Long story short...Desantis removed the Andrew Warren, state attorney for our circuit, because Desantis doesn't like his politics. Warren was elected to the SA spot and is a progressive. He stated that he wouldn't go after women for violating Florida's 15-week abortion ban and Desantis removed him for not following the law. A judge ruled today that Desantis was blatantly politically motivated and violated the Constitution. but the judge didn't reinstate Warren.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2023/01/20/judge-says-desantis-was-wrong-declines-restore-andrew-warren-office/

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2023/01/20/4-takeaways-ron-desantis-andrew-warren-ruling/

I know everyone thinks Florida is as red as any state can be but that's not necessarily accurate. There are a lot of independent or NPA voters that go back and forth between the parties. If Warren runs for the SA spot again, he'll probably win by a landslide. I'm wondering if he has larger aspirations though. I think he'd be a solid candidate for governor.

Also, Desantis just rejected a new African-American AP course saying it doesn't have any educational value.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2023/01/19/florida-rejects-new-ap-high-school-course-african-american-studies/

There are currently AP courses for Spanish, Japanese, German and other nationalities.

I know these kinds of things are red meat for the GOP base. But I think removing an elected official in a nakedly political stunt and going on and on about the lack of value in African American studies are stepping way over the line. I'll be shocked if black folks aren't pissed at his dismissive view of black history.

I think these are the kinds of things that rally progressives AND swing good number of unaffiliated voters away from the GOP.

literally and figuratively.

...if Biden runs again. Or if the democrats don't put up a good candidate.

This stuff is red meat for the MAGAs who are skeptical of him. He is showing that he gets their stuff done (better than Trump did since he doesn't shoot himself in the foot).

At the same time, the "unaffiliated" voters don't see or don't really care about this kind of stuff. They see a well-spoken standard Republican politician. And that's enough to get them back on board. Especially since a lot of voters left Trump primarily because of his personality.

when it comes to electing the next GOP presidential candidate.

I know its just a poll but he may not make it that far.

and if he does..


Trump will run 3rd party before letting him win.

Which means he is really 5’7. America isn’t electing a 5’7 fat man to be president.

I think he tried to hire his height and weight with poorly fitted suits.

What’s he gonna run on? banning Black history AP classes? Even the supposably pro-black niggas on here who talk that “both parties are the same” bullshit can’t square that.

Also, he’s got all the charm and personality of an unwashed asshole. Running on fascism works in Florida but that shit doesn’t scale (y’all already forgot about midterms) when you don’t have the cult of personality that Trump does.

How does he win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona? Three states that just rejected a whole slew of similar politicians. Georgia niggas just gonna tuck tail and let a low energy cracker take their state?

That plays well to the middle of the road republicans.

See what happened in VA with Youngkin. He flipped those DC suburbs largely by hammering CRT in schools.

How's Desantis polling nationally?

(In a presidential primary amongst Republicans)

Exactly.

Different sides, ones just more blatant.

Miami and maybe a few other cities lean left but aren’t state elections getting wider (pun intended)?

we're pre-primary. he doesn't have to pull back yet

its weird seeing dems so dismissive about him. i get that he's overhyped, but dems keep getting by on repubs being so awful, and i fear that they're mistaking it for them being liked (vs just seen as less awful)

if he gets thru the primary, and trump doesn't blow him up he's gonna be president.

and yt folk.

So no he catering to his base.

cuz Miami Cubans are just a different breed of people.... these Batista-loving caucasians really dont represent most immigrants in Florida imho

Cubans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Argentinians, Peruvians, and even the tragic mulatto Dominicans.

I live in MIA and see it all the time. I know Spanish so when they be saying slick stuff sometimes I response but most of the time I just keep quiet.

And the Cubans are linked up with the so called Chosen people and we should know their relationship with Africans.

