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RON DeSantis has so far refused to say whether he will run for President, but if he does he might well find a strong following among right-wing, Jew-hating Catholics, as well as white Protestant nationalists.
Writing for The New Republic at the weekend, Audrey Clare Farley pointed out that DeSantis “quite masterfully frames his crusades in religious, rather than political, terms.”
His is a distinctly white Catholic morality—one that few realize is on the rise today. If we want to understand the Florida governor’s allure, the scope of infrastructure in place to buttress him, and the sheer terror that many already feel at the prospect of a DeSantis White House, it is imperative to understand that the man best suited to supplant Trump as the Republican Party standard-bearer has a patently Catholic brand of hate.
She added:
Over the last few decades, there has been a dramatic ‘Catholicization of public morality.’ Religion scholar Megan Goodwin introduced this phrase in her book Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions to describe the adoption of historically Catholic positions on matters like abortion, as well as conservative evangelicals’ increasing willingness to support Catholic politicians whose religion they privately disparage. If DeSantis has benefited from this process, he is also accelerating it.
Farley referred to DeSantis’ rhetoric about vaccines and LGBT+ “groomers”, his gift for in drawing out anti-semitic tropes and his hatred of Blacks.
Catholic racists
She quoted Gunnar Gundersen, a lawyer and co-founder of Black Catholic Messenger as saying on Twitter:
The man is going to run for President on anti-blackness and the Church will call his politics pro-life.
Gundersen, she wrote, views white Catholics as leading the way in today’s racist politics.
However, in an interview with The New Republic, he reminded that these individuals were always at the forefront of such movements. Gundersen said that, though Catholics inaugurated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and though they were integral to protecting both slavery and Jim Crow in America … they’ve long perceived a special need to show contempt for Black life.
They think their ability to participate as equal citizens depends on oppressing Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour including BIPOC Catholics.
LGBT+ issues
According to Florida Politics, DeSantis holds one of the worst reputations in the country for policies targeting LGBT+ Americans.
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Reputation-management company Signal AI, found only one Governor more homophobic: Texas’ Greg Abbott, above.
The study specifically notes the level of attention to DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
The new law forbids instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade and requires those topics to be handled in an age-appropriate manner in all grades.
Do Republican voters want DeSantis o run?
Brigid Kennedy, writing for The Week said It seems so and that DeSantis has continued to make gains as time has passed. For instance, 65 percent of Republican voters and independents who consider themselves either conservative or very conservative want DeSantis to run.
What’s more, 56 percent of that same group said they prefer DeSantis to Trump.
“There’s a new Republican sheriff in town,” mused David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center.
DeSantis outpolls Trump not only among the general electorate, but also among these Republican-leaning voters who have been the former president’s base. Republicans and conservative independents increasingly want Trumpism without Trump.
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Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist 
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