The Ugly Ambition of Ron DeSantis

In a cynical bid for the Bolshevist vote, the presidential hopeful betrays a founding principle of the historical American nation

Despite its long history as an integral, if messy, part of participatory democracy, handing out or displaying political flyers in Florida can now land an activist behind bars, thanks to legislation Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law last week. If someone feels threatened because the flyer you handed them “evidences prejudice based on the race, color, ancestry, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, homeless status, or advanced age of the victim,” you lose your right to free political expression and you could spend ten years in prison with a third degree felony hate crime conviction.

From GabNews.com:

The legislation came about after activists from a group called the Goyim Defense League made headlines for several years for their activism efforts. The Goyim Defense League’s activism takes the form of distributing flyers that contain “uncomfortable truths” about the individuals who control the mainstream media in the United States. These flyers have been handed out across multiple states, including Florida, and have been met with mixed reactions from the public.

Despite the controversy surrounding the flyers, it is worth noting that they contain no threats of violence or threatening language. Rather, they present what the Goyim Defense League sees as a reality about the individuals who control the mainstream media, and invite readers to consider a different perspective. While some might consider this information to be “offensive,” there is nothing inherently threatening or “intimidating” about the distribution of flyers with factual information on them. The flyers even have a statement on them noting that they are “distributed randomly without malicious intent.”

Among other reasons, this is bad law because, under this law, the determining factor that makes posting flyers a criminal act isn’t some objective standard like vandalism, applicable to anyone posting flyers. The criminality arises from the completely subjective claims of someone else. It should be obvious that no just society could lock a person in a cage on the strength of how someone else claims that person’s opinion makes them feel.

But the most disturbing part of this law isn’t in what it says, it’s in where Governor DeSantis signed it. He didn’t sign the bill in Tallahassee, the city in which the people’s business in Florida is typically done. He signed the bill in Israel.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs Florida legislation into Florida law in Israel on April 28, 2023

From the governor’s official website:

“In 2019, I had the opportunity here in Israel to sign into law groundbreaking legislation to root out antisemitism from our public education system, establishing Florida as a leader in protecting religious liberty,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Four years later, the threats faced by religious Americans of all faiths have evolved. Through this legislation, we are ensuring that perpetrators who commit acts of antisemitism and target religious groups or individuals will be punished.”

Even by the standards of American democracy, characterizing a law that increases the ability of the State to jail political dissidents as “protecting religious liberty” is notably cynical. A more honest, less ambitious governor would describe the law as putting the power of the State at the service of the already powerful to stamp out the tiniest squeak of dissent from the powerless. And while he claims the law protects religious Americans of all faiths from those mysterious threats only Jonathan Greenblatt can see, by going to Israel to sign the law, and by his own remarks, Governor DeSantis made it clear that Jews are the law’s intended beneficiaries.

I think most Americans are made vaguely uneasy by the unfamiliar sight of the governor of an American state traveling to another country to sign a law under which the people of his state will live—especially if that governor openly states the law is for the benefit of the segment of his state’s population with an ethnic tie to the foreign country. But, America is in uncharted waters in a thousand different ways, and at least as prevalent as uneasiness among the people is confusion among the people.

“Confusion among the people” was how foreign diplomats returning from Russia frequently put it when asked to describe the situation there leading up to the revolutionary period of 1917 when the Russian people tipped into history’s bloodiest holocaust. Much of the confusion among our people stems from our complete ignorance of the circumstances surrounding the confusion among those people.

In his two-volume history of the relationship between Jews and Russians, 200 Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the social atmosphere in revolutionary Russia. The February Revolution, the first of two in Russia in 1917, ended the “123-year-old history of unequal citizenship of the Jewish people in Russia” writes Solzhenitsyn. At the moment of Jewish emancipation there were outpourings of condemnation of everything in Russia’s past, and demands to rip the old Russia out by the roots¹ in order to build a new Russia.²