The first state rep of Florida was a slave owning "chosen" people.

and all the other West Indians

He seems like Trump-lite, but the numbers dont lie…he is WILDLY popular and has single-handedly made the state a red lock

It isnt a swing state anymore. It is solidly red for the foreseeable future. (shout to the dumb Cubans in south florida)

because mind you I am very pro-Cuba, pro-revolution and the info that I've been reading for several years now is that the younger generation of Cuban-Americans are not their parents and grandparents. That they are much more likely to be democratic voters and to want to restore relations with Cuba/end the blockage. So, I'm wondering what it looks like on the ground.

I was thinking it was poor ground game organizing but you think its bigger than that?


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

Drag queens. Gya kids. GROOMERS.

People not letting you say trannie, and frankly why can't I say n***a?? People telling you to wear a mask during a pandemic.

People oppressing whites and the "traditional" way of life.

People not "respecting the flag." People trying to take away your guns!!

Any social program since 1938 is obviously communistic.

Same complaints from 1864.Same as 1980. Same as 1992. Same as 2008.

Shit works when people are stupid and evil. Florida has had a lot of immigration from other states, and the other states aren't sending their best.

See also: Texas.

The price of eggs.

Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Ukrainian nazis.

Women’s liberation.

80,000 armed IRS agents.

**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

because it was open for biz

no idea if its true, prolly simply because its where old white people like to move when they retire.

shit is gone tho

the whole 'deathsantis' thing didn't play out as a lot of people would have expected (or secretly hoped?). he dropped mandates, opened up schools earlier, etc..

and yeah, culture war stuff. anti wokeness, crt, etc..
FL is being sold as 'free america', where you don't have to cower behind your masks, and you don't have to let your 5x boosted 4 year old choose his gender while his teacher calls him an oppressor over zoom.

its early but we'll see how much he overplays all this stuff

It worked out for DeSantis. The Death-Santis term was a flop and his commitment to anti-woke and culture wars has paid off for Florida. Nationally as a Presidential Candidate, remains to be seen.

He was successful in making the Republican base think Florida is the haven for anti-woke, anti-fauci, anti-biden, anti-covid, trump loving Disney World of America.

haven’t looked into it but wonder if queer studies is really a subject in this course and only part of AA studies.

It sounds ridiculous.

Fucking trotted out Charlie Christ to go against him for Governor. CHARLIE CRIST

Val Demings i like, but she got waxed too by Rubio. Florida just doesn't have any strong Democratic candidates.

>Fucking trotted out Charlie Christ to go against him for
>Governor. CHARLIE CRIST

I would have prefeerred Nikki Fried but she was gonna lose big too.

>Val Demings i like, but she got waxed too by Rubio. Florida
>just doesn't have any strong Democratic candidates.

Co-sign all of this. However, I like Andrew Warren and I think he's got potential.

..campaign since 2016----and 60yearold+ cuban novice facebook users in south florida ate all that shit up (including many of my relatives unfortunately)

Trump came out in 2015 with all these established politicians and simply started bagging on them, and one by one they fell and fell in line.

that magic is likely gone. and 'desanctimonious' is a weak ass diss but..

but i could still easily see all this political capitol Ron has built up decimated by 45 making a few short jokes.

I never noticed him appearing short. And I can't find any chatter about his height.

He seems a little shorter than Trump here. And Trump is pretty tall.
https://www.celebheights.com/xr/r/ron-desantis.jpg

And he's taller than all these guys.
https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/P1.jpg

he looks around 5'9/10 in those pictures and fuck anyone who thinks 5'9 is short (yup fivenine gang!)

He wears the same heel lifts trump does. He even has heels on his rain boots, which is something i hadnt seen before. Ha

Most people who dont even follow politics know who the Gov. of Florida and Texas are they stay in the news.

One of the most insightful things someone said about Trump is that people who hang around trump, start getting "Trumpian" and try to act and do the things that he does, but it only works for trump.

Being Trump really didn't work for trump when it came to two terms in office. I don't know why anyone would think keep the people talking is the winning strategy.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/05/21/ron-desantis-book-founding-fathers/

Ron DeSantis’s context-free history book vanished online. We got a copy.

In the lead-up to this spring’s release of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s book “The Courage to Be Free,” a funny thing happened on the internet: His first book, published in 2011 before his political career began, disappeared.

