The Ron DeSantis Hospital for White Snowflakes

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

by Rich Herschlag

Because I am a fake journalist covering fake stories for the fake media, I was recently allowed full access to one of the most shocking yet most secretive publicly funded institutions in the country. The Florida Hospital for White Snowflakes—also known as DeSantis HOWS, and sometimes DeSantis House—is a facility dedicated to healing young white readers exposed to books revealing unsettling truths of Black American history. Initially in disbelief that such a place even existed, I took the assignment on a lark, mostly as an all-expenses-paid break from the unpleasant northeast winter. What I saw over the course of a few short days would change my life forever.

Tad, as we’ll call him, was a junior at an exclusive mostly white private high school just outside Gainesville. Tad maintained a 3.2 average and in 2021 as a sophomore and the school’s starting quarterback led the team to its first regional title in a decade. Recruited by numerous NCAA Division I colleges, Tad could often be seen escorting various attractive young women about town in a 2021 Porsche GT3 of unknown origin. Sadly, on November 3, 2022, Tad’s world came crashing down.

Assigned Jeanne Theoharis’s The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by a now unemployed English teacher who either hadn’t read or had ignored a recent memo by the school board, Tad could not locate the Cliffs Notes in time and read over half the book in conventional fashion for a paper ironically due just days before widespread availability of ChatGPT. Friends and teammates recall Tad being in an unusually somber mood in the ensuing days, making comments to the effect of “Rosa Parks received death threats for years after her courageous one-woman resistance on that bus back in 1955,” and “Rosa Parks, nearly broke, fled north to find work.”

Tad missed practice on November 9 and skipped a keg party on November 12. On the evening of November 16 Tad experienced several minutes of erectile dysfunction while attempting to bring the previous year’s prom queen to climax. The quarterback’s tailspin reached a nadir on the afternoon of Saturday, November 26 when during round 1 of the division playoffs Tad threw two interceptions in the fourth quarter en route to a 27-24 defeat at the hands of a clear underdog opponent.

Today Tad is on life support—life support consisting of being strapped into bed watching an endless loop of Knute Rockne, All American, outfitted with earphones and an audiobook of The Great Gatsby, and a nurse who looks like Pamela Anderson circa Baywatch coming in every hour on the hour to issue Tad a hand job.

Tad will probably be picked near the bottom of the 2028 NFL draft and is mentally prepared to play for his community college and eventually be a walk-on at a four-year school. He is philosophical about his prospects in life, vowing to party till it hurts on the Florida Panhandle this summer and to read only highly mainstream, state-sanctioned historical material for the remainder of his natural life. From my own amateur viewpoint Tad appears to be on the mend, greeting me with the words, “You that New York Jew reporter?”

This is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s mission. Beyond the hoopla of his impending run for the Republican nomination as candidate for U.S. President, Desantis has vowed below the radar to nurse back to health every middle to upper middle class white Floridian under the age of 18 savagely exposed to run-of-the-mill Black history. The victims are everywhere.

Just a few beds down from Tad is a 16-year-old we’ll call Madison because her name is Madison. Madison suffers from Harriet Tubman Syndrome, having read sections of a biography of the legendary Underground Railroad and civil rights pioneer who was once struck in the head by her slavemaster with a two pound weight leading to a lifetime of epilepsy. 

While Madison herself has not experienced anything remotely resembling epilepsy, she has apparently lost interest in both the yearbook committee and the gun club. Last spring Madison posted an Instagram commemorating Harriet Tubman’s birthday leading to a minor fallout at the “popular table” in the cafeteria. At DeSantis House, Madison’s daily therapeutics consist of a steady diet of Starbucks Frappuccinos and a continuous stream of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet reruns. Madison seems to be recovering steadily, having hooked up with Tad on at least three occasions.

The fair wounded birds of DeSantis House could melt even the most hardened war correspondent’s heart and lead one to question not only one’s chosen profession but the destiny of White America itself. By the third day I began to feel a bit like Joan Didion in the horrific but starkly matter-of-fact book of early 80s banana republic atrocities, Salvador. Whether the 12-year-old middle school kid mildly upset over the overseer beatings received by Frederick Douglass 190 years ago, a 15-year-old cheerleader inspired to go to law school one day and become a public defender after reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, or a high school freshman volunteering his train seat to an elderly gentleman of color after reading about the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, one gets the sense that however well intentioned the efforts at DeSantis House the damage has already been done.

Governor Ron DeSantis, for his part, is undaunted. Willing to spare no expense by taxing Disney World to death, the asshole fascist narcissist self-described next leader of the not-so-free world has vowed to find, catch, treat, and release every Floridian minor exposed to the facts of our complex and often unflattering racial history. “This is for the kids,” DeSantis told a Pensacola KKK rally, “not for me. I’ve seen this play before. One minute they’re reading about American slavery, the next minute they’re reading about the Holocaust.”

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