Ron Deathsantis
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, is running against Charlie Crist, former governor of Florida, for re-election after winning 4 years ago by only 32,000 votes (which were won only after he kissed up to Trump so he would endorse him). He’s a Harvard educated former JAG lawyer from the US Navy but he dumbed himself down to get the MAGA vote. He even did a campaign TV ad in 2020 that was all about Trump. He had his very young children wear Trump merchandise, read them Trump bedtime stories and helped “build a wall” with cardboard MAGA bricks with them.
Last night the two did their one and only debate. DeSantis repeatedly worked in all of the GOP talking points — inflation, voting with Biden 100%, reverse racism, immigrant invasion, transgenders, and killing babies. He said it’s wrong to teach students that the US “was built on stolen land” because it isn’t true and that the Civil War was not about slavery. He defended sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard because fentanyl coming over the border is out of control. He wouldn’t say that he supports a total ban on abortion but he did say that he was proud of the 15 week ban that he passed because a 15 week old fetus is a fully formed human being.
Charlie Crist accused DeSantis of being obsessed with the border because he wants to keep it alive to make it a wedge issue that benefits him politically. He asked him to look the people of Florida in the eye and tell them he’s only running for re-election and not president and that if he wins, he’ll serve a full 4 year term. DeSantis wouldn’t do it. He didn’t say a word.
DeSantis barely won 4 years ago but like Trump, he behaves as if he won in a landslide. Prior to being governor he served three terms in the US House of Representatives. He was once one of the admins for a 95,000 member Facebook group called, “Tea Party.” The banner for the page was an image of flags — confederate, Christian, Don’t Tread on Me, USA and Israel. Typical posts from members slammed the Black Lives Matter movement, called African Americans “ghetto scum,” demeaned the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting, yelled at liberals about guns, defended Nazis, attacked immigrants, bashed the left, blasted the media, accused Muslims of being terrorists, and mocked John McCain. He stopped running the page after he started running for governor.
As governor of Florida, a state with a lot of Jewish residents, he refused to condemn a Nazi group that held a rally in Orlando. Three of them were arrested and charged with battery with hate crime enhancement and grant theft, but DeSantis stayed quiet. He accused anyone who condemned him for not taking an anti-Semitic stand of trying to “smear” him. He kept company with the right-wing political elite which shuns the Jews. He held plenty of events with extremists such as Trump, Mike Pence, and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, and kept the press locked out, even when events were held in public spaces. At one of those events he had 71 year old Ben Frazier escorted out of the building in handcuffs then arrested and detained on first degree misdemeanor charges for trespassing. Frazier was a well known figure in the local community. He was one of Jacksonville’s first African American news anchors and founder of Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, a grassroots social justice group that helped get confederate statues taken down around the city. He’s also famous for showing up at a school board meeting that was protesting Critical Race Theory. He was there to stand up for the truth being taught in schools and got kicked out along with 20 other people.
DeSantis got the “Stop Woke Act” passed to preserve white supremacy. It’s a bill that prohibits public schools from teaching the truth about slavery and racism, and prevents private businesses from doing diversity training in the workplace. He made it illegal to teach about discrimination and systemic racism. 54 math textbooks were banned because they pushed Critical Race Theory which has never been taught in K-12 schools nor will it ever be. It’s a college class for law students. Doesn’t matter, If parents suspect that their children are being taught CRT, they can sue school districts (they can also sue if their kids order “woke” vegetarian meals without their consent). He went on Fox News to say that liberal educators are “teaching kids to hate this country” and encouraged MAGA parents to “inspect curriculum” and show up to school board meetings to bully school board members.
DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill during a televised ceremony that made it illegal to mention anything about gay people. Gay people had to be removed from history and not mentioned when lecturing about current events. Gay rights were not to be discussed and LGBTQ students and their families were not to be acknowledged. Teachers were told to out their students if they suspected them of being gay. Schools were told to remove all books from shelves that mentioned homosexuality, discriminate against gay teachers, and alert parents if LGBTQ kids would be participating in team sports or overnight school trips.