“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” was once available at the click of a button as an e-book, but no more. A used hard copy is selling for $1,950 at the only online bookseller that appears to have it. The publisher, a small vanity label in Florida called High-Pitched Hum Publishing, did not respond to phone calls or social media messages about why the e-book was removed.

Fortunately, The Washington Post purchased a digital copy last summer, in anticipation that it may someday become more relevant. Now, with DeSantis (R) expected to declare his bid for the presidency officially this week, that time has come.

“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” in title, cover and content, is essentially a troll of former president Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” which recounted Obama’s upbringing and young adulthood before he entered Harvard Law School.

In his book, DeSantis, who has moved to stop history lessons in Florida that might make students uncomfortable and who attacked an AP African American Studies course he said “lacks historical value,” dismisses slavery as a “personal flaw” of the Founding Fathers, irrelevant to the really important stuff: context-free, cherry-picked quotes from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

His writing is coherent, pretty lively and includes — angels and harps! — footnotes to his sourcing. This alone makes it better than the vast majority of politicians’ attempts at writing history. And though DeSantis aligned himself with the tea party movement when he wrote the book, he does not subscribe to its conspiracy theories claiming Obama was a secret Muslim or born in Kenya. He also does not think “death panels” are real — though “concerns about them are not foolhardy,” he writes.

But DeSantis’s thesis is twofold: that Obama was conducting a dangerous power grab, and that the Founding Fathers would have been appalled if they were still alive to see it.

According to DeSantis, evidence of Obama’s power grab includes the auto-industry bailout, the 2009 stimulus package and Obamacare. The president’s anti-American principles, DeSantis alleges, come from the usual boogeymen — activist-writer Saul Alinsky, formerly incarcerated professor Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — plus poet Frank Marshall Davis and the father who abandoned Obama when he was 2. DeSantis then writes a laundry list of bad things these men once said and pins them onto Obama.

If that seems like a bit of a stretch, the balance of the book is devoted to performing a similar maneuver on the Founding Fathers, glomming DeSantis’s loathing for the 44th president onto quotes from Madison and Hamilton. Other Founders are mentioned only in passing and only so far as they can be made to support DeSantis’s argument, with one exception: a late chapter about George Washington.

Slavery ‘a fact of life’

Any history book about the Founders must acknowledge that many of them were enslavers, and DeSantis gets to it in the introduction with a whiff.

“Slavery,” he writes, “had been a fact of life throughout human history.” It’s a variation on the false argument that “people didn’t know it was wrong back then.” In any case, the form of slavery practiced in the early republic — lifelong, inherited, race-based, chattel slavery — was particularly severe and relatively new, as far as human history goes.

Some of the Founding Fathers, like Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin, opposed slavery anyway, DeSantis writes. True enough, though he hardly mentions either man again until the conclusion of the book, when he repeats that some of the Founding Fathers opposed slavery. It’s as if Morris and Franklin have nothing to offer DeSantis by way of writing, philosophy or the “First Principles” of his book’s title (read: limited government) and are simply useful as permission slips to skip the yucky parts.

DeSantis concludes his brief discussion of slavery with: “Though it was not immediately abolished, slavery was doomed to fail in a nation whose Constitution embodied such philosophical truths” as liberty. Many of the Founders believed in the inevitability of slavery’s gradual end, but anyone today capable of typing “cotton gin” should know that isn’t what happened. By the time of the Civil War, fully eight decades after the revolution, American slavery was bigger, crueller, more entrenched and more profitable than ever.

Cherry-picking to bash Obama

It would be impossible (or at least brain-meltingly boring) to run down every single quote in DeSantis’s book and see whether he gave it proper context. But, for those The Post reviewed, it can safely be said that he did not.

One example: DeSantis seethes in Chapter 9 about Obama urging young people to aim for a life of public service instead of pursuing “big money” and a “fancy enough car.” “This negative view of financial success is yet another instance of Obama not being in tune with the Framers,” he concludes, splicing in bits of Hamilton quotes, not even full sentences, about Americans’ “industrious habits” and “pursuits of gain.”

