{"id":32343,"date":"2023-05-22T15:53:14","date_gmt":"2023-05-22T19:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=32343"},"modified":"2023-05-22T15:53:18","modified_gmt":"2023-05-22T19:53:18","slug":"ron-desantiss-context-free-history-book-vanished-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2023\/05\/22\/ron-desantiss-context-free-history-book-vanished-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Ron DeSantis\u2019s context-free history book vanished online"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the lead-up to this spring\u2019s release of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis<\/a>\u2019s book \u201cThe Courage to Be Free,\u201d a funny thing happened on the internet: His first book, published in 2011 before his political career began, disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,\u201d was once available at the click of a button as an e-book, but no more. A used hard copy is selling for $1,950 at the only online bookseller<\/a> that appears to have it. The publisher, a small vanity label<\/a> in Florida called High-Pitched Hum Publishing, did not respond to phone calls or social media messages about why the e-book was removed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, The Washington Post purchased a digital copy last summer, in anticipation that it may someday become more relevant. Now, with DeSantis (R) expected to declare his bid<\/a> for the presidency officially this week, that time has come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u201cDreams From Our Founding Fathers,\u201d in title, cover and content, is essentially a troll of former president Barack Obama<\/a>\u2019s 1995 memoir \u201cDreams From My Father,\u201d which recounted Obama\u2019s upbringing and young adulthood before he entered Harvard Law School.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his book, DeSantis, who has moved to stop history lessons<\/a> in Florida that might make students uncomfortable and who attacked an AP African American Studies course he said \u201clacks historical value<\/a>,\u201d dismisses slavery as a \u201cpersonal flaw\u201d of the Founding Fathers, irrelevant to the really important stuff: context-free, cherry-picked quotes from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His writing is coherent, pretty lively and includes \u2014 angels and harps! \u2014 footnotes to his sourcing. This alone makes it better than the vast majority of politicians\u2019 attempts at writing history<\/a>. And though DeSantis aligned himself with the tea party movement when he wrote the book, he does not subscribe to its conspiracy theories claiming Obama was a secret Muslim or born in Kenya. He also does not think \u201cdeath panels<\/a>\u201d are real \u2014 though \u201cconcerns about them are not foolhardy,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But DeSantis\u2019s thesis is twofold: that Obama was conducting a dangerous power grab, and that the Founding Fathers would have been appalled if they were still alive to see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The largely forgotten book ban case that went up to the Supreme Court<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to DeSantis, evidence of Obama\u2019s power grab includes the auto-industry bailout<\/a>, the 2009 stimulus package<\/a> and Obamacare<\/a>. The president\u2019s anti-American principles, DeSantis alleges, come from the usual boogeymen \u2014 activist-writer Saul Alinsky, formerly incarcerated professor Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright \u2014 plus poet Frank Marshall Davis<\/a> and the father<\/a> who abandoned Obama when he was 2. DeSantis then writes a laundry list of bad things these men once said and pins them onto Obama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If that seems like a bit of a stretch, the balance of the book is devoted to performing a similar maneuver on the Founding Fathers, glomming DeSantis\u2019s loathing for the 44th president onto quotes from Madison and Hamilton. Other Founders are mentioned only in passing and only so far as they can be made to support DeSantis\u2019s argument, with one exception: a late chapter about George Washington<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slavery \u2018a fact of life\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any history book about the Founders must acknowledge that many of them were enslavers<\/a>, and DeSantis gets to it in the introduction with a whiff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSlavery,\u201d he writes, \u201chad been a fact of life throughout human history.\u201d It\u2019s a variation on the false argument that \u201cpeople didn\u2019t know it was wrong back then.\u201d In any case, the form of slavery practiced in the early republic \u2014 lifelong, inherited, race-based, chattel slavery \u2014 was particularly severe and relatively new, as far as human history goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did Ben Franklin really say, \u2018A republic, if you can keep it\u2019?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the Founding Fathers, like Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin<\/a>, opposed slavery anyway, DeSantis writes. True enough, though he hardly mentions either man again until the conclusion of the book, when he repeats that some of the Founding Fathers opposed slavery. It\u2019s as if Morris and Franklin have nothing to offer DeSantis by way of writing, philosophy or the \u201cFirst Principles\u201d of his book\u2019s title (read: limited government) and are simply useful as permission slips to skip the yucky parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DeSantis concludes his brief discussion of slavery with: \u201cThough it was not immediately abolished, slavery was doomed to fail in a nation whose Constitution embodied such philosophical truths\u201d as liberty. Many of the Founders believed in the inevitability of slavery\u2019s gradual end, but anyone today capable of typing \u201ccotton gin\u201d should know that isn\u2019t what happened. By the time of the Civil War, fully eight decades after the revolution, American slavery was bigger, crueller, more entrenched and more profitable than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the lead-up to this spring\u2019s release of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis\u2019s book \u201cThe Courage to Be Free,\u201d a funny thing happened on the internet: His first book, published in 2011… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32344,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[5077],"class_list":["post-32343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-ron-desantiss-context-free-history-book-vanished-online"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}