He signed a bill that makes college students and faculty members register their political beliefs with the state. He signed another making it legal for teachers to go to work packing so they can shoot the shooters. He made them work in the classroom throughout the COVID pandemic, too, which got them sick, killed them, and burned them out to the point that 9,000 of them left the profession. DeSantis’s solution to that problem was to bring in the military. Vets with no teaching experience are indoctrinating kids in Florida schools.
DeSantis’s handling of the COVID pandemic was the worst in the nation. He refused to shut down schools (he punished schools if they made kids wear masks by withholding funds and forbade school boards from doing anything to keep kids safe) as well as businesses and beaches, refused testing, and wouldn’t mandate masks, social distancing or vaccines so the virus spread like wildfire. He blamed the spread on immigrants and New Yorkers (he wouldn’t make Floridians quarantine, but he’d make anybody with New York license plates quarantine). One third of the world went on lockdown, but not Florida. DeSantis promoted Trump’s Regeneron miracle cure and herd immunity and lied to the public about the real infection rates and death numbers. The Orlando Sentinel sued him for that. Florida became the sickest, deadliest state in the nation under his leadership. He shut down all of the state run COVID testing centers and let one million doses of vaccine expire in a warehouse. He downplayed vaccines and masks, and played up Regeneron to please his biggest donor who was an investor in the drug. He replaced the state’s surgeon general with a QAnon nut, Joseph Ladapo, who didn’t even live in Florida. He went into hiding for 2 weeks while the virus burned through his state. People suspected that he was sick. Mayors all over the state were furious that he wouldn’t respond to their calls. He claimed victory over COVID when Florida was #1 for the number of cases and #2 for hospitalizations.
DeSantis handled COVID the same way Trump did — lie and deny. Ron DeSantis let 7 million get infected and 82,176 die for purely political reasons. Nobody will ever know just how many people really died from COVID in Florida.
He fought with the cruise lines (a big source of revenue for the state) about allowing unvaccinated passengers aboard and threatened the Special Olympics over mandating COVID restrictions at their Orlando events. He told them if they didn’t drop their vaccine requirement, they’d be fined $27 million. Most of their athletes have compromised immune systems but because they couldn’t afford the $27 million they caved and dropped requirements designed to keep participants and attendants healthy. DeSantis also went to war with billion-dollar Disney World for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ legislation. Disney World brings in a ton of tourism revenue and employs 77,000 people. He revoked Disney’s special status that lets them self-govern and operate as their own city out of spite.
Ron DeSantis has been campaigning for president for the 4 years that he has been governor and he’s campaigning for president right now even though he’s supposed to be campaigning for re-election. He has used his power as governor to make laws that strengthen systemic racism and the Republican party. He drew his own congressional maps that chopped up voting blocks that guaranteed 20 seats for Republicans. The Democrats only have 8. He eliminated two Black districts and gerrymandered a district away that was 46% Black. He partitioned them off to 4 white districts so they would be left without any representation and put a Black congressmember out of a job. He opened a new $112 billion election crimes unit for a problem that doesn’t exist — voter fraud. A special police force was put into place to “monitor elections” to enforce Jim Crow law. 20 Black people were just rounded up and arrested for voter fraud. The strategy is to keep them from voting in the midterms and scare other Black people from voting at all.
He copied the Trump grift of using tax dollars to campaign by illegally transporting 50 asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard for free media attention. It backfired. He’s under federal investigation for kidnapping and human trafficking, the Treasury Department is investigating him for misusing COVID funds to pay for the excursion, and he is being sued by the migrants for exploiting them for political gain.
Hurricane Ian just pummeled the entire state of Florida but “only” 100 people died. DeSantis is lying about that like he did COVID. In the weeks to come, after people begin to reckon with the death, loss of property, and the change to the coastline, another really huge problem is going to make everything way worse. Property insurance markets have collapsed under DeSantis’s leadership. He is doing everything in his power to keep the media from finding out what’s really going so he can control the messaging before the midterms so he can safely campaign for president wearing matching outfits with his wife, encouraging people to donate to the special “hurricane relief fund” that they created and his wife manages.
