feel inadequate as people.

    I have no idea how it goes in real life in the UK, but various dramas include dialogue in which a correction of any sort includes a hint of put-down. If this actually happens frequently, possibly that’s a factor.

30. Richard Aubrey:

    I found the Lewis piece interesting but it was difficult to relate to it. When I was in high school I was unaware of any “in” ring that would have me or that I would want to be part of, so the feeling was mutual. I was not the cheerleader type, nor the student-government type. I guess if I was any type at all I was a “brain.” But that wasn’t really a “ring.” I had some acquaintances and a few good friends, and then in senior year a boyfriend. And that was it. Those were the things that mattered to me, socially speaking.

    Of course, my high school wasn’t a typical one for a number of reasons. It was very large and very fragmented and there was almost zero school spirit. I simply didn’t pay attention to most of the larger goings-on there. I had my classes, which were usually the same thirty or so people who were fellow “brains.” The rest of the school was pretty opaque to me, and it was somewhat dangerous as well (although not compared to inner city schools). A lot of what other people say about their high school years are about schools that bear no resemblance to mine.

31. Neo.
    If I had to characterize my high school years, I’d say I brushed up to, and was in from time to time, most identifiable groups. But never permanently. Not good in STEM, good in classes requiring verbal stuff. Couple of years of football. Lead in senior play. Dated an exchange student. Went shooting with some guys I knew.
    But not then or ever have I seen a “ring”. Maybe not sufficiently observant. Or, as I said of my parents, maybe the attraction of belonging to something was never sufficient to bring it to my attention.
    Had a fraternity brother going into journalism, always trying new metaphors, tell me I go through life leaning against a wall, arms folded, watching for something requiring action of some sort. Looking back on it, everything I’ve done, no matter how creditable, has fallen into my lap. Didn’t go looking for it.
    So, for some reason or other, maybe I don’t “need” various things enough to be attracted to a “ring”, to go looking for one, go looking for a group.

    But this isn’t about me. It’s about what seems to be a very sad cohort of people if Lewis is reading his audience correctly, and he probably was alerted to it because he’d been tempted strongly in his life. And what was his audience? Every young person in the UK? That would be unfortunate.

32. Ah yes, the good old days of yore, when my leftist alcoholic drinking buddy laid into our bartender because she had glasses like Sarah Palin and put her hair up like her. So refined. So superior.

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