Journalism: ‘Zombie Studies’ Profs Take Bizarre Starring Role in Media’s Latest War on Ron DeSantis

We've seen an awful lot of bizarre, surreal media attacks on Ron DeSantis, such as the one from the Washington Post trying to dunk on the Florida Governor and his wife, Casey, for getting married at Disney in 2009, as though it made him a hypocrite.

"Ron DeSantis, who denounced Disney, actually got married there," blared the November 2022 headline as the DeSantis/Disney war was once again heating up.

Even stranger were the hit pieces from the Miami Herald, NBC News, and "60 Minutes" from 2021 that centered around DeSantis committing the crime of prioritizing seniors for the coronavirus vaccine, which the MSM alleged was racist or something because it allegedly involved "pay to play" with Publix in majority-white older neighborhoods.

It was a narrative that quickly crumbled under scrutiny.

The MSM's latest round of "get DeSantis" may take the cake, though.

It centers around comments made by DeSantis last month during a campaign stop in Iowa. He was expressing his opinion on Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan and the end-runs the Biden administration was trying to take to get around the Supreme Court's June ruling on the matter.

“Why should a truck driver have to pay for somebody that got a degree in zombie studies?” DeSantis said at the time. “It doesn’t make sense.”

DeSantis' point about a trucker having to pay for someone to study zombies, a point which he has made before using gender studies as another example, actually got turned into a hit piece on DeSantis a month after he made the remark thanks to CNBC, which actually corralled quotes from some zombie studies scholars including some in Florida to note that a) zombie studies "is a real thing" that is beneficial to students and b) DeSantis might be a racist for bringing it up on the campaign trail (because of course he is!).

From their story:

But less clear is why DeSantis is taking aim at “zombie studies.”
“To my knowledge, there are no academic majors in zombie studies,” said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.
There are, however, several colleges that offer classes on zombies, as well as a growing body of academic research, CNBC found. Scholars in the field defend the subject, pointing out that zombies are an important symbol in our culture, with ramifications for the U.S. criminal justice system, the history of slavery, neuroscience and more.
“The figures that haunt our popular narratives are a society’s way of working through shared experiences and problems,” said Sarah Juliet Lauro, an associate English professor at the University of Tampa. Lauro edited a collection of zombie scholarship, “Zombie Theory: A Reader,” in 2017.
[...]
Meanwhile, at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Tatiana Tatum, a science professor, teaches a class called “Biology of Zombies.” She said the topic helps her explain how the human body works.

Later, we learned that the Tampa professor quoted earlier in the piece had seemingly "connected the dots" between DeSantis' comments on zombie studies and his supposed racism:

But Lauro argues in her book “The Transatlantic Zombie” that the stories are always in some way about slavery and resistance to slavery, given the myth’s origin.
“Since DeSantis has taken aim at Black history, I think we can connect the dots on why the idea of ‘zombie studies’ gets under his skin so much,” she said.

And with that quote, I think we can "connect the dots" on why this story was pursued in the first place -- because the mainstream media is nothing if not shamelessly predictable.