The phrases come from Federalist No. 8, which is about preventing conflicts between states. In its full context, Hamilton is exploring the pitfalls of keeping a standing army: “The industrious habits of the people of the present day, absorbed in the pursuits of gain, and devoted to the improvements of agriculture and commerce, are incompatible with the condition of a nation of soldiers, which was the true condition of the people of those republics.”

DeSantis also seems here to diminish his own life of public service. The U.S. Navy has been his employer; since he published the book, he’s been employed by Congress and the state of Florida.

DeSantis devotes a chunk of his book to the sacredness of property rights and Obama’s alleged disrespect for them (regulations on credit-card companies, the individual mandate), but in doing so he commits a much bigger cherry-picking blunder on slavery. He describes an elderly James Madison heroically lifting his creaky bones from retirement to speak at Virginia’s 1829 Constitutional Convention. There, DeSantis recounts, Madison “advised the delegates that ‘these natural rights cannot be separated. The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, a social right.’”

Madison, though, was not talking about the deed to your house or an unfair tax. The 1829 convention was called because in Virginia only White men who owned property were allowed to vote, and a bunch of White men who didn’t own property wanted to vote, too. Madison didn’t want such men to have the right to take away his slaves or make slavery less profitable.

See for yourself. Here is Madison, two paragraphs after the quote DeSantis cites:
“To come more nearly to the subject before the Committee, viz. that peculiar feature in our Community which calls for a peculiar provision, in the basis of our Government, I mean the colored part of our population; It is apprehended, if the power of the Commonwealth shall be in the hands of a Majority who have no interest in this species of property, that, from the facility with which it may be oppressed by excessive taxation, injustice may be done to its owners.”

Only people who own people, Madison is arguing, should be allowed to vote on matters concerning the owned people. It is a very specific kind of property.

Either DeSantis was unaware of that context of the quote, or he intentionally left it out. The former suggests sloppy research; the latter suggests the kind of “distort history” he has claimed “woke” educators in his state are trying to impose.

A warning for democracy

The ending chapters focus on Washington’s miraculous humility, how he voluntarily gave up his commander in chief status after the end of the Revolutionary War, and how he limited himself to two terms as president, setting a standard that only one president (a Democrat!) ignored. DeSantis describes this well and accurately and, if anything, understates Washington’s reticence to take power; historians like Alexis Coe have shown that Washington wanted to step down after one term, had to be persuaded to serve another and regretted it when he did.

DeSantis brings up Washington’s humility to warn against Obama’s “self-reverence,” “cockiness,” and “inflated sense of himself,” which, he claims, could threaten the republic if Obama were reelected in 2012. (It did not.) Twelve years have passed since DeSantis gave this warning, and in those 12 years, DeSantis’s record of taking principled stands against ego-driven presidents has not held up.

DeSantis sought and relished an endorsement from former president Donald Trump, who claimed in his nomination acceptance speech, “I alone can fix it.” DeSantis ran fawning ads in which he read to his children not from the Federalist Papers but from Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” Even now, as he is expected to mount a primary campaign against his former ally, DeSantis has not condemned the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election or his unprecedented efforts to stay in the White House.

MLK and an avoidance of race

The premise of “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers” devolves as it goes on. A later chapter claims the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville would also have hated Obamacare. It’s an odd inclusion in a book purportedly about the Founding Fathers, considering Tocqueville was not one of them.

There are long asides about Supreme Court cases, and even a nod to Martin Luther King Jr. — the sanitized version trotted out in annual tweets, anyway. DeSantis quotes King as complimenting the Constitution’s “magnificent words.” According to DeSantis’s footnotes, he grabbed it not from its context — pushing for civil rights legislation in the “I Have a Dream” speech — but from the Yale Book of Quotations.

DeSantis’s book depicts history as Useful Quotes from Great Men, not a rigorous study of the past in all its complexities, contexts, perspectives and, yes, hypocrisies. His attacks on history education should come as no surprise; given the chance to literally write history here, he took great pains to ignore African American history up until it could produce King’s quote.

