Originally published at: Clips of Ron DeSantis awkwardly trying to smile | Boing Boing
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Perhaps I’m a bit touchy thanks to my own experience with the ongoing penalties for being awkward and bad at masking; but there’s definitely something about the vein of DeSantis criticism that focuses on how his smile doesn’t crinkle his eyes around the edges right or whatnot; rather than the fact that he’s a vindictive reactionary monster who revels in the suffering of the weak; that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
He certainly walked into it; taking a basically indistinguishable policy platform up against someone with a vastly greater ability to work a crowd; and that’s reasonably notable; but beyond that specific point it doesn’t seem all that different from coverage of the fact that Christie is fat.
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Man, he seems absolutely terrified whenever he’s not actually speaking.
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I think a window into his psyche was the anecdote from earlier in his life, that, on dates, he would pronounce Thai food as “thigh food”. And if his date corrected him, he didn’t pursue the relationship. He is afraid of people who call him on his bullshit.
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I think I prefer “unauthentic” or “fake” rather than “awkward” when talking about DeSantis trying to project positive emotions.
The problem I have with using “awkward” is that he is not authentically attempting to express a positive emotion and having difficulty.
He is trying to hide how he actually feels (usually angry, contemptuous, annoyed, frustrated, confused, and occasionally, murderous), and trying to pretend he is happy and enjoying himself and not filled with rage and hate.
He is acting a role and doing it poorly. Since he is acting in the service of advancing fascism I think it is appropriate to point to videos or images that show his inability to mask the true feelings he has underneath, because he has repeatedly shown that those are what he acts on when in power.
A lot of this though does get presented, especially on social media, as awkwardness, neuro-divergency, or even some kind of mental illness, which is unfair to people who actually have social anxiety, or other things that result in social awkwardness.
DeSantis is not socially awkward, he’s just an uncharismatic bully who has a hard time hiding his resting contempt face.
ETA: added neuro-divergency to the list of things that it gets presented as, but is not
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Not sure which is creepier.
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Do we know for sure that there’s no neurodivergency involved here?
I dislike Desantis as much as the next non-fascist, but I’ve had a similar reaction as @fuzzyfungus to the awkward-smile-shaming. It feels a little like when Republicans give Biden shit for his stutter. Although you do make a very good point about the distinction between awkward and fake.
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Rather than speculate let’s just go with as far as we know he has no diagnosis of anything, so even if he does he is not doing anything to try to cope with it in a healthy way.
I think the important thing to understand is that it’s not that he’s having a hard time or being “awkward”, he’s a hate filled fascist trying to pretend like he’s a person that you might want to vote for
ETA: also I wanted to be clear that I don’t mean to dismiss your concerns or fuzzyfungus’. I can understand feeling uncomfortable with it, especially because it does get framed in that way often.
I guess what I am saying is that I’ve never known a neurodivergent person that looks like they literally want to murder everyone around them when there’s no camera on them, then suddenly puts up a fake smile when somebody’s looking.
I think DeSantis is just a fascist that is used to being surrounded by other fascists who agree with him and also have that same look of cold contempt as their baseline. He’s just not used to pretending that that’s not what he is in front of people who really aren’t.
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Came here to say he’s a giant lizard in a human suit, and he’s too dumb to learn how to properly operate it, but a cockroach in a human suit also works well.
Do carry on.
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