Anything Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis does can be explained in one sentence: He wants to be president. In today’s version of Republicanism, that means stoking any conspiracy theory the base presents to you, good and hard, and the current conspiracy theory is that woke educators are making your white conservative children cry by teaching them that racism is wrong or whatever.

Think back to any white racist panic of the last 40 years, from “reverse discrimination” to “we need these statues of murderous slaveholding traitors because Heritage,” and it’s all the same bullshit. A bunch of extremely loud suburban moms and bulging-eyed weird dudes whose hobbies include collecting guns and complaining about the United Nations all show up to government meetings to insist that the liberals and the globalists are teaching communism to their precious doughlumps, resulting in broken spirits and expanded horizons and a new reluctance to submit to the authority previously imparted by Daddy’s Beer Hand. Translation: We’re racists, we taught our kids to be racists, anything that goes against our heritage of being deplorable human crapsacks is a violation of our racist rights and our “heritage.” That includes the rest of you shutting up about all of it so that Timmy and Buffy don’t have to feel awkward in freshman literature classes.

So anyway, Trump wannabe Ron DeSantis is making a big deal of signing a new Republican-pushed Florida law that will require a “survey” of the state’s public universities and colleges to determine if any students or faculty feel their “competing ideas and perspectives” are being insufficiently represented. While the text of the bill tries to be ambiguous about what might happen next, DeSantis isn’t being shy about broadcasting the survey’s true intent—possibly because he knows his core audience is too thick to get the point unless he shouts it out himself. The results of the survey, suggests DeSantis and other Republican backers, will be used to justify budget cuts to schools determined to have improperly ensaddened Florida’s delicate Aryan youths.

The Tampa Bay Times report is brimming with the quotes racist conservatives have used for decades to claim that colleges are brainwashing their youngfolks. There’s “indoctrination,” and “hotbeds” of “stale ideology,” and “orthodoxies,” and general demands that schools teach the controversy such that no bullheaded ignorant student has to suffer the embarrassment of a professor telling them that actually, no, there are hundreds of years of research to prove that the idea they just thought up off the top of their head was wrong.

For example, if a future Florida professor were to say to a class that “the reason all of our feet are wet right now is because sea levels have risen two feet and we are all extremely boned,” a conservative student ought to be able to pipe up to say, “Actually, my mommy told us that this water is all the tears God shed when he caught my brother masturbating,” and the professor would have to say, “Sure, what the hell, feel free to go with that one too when it comes time for final essays.” This has been very, very important to conservatives ever since they realized that book learning was resulting in children having different opinions on things after they had left for college, and believing that this was a new thing that had never, ever happened to any parent before and was therefore a plot by, again, global communism.

It’s all stuff that conservatives have been using in emails and pamphlets and self-important books to claim that the Red Menace was never truly defeated after McCarthyism crashed and burned, but lives on in the ivory towers that analyze modern Asian literature or take regular particulate readings in neighborhoods near major industrial plants.

There’s really not much to say on this one. It’s going to result in lawsuits, Florida is going to lose a bunch of them and not care, Florida education standards are going to drop even more than now as boards look to ditch any class, activity, or cultural event that might upset professional conservative Biffs, and all of it is a side effect to Ron DeSantis and allies needing new pet issues to promote in the midterms now that the previous Republican promise, “elect us and you can at least be somewhat confident that we won’t kill off a half a million people while sending the economy into a historic tailspin yet again,” proved to be too heavy a lift.

Media conservatives have been beating this drum for, again, decades, part of the much broader claim that the world and all its endeavors are biased against them for not considering evidenceless conservative ideological handwaving to be the exact equal to empirical science and documented history. It is a necessary component of the pre-fascist persecution complex.

DeSantis, for his part, has learned a great deal from Trump and seems bent on exploiting it all. Trump taught DeSantis that corruption and incompetence can be open as long as you can make a claim that it benefits the Republican base, and that lying outright no longer comes with any notable penalty. He’s putting a special emphasis on adopting the same all-conspiracy, all-the-time approach that Trump only stumbled on due to his unchecked malignant narcissism. Ron is down for whatever conspiracy you’ve got, is absolutely for pretending that the pandemic can be combatted with zero significant effort on anybody’s part, and will outbid anyone else in the party when it comes to turning Trump’s worst fascist instincts into new Florida laws.

It’s just another publicity stunt at taxpayer expense. It always is, with Republicans.