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Ron’s Retro-COVID Denialism
A disturbing and deceitful narrative arising around Ron DeSantis.
I noticed it as soon as Ron DeSantis emerged from the midterms as the Republican Party’s new flavor of the month.
It was a casual assertion — so casual, in fact, that you might easily have missed it — but presented as an obvious fact upon which we all agreed and therefore didn’t even merit elaboration or special emphasis. And it was widespread in conservative media.
It was the notion that DeSantis had been right about COVID-19 all along: that the vaunted virus was really just a big nothingburger over which everyone in Snowflakeland overreacted, while Ron admirably kept his cool. Indeed, this idea has rapidly become one of the centerpieces of his appeal to the Republican electorate, or so we are told.
Jim Geraghty, senior editor at National Review, offered a textbook example in a post-midterm opinion piece for the Washington Post:
As governor, DeSantis took on some gargantuan fights and won. Most notably, his pandemic policies — reopening society faster and wider than many other states — spurred outrage from liberals who nicknamed him “DeathSantis”….But the governor came out of the pandemic more popular in Florida than when it started.
As Americans consider lockdown fallout — including children’s learning…