“The February Revolution was carried out by Russian hands and Russian foolishness,” Solzhenitsyn continues. “Yet at the same time, its ideology was permeated and dominated by an intransigent Jewish hostility to the historical Russian state that ordinary Russians didn’t have. So the Russian intelligentsia too had adopted this view.”³ In other words, the Russian intelligentsia—the writers, the professors, and so on—and their imitators sought social status by distinguishing themselves from the Russian masses through the adoption of a viewpoint opposite to the common person's patriotic love of Russia. Sound familiar? Throughout 200 Years Together, Solzhenitsyn documents the historical justification for the "intransigent Jewish hostility" to Russia, but he was unforgiving towards the status-seeking Russian intelligentsia, whose fate during the coming murder of historical Russia was especially gruesome at the hands of the murderers, who held their former allies in the same contempt Solzhenitsyn did. It was the "intelligents," along with the Orthodox clergy, whose executions most frequently included the executions of their wives and children, as well, and who suffered the agony of seeing their children murdered in front of them before being executed themselves.)

In the immediate aftermath of the February Revolution, which brought about the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on March 2, the one thing all the press and society agreed on was the immediate legislative enactment of Jewish equality, which advanced very quickly.⁴ Concurrently with the rapid Jewish advancement, there was "an energetic pursuit" of known or suspected anti-Semites... "All over Russia there were hundreds of arrests of Russians, either because of their former positions or even because of their former views," writes Solzhenitsyn.⁵

But by mid June, there were grumblings in the ever lengthening queues against the perceived new privileges of the Jews, who were pouring into the cities from both inside and outside Russia—particularly from the United States—and who had vaulted into positions of power over them. As the conditions of the Russians deteriorated, the backlash against the Jews gained strength. The newspaper Russkaya Volya (Russian Freedom) reported: “Right in front of our eyes, anti -Semitism, in its most primitive form … re-arises and spreads…. It is enough to hear the conversations in streetcars [in Petrograd] or in queues at various shops, or in the countless fleeting rallies at every corner and crossroad … they accuse Jews of political stranglehold, of seizing parties and soviets, and even of ruining the army⁶ … of looting and hoarding goods.”⁷

The anti-Semitic backlash intensified when “a small slice of young cutthroat Jews, who, with their Russian internationalist brothers...burst forth to 'deepen' the Revolution”⁸ with the Bolshevik takeover in October, 1917.

As early as April 1918, the Council of the People’s Commissars of Moscow and the Moscow region published in the Izvestia (thus for a wider audience than the region of Moscow alone) a circular addressed to the Soviets “on the question of the anti‐Semitic propaganda of the pogroms”, which evoked “events having occurred in the region of Moscow that recalled anti‐Jewish pogroms” (no city was named); it stressed the need to organize “special sessions among the Soviets on the Jewish question and the fight against anti‐Semitism...”⁹

On July 27, 1918, (just after the execution of the imperial family), the Sovnarkom¹⁰ "directed all Soviet deputations to take radical measures to eradicate anti-Semitism. The inciters of pogroms, those who propagate them, will be declared outlaws.” The order was signed by Lenin. "If the meaning of the word 'outlaw' may have escaped some at the time, in the months of the Red Terror it would appear clearly: to ‘outlaw’ the active anti-Semites was to shoot them.”¹¹ Who doubts those guys in Florida handing out flyers would qualify as "active anti-Semites?"

The CheKa was the Bolsheviks’ secret police. Like the local police in Florida, the CheKa was charged with enforcing the correct political views. It instantly gained strength and by the beginning of 1918 it was already filling the entire populace with mortal fear. In fact, it was the Cheka that started the “Red Terror” long before its beginning was officially announced on September 5, 1918. The CheKa practiced terror from the moment of its inception and continued it long after the end of the Civil War. By January of 1918, the CheKa was “enforcing the death penalty on the spot without investigation and trial.” Then the country saw the snatching of hundreds and later thousands of absolutely innocent hostages, their mass executions at night or mass drowning in whole barges. Historian S. P. Melgunov, who himself happened to experience perilous incarceration in CheKa prisons, unforgettably reflected upon the whole epic story of the “Red Terror” in his famous book Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923.¹²

And from that mind-blowing book,¹³ "After announcing the abolishment of capital punishment for rhetoric purposes,¹⁴ the Bolsheviks immediately restored it. As early as January 8, 1918, an announcement of the Soviet of People's Commissars decreed "to create the battalions for digging trenches from the ranks of bourgeois men and women, under the supervision of the Red Guard. Resisters will be executed by firing squad" and counterrevolutionary agitators were "to be executed on the spot."¹⁵