Madison largely wrote the “magnificent words” under which the United States has governed for 234 years. When Madison relaxed at home, most of the people around him were enslaved Black people, whose labor — and the profits their labor produced — allowed him the time to develop, as DeSantis put it, “a deep knowledge of the full spectrum of philosophical, political, economic and religious thought running through the Convention.”

These realities coexisted uncomfortably long before our current history wars. Perhaps in a society — or in a state, or with a candidate — at peace with its past, there would be nothing controversial in saying so.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/us/politics/desantis-private-jets-donors.html

Air DeSantis: The Private Jets and Secret Donors Flying Him Around

As the Florida governor hopscotched the country preparing to run for president, a Michigan nonprofit paid the bills. It won’t say where it got the money.

For Ron DeSantis, Sunday, Feb. 19, was the start of another busy week of not officially running for president.

That night, he left Tallahassee on a Florida hotelier’s private jet, heading to Newark before a meet-and-greet with police officers on Staten Island on Monday morning. Next, he boarded a twin-jet Bombardier to get to a speech in the Philadelphia suburbs, before flying to a Knights of Columbus hall outside Chicago, and then home to his day job as governor of Florida.

The tour and others like it were made possible by the convenience of private air travel — and by the largess of wealthy and in some cases secret donors footing the bill.

Ahead of an expected White House bid, Mr. DeSantis has relied heavily on his rich allies to ferry him around the country to test his message and raise his profile. Many of these donors are familiar boosters from Florida, some with business interests before the state, according to a New York Times review of Mr. DeSantis’s travel. Others have been shielded from the public by a new nonprofit, The Times found, in an arrangement that drew criticism from ethics experts.

Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to formally announce his candidacy next week, is hardly the first politician to take advantage of the speed and comfort of a Gulfstream jet. Candidates and officeholders in both parties have long accepted the benefits of a donor’s plane as worth the political risk of appearing indebted to special interests or out of touch with voters.

But ethics experts said the travel — and specifically the role of the nonprofit — shows how Mr. DeSantis’s prolonged candidate-in-limbo status has allowed him to work around rules intended to keep donors from wielding secret influence. As a declared federal candidate, he would face far stricter requirements for accepting and reporting such donations.

“Voters deserve this information because they have a right to know who is trying to influence their elected officials and whether their leaders are prioritizing public good over the interests of their big-money benefactors,” said Trevor Potter, the president of Campaign Legal Center and a Republican who led the Federal Election Commission. “Governor DeSantis, whether he intends to run for president or not, should be clearly and fully disclosing who is providing support to his political efforts.”

Representatives for the governor’s office and for Mr. DeSantis’s political operation declined to comment or provide details about who has arranged and paid for his flights.

Mr. DeSantis has aggressively navigated his state’s ethics and campaign finance laws to avoid flying commercial. And he has gone to new lengths to prevent transparency: Last week, he signed a bill making travel records held by law enforcement, dating back to the beginning of his term, exempt from public records requests.

Mr. DeSantis is still required to report contributions and expenses in his campaign finance records, but the new law probably prevents law enforcement agencies from releasing more details, such as itineraries, flight information or even lists of visitors to the governor’s mansion. (Mr. DeSantis says he is trying to address a security concern.)

In February, Mr. DeSantis traveled to Newark on a jet owned by Jeffrey Soffer, a prominent hotel owner who, according to several lawmakers and lobbyists, has sought a change in state law that would allow him to expand gambling to his Miami Beach resort.

The February trip and others were arranged by And To The Republic, a Michigan-based nonprofit, according to Tori Sachs, its executive director. The nonprofit formed in late January as Mr. DeSantis was beginning to test the national waters and quickly became a critical part of his warm-up campaign. It organized nearly a dozen speaking events featuring the governor in at least eight states.

Ms. Sachs would not say how much was spent on the flights or who paid for them.

Navigating the Loopholes

It is unclear how Mr. DeSantis will account for the trips arranged by the nonprofit without running afoul of state ethics laws. Florida generally bars officeholders from accepting gifts from lobbyists or people, like Mr. Soffer, whose companies employ lobbyists — unless those gifts are considered political contributions.

