Florida Man continues to make trouble
With Florida performance artist Ron DeSantis ready to announce his candidacy for president at any minute, let’s not inadvertently diminish the singular political accomplishment at hand: He’s probably the first governor ever to set out for the White House while his home state is the subject of multiple travel advisories not associated with a hurricane.
You heard me.
At least three different entities — the NAACP, the League of United American Citizens, the biggest Hispanic and Latin American organization in the country, and Equality Florida, which advocates for the civil rights of the LGBTQ+ community — have issued travel advisories warning that policies put into practice by DeSantis have rendered the Sunshine State a credible threat to the health, safety, and freedom of their constituencies.
Whoa. Big congrats Ron.
Is that the campaign slogan: “Help Save Florida. Put DeSantis in the White House?”
Generally, you don’t need the intellectual validation of serious state and national advocacy groups to persuade you about the inherent drawbacks of Florida. It’s got unbearable heat, intractable alligators, ubiquitous pythons big as a fire hose, and at least one guy who’ll pull a gun on you if you take too long in line at the bank.
And DeSantis’s brilliant permitless carry law isn’t even in effect yet.
When the governor was asked about the possibility of such travel warnings this spring, he was not pleased: “What a joke. What a joke,” went the quote. “This is part of the reason why our country goes through all of these — we get involved in these stupid fights. This is a stunt to try to do that. It’s a pure stunt.”
The NAACP and the other organizations can take that as a high compliment, coming as it does from the guy who would be National Stunt Master of the Year if it weren’t for his primary competition over there are the Mar-aLago Institute for the Criminally Insane.
Who was that guy who took migrants from another state, put them on a plane with the promise of cash and a job, flew them to Martha’s Vineyard to annoy the “woke,” then billed his own taxpayers?
DeSantis, with his top stunt of 2022.
But here’s another part of the same DeSantis quote from above: “We’ll see how effective that (travel advisory) is. It’s ridiculous. And we’re proud to be leading the nation in tourism.”
Uh-huh. And why is Florida leading the nation in tourism? Disney. And who is does DeSantis treat like Public Enemy No. 1 in Florida? Disney. And when is anything DeSantis does from a public policy standpoint ever going to make sense? It is not, and there is a great word for that — kakistocracy, government by the worst.
Disney, of course, is too inclusive, too diverse, too “woke,” for DeSantis’s craven political tastes. He’s never been one to put Florida’s interests ahead of his own, but what began as a typical DeSantis woke-stoking feud with Mickey and Minnie might soon have serious tangible impacts.
Already cancelled is the $1 billion Orlando office park Disney was planning, the one the state’s own Department of Economic Opportunity said would bring 2,000 jobs with an average salary of $120,000. On the table for Disney’s reconsideration is another $16 billion in construction that might have created another 13,000 jobs over the next 10 years. I guess some Florida Republicans are happy their governor maybe isn’t tickled that the new Little Mermaid is black, but the price of indignation has become fairly threatening, no?
So a month ago, Disney sued DeSantis over what it called a “targeted campaign of government retaliation — orchestrated at every step by Governor DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech (which) threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes, its economic future, and violates its constitutional rights.”
Turns out, all of this is a little more significant than the standard Floridiot headline, more sinister by far than Florida Man In His Underwear Loses Arm Fighting Alligator, although that comes awfully close as a working metaphor.
“The fight between DeSantis and Disney illustrated the dramatic ideological change in the Republican Party in the last two years,” Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote recently. “No longer committed to keeping the government weak to stay out of the way of business development, the party is now committed to creating a strong government that enforces Christian nationalism. This is a major and crucially important political shift.”
Polling from a few months ago had DeSantis with a viable chance to move past Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, but every move the Florida governor makes appears to widen Trump’s lead. That’s the basic snapshot of the race as we speak. A guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing is falling farther behind a guy who really, really doesn’t know what he’s doing.