In other words, capital punishment without investigation and trial had been restored. A month later an announcement of the subsequently infamous All-Russia CheKa read: "...counterrevolutionary agitators... everyone attempting to escape to Don to join counterrevolutionary armies... will be ruthlessly executed by the squads of the Commission on the spot… those posting bills "to be executed immediately"¹⁶ and so on…

Bolshevism included the criminalization of antisemitism, a crime that defies objective definition and is indifferent to factual truth. In practice, only a gentile can be guilty of antisemitism (not to ignore the many Jews who were also murdered by the Bolsheviks), and for a gentile to be deemed guilty of antisemitism often requires nothing more than the accusation of such by any Jew (for example, by claiming to feel “threatened” by some guys in Florida handing out flyers). Bolshevism also demanded a complete monopoly on all public speech and, to enforce that monopoly, the power of the State had to be harnessed to stamp out even the tiniest squeak of dissent from the powerless.

Remarkably, in the same week in which Communism triumphed in Russia with the Bolshevik seizure of power on October 25, 1917, its ostensible arch-enemy, Zionism, triumphed in England with the November 2, 1917, announcement by the British government committing Great Britain to the establishment of Israel in the ancient land of Palestine. More than a century later, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis traveled to the result of the one triumph to honor the triumph of the other by inflicting its ideology on the people of his state.

Ron DeSantis wants to be president and is willing to help destroy a foundational principle of the historical American nation—freedom of expression—to achieve his goal. Americans should hold him in the same contempt in which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn held the status-seeking Russian intelligentsia.

1. Rech, March 17, 1917

2. Ch. 13

3. Ch. 13

4. On March 1, one day before Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, the Ministry of Justice ordered the immediate elevation of all Jewish paralegals to full attorneys. On March 3, the Provisional Government issued a declaration stating that one of the main goals of the new government is a `repeal of all restrictions based upon religion, nationality and social class.´ On March 4, the Defense Minister proposed to open a path for the Jews to become military officers, and the Minister of Education proposed repealing the percentage quotas on the Jews in universities. Both proposals were accepted without obstacles. On March 6, the Minister of Trade started the repeal of the law forbidding purchase of land by companies with Jewish executives. On March 20, in its first broad legislative action, the Provisional Government removed all restrictions on Jews, including on Jews coming from the United States.

5. Ch. 13

6. The Provisional Government leader, Alexander Kerensky, was a Jew, and only 25 percent of those wielding power within the Executive Committee of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which was formed within hours of the Revolution, were Russian. From Ch. 13: This Executive Committee was in fact a tough shadow government that deprived the liberal Provisional Government of any real power. By its “Order No. 1,” the Executive Committee wrested power from the military and created support for itself in the demoralized garrison of Petrograd. It was precisely this Executive Committee, and not the judiciary, not the timber industrialists, not the bankers, which fast-tracked the country to her doom. In the summer of 1917, Joseph Goldenberg, a member of the Executive Committee, explained to the French Diplomat Claude Anet: “The Order No. 1 was not a mistake; it was a necessity.... On the day we executed the Revolution, we realized that if we did not destroy the old army, it would crush the Revolution. We had to choose between the army and the Revolution, and we did not waver: we chose the latter ... [and we inflicted,] I dare say, a brilliant blow.” So there you have it. The Executive Committee quite purposely destroyed the army in the middle of the war.

7. Ch. 14

8. Ch. 13

9. Ch. 15

10. The Councils of People's Commissars, commonly known as the Sovnarkom, were the highest executive authorities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Soviet Union, and the Soviet republics from 1917 to 1946.

11. Ch. 15

12. Ch. 16

13. The Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923, pg. 37 Melgunov’s eyewitness account of the Red Terror is the most difficult book I’ve ever read for the sheer horror of what it describes. I could only read about ten pages at a time.

14. No. 1 of the "Paper of Intermediate Worker and Peasant Government" October 28 read: "Russian Congress of Soviets enacted: capital punishment, restored by Kerensky in the army, is hereby abolished".

15. "Izvestiya" No. 30.

16. "Izvestiya" No. 27.