Revulsion over DeSantis video shouldn’t fade
An incompetent presidential campaign does not necessarily foretell a competent presidency. (Yes, we’re talking about Gov. Ron DeSantis.)
The creepily anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-Trump video his campaign circulated wasn’t simply vile and vicious. It was also one of the most stupendous blunders in recent politics and is the subject of widespread revulsion. Whatever DeSantis is buying with all those millions, it is not sound advice.
The goal of almost every campaign is to have its ads talked about, copied and circulated in free media. They’re not supposed to be ridiculed and mocked as this one has. Most of all, they should never generate sympathy for an opponent, as this one does for former President Donald Trump.
They shouldn’t be ready-made ammunition for the other political party, as this one would be should DeSantis improbably win the Republican nomination.
It’s been taken down
The video is easy to find on social media. But for those who won’t see it — it has been taken down from the Twitter page where it originated — it describes Trump as a warm friend of LGBTQ+ people, which is questionable at best.
The video descends into the realm of the bizarre with a photo of DeSantis edited to show lasers blazing from his eyes and the word “No.”
It proudly quotes critics who have attacked DeSantis’ own anti-LBGTQ+ record as extreme, evil, and “some of the harshest, most draconian laws that literally threaten trans existence.” It juxtaposes campaign appearances and movie clips to try to compare DeSantis favorably — yes, favorably! — to Christian Bale’s yuppie spree killer in “American Psycho.”
A clip of Trump defending LGBT Americans at the 2016 Republican convention is carefully edited to conceal the context. Trump was remarking on the slaying shortly before of 49 people and the wounding of 53 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. At the time, it was widely assumed to be an anti-gay hate crime. Only later did the slain killer’s Google search record reveal that he had been looking for any lightly protected nightclub to attack as an act of anti-American terrorism.
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect is what the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni described as “an undercurrent of homoerotic kink.”
“Up pops a shirtless hunk with a ripped chest,” Bruni writes. “Here’s a glowering Brad Pitt in his ‘Troy’ drag. Are honchos with a Homer fetish some new thing?”
It backfired badly
If DeSantis were as familiar with our state’s history as a Florida governor should be, he would have known how homophobic propaganda can backfire.
In a very different time, a controversial Florida legislative investigating committee published what became mocked as the Purple Pamphlet for the color of its printer’s ink.
Meant to justify its 10-year crusade to purge homosexuals from schools and colleges, the screed titled “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida” contributed instead to the committee’s demise in 1965. Embarrassed leaders wanted to be rid of it.
Sen. Charley Johns, who as Senate president became acting governor after Dan McCarty’s death in 1952, chaired the committee. The scorn it harvested contributed to Johns’ reputation as one of Florida’s worst governors, even though he was long out of the governor’s office by the time of the pamphlet’s release.
The pamphlet’s cover showed two seminude men kissing. Other photos featured bondage, a purported restroom tryst, and a prepubescent child partly undressed, which would be considered child pornography today. It was so homoerotic that Dade State Attorney Richard Gerstein threatened obscenity charges against anyone distributing it.
“(Y)ou and your crowd have the dirtiest minds in the whole state,” wrote one of many critics.
That criticism parallels some of the Twitter response to the anti-Trump video after it was posted by DeSantis War Room, the Twitter account of DeSantis’ rapid response team.
“You’ve got some strange imagery of Ron DeSantis being between two oiled-up, hunky type of men,” said Charles Moran, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, in an NPR Morning Edition interview. “I mean, the ad smacked of both homophobia and homoeroticism at the same time.”
“Maybe the liberals are right when they say DeSantis is a threat to the lives of gays,” wrote a critic on Twitter.
“This might as well be a pro-Trump ad,” remarked another.
Digging the hole deeper
The campaign’s attempts to defend the ad only dug in deeper.
Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ rapid response director, tweeted this: “Opposing the federal recognition of ‘Pride Month’ isn’t ‘homophobic.’ We wouldn’t support a month to celebrate straight people for sexual orientation either.”
“It’s unnecessary, divisive, pandering,” she added.
That’s egregious false equivalence. Straight people don’t need a support month. They are not scorned, demonized and legislated against for anyone’s political ambition.
As for divisiveness and pandering, DeSantis and Pushaw have no equals, and as long as the former keeps listening to the latter, he’ll keep losing.