Lately out of sheer intellectual boredom I have been comparing myself to Aldous Huxley. Like Huxley I abhor popular culture, and my disdain knows few limits. Like Huxley I think we are amusing ourselves these days into irrelevancy. Huxley foretold the current world better than Orwell. Where I part company with Huxley is over his perennial philosophy---beyond my fathoming---and with his doors of perception---the 60's are over, Aldous, and Timothy Leary and The Greening of America will not be making curtain calls although writer Thomas Wolfe might be seen winking offstage.

Chauncey Devega on DeSantis in Salon.com

 At DeSantis’ command and encouragement, Florida, like other red states, has implemented a thought crime regime where teaching the real history of Black Americans, and the country’s complex history more generally, has been banned and replaced with right-wing patriotic education that “does not make white children uncomfortable." Florida’s fascist authoritarian thought crime regime includes such measures as banning books, harassing, and firing teachers and other educators who are not in agreement with the goals of the white right and neofascist movement, defunding school programs and departments, and rubbleizing the once respected New College of Florida. DeSantis’ Orwellian thought crime regime is an extension of a decades-long campaign by the American right-wing and “conservative” movement to destroy public education as part of a much larger project to end social democracy.

 Nikki Haley is not a racist. She showed formidable leadership as South Carolina governor, in the aftermath of the 2015 mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in her state. But as a former MAGA activist now working to persuade people to leave the MAGA movement, I see Haley's recent comments on the Civil War and slavery in a particular light. They reflect the intense white fright pervasive in MAGA supporters as a result of continuous demographic change, and they affirm that a demythologization of historical nostalgia is necessary. 

-Rich Logis in Salon.com