The website has been quiet but I have not (yet) dropped off the face of the Earth. I’m currently 15,500 words into a novel having another 25,000 words or so of unfinished projects on the back burner.

This is an oped I wrote for the Irish Examiner recently on Ron DeSantis and the abuse of history in the Florida school curriculum – it was written in the aftermath of the decision to start teaching so-called positives about slavery and, politics being politics, the situation has only gotten worse since.

What DeSantis and his administration (a group of academics wrote up the curriculum, not him personally) are doing is very different from a conservative reading of a historical document, which would be, for example, arguing that a particular tone or phraseology supported a conservative interpretation of the text.

Using history to teach context and ways of avoiding past mistakes and horrors is one thing. But this is a blatant abuse of history for political ends.