But both Ms. Sachs and a person involved in Mr. DeSantis’s recent travel said they did not consider the trips political contributions or gifts. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. The group’s practice “is to provide transportation for special guests,” Ms. Sachs said, “in full compliance with the law.”

Florida ethics rules, however, give politicians plenty of loopholes. In some circumstances, for example, officeholders can accept paid travel to give speeches as part of their official duties. The state ethics commission has also allowed officeholders to accept gifts from lobbyists if they are channeled through third-party groups.

Since taking office in 2019, Mr. DeSantis, who has worked in public service nearly his entire career and reported a net worth of $319,000 last year, has steadily leaned on others to pick up the tab for private flights.

His political committee has accepted private air travel from roughly 55 wealthy, mostly Florida-based contributors and companies associated with them, including the heads of oil and gas companies, developers and homebuilders, and health care and insurance executives, a Times analysis of campaign finance records shows.

Additional travel donations were routed to the Republican Party of Florida, which Mr. DeSantis often used as a third-party pass-through.

A half dozen lobbyists and donors who spoke with The Times said they became accustomed to calls from the governor’s political aides asking for planes — in at least one case, for a last-minute trip home from out of state and, more recently, for a flight to Japan.

The Japan trip, which was part of an overseas tour that gave Mr. DeSantis a chance to show off his foreign policy chops, was considered part of the governor’s official duties and was organized in part by Enterprise Florida, a public-private business development group. But Mr. DeSantis’s office would not disclose how it was paid for or how he traveled. Enterprise Florida did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. DeSantis’s office rarely releases information about nonofficial events. (In February, when he traveled to four states in one day, his public schedule simply read, “No scheduled events.”) And Mr. DeSantis has brushed off past criticism of his travel. In 2019, The South Florida Sun Sentinel revealed a previous flight to New York on a plane owned by Mr. Soffer. Mr. DeSantis said he had followed proper procedures.

“It’s all legal, ethical, no issues there,” he told reporters.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Soffer declined to comment.

The Warm-Up Campaign

Soon after winning re-election in November, the governor turned to building his national profile. He began traveling the country to visit with Republican activists, dine with donors, speak at events and promote a new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”

Some of his travel was paid for by Friends of Ron DeSantis, a Florida political committee that supported his campaign for governor and reports its donors. The committee had more than $80 million on hand as recently as last month — money that is expected to be transferred to a federal super PAC supporting his presidential run.

Since November, that committee has received 17 contributions for political travel from nine donors. They include Maximo Alvarez, an oil and gas distributor, and Morteza Hosseini, a Florida homebuilder who has frequently lent his plane to the governor and has become a close ally.

But trips paid for by the nonprofit group, And To The Republic, do not appear in state records.

The group is registered as a social welfare organization under Section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, meaning its primary activity cannot be related to political campaigns. Other prospective and official presidential candidates also have relationships to similar organizations, often called dark money groups because they are not required to disclose their donors.

The nonprofit’s founder, Ms. Sachs, said it was formed to promote “state policy solutions that are setting the agenda for the country” and described Mr. DeSantis as one of the first elected officials to “partner” with the group. Another of those officials, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, has appeared at the group’s events in her home state — alongside Mr. DeSantis.

And To The Republic has hosted Mr. DeSantis at events in South Carolina, Nevada and Iowa, all key early primary states. Some of those events were promoted as “The Florida Blueprint,” borrowing from Mr. DeSantis’s book title.

The arrangement has made tracking Mr. DeSantis’s travel — and its costs — difficult. The Times and other news outlets used public flight trackers to verify the governor’s use of Mr. Soffer’s plane, which was first reported by Politico.

Other trips arranged by the group include the Feb. 20 stops outside Philadelphia and Chicago and the return trip to Tallahassee, on which Mr. DeSantis flew on a plane registered to a company run by Charles Whittall, an Orlando developer. Mr. Whittall, who gave $25,000 to Mr. DeSantis’s political committee in 2021, said that he uses a leasing company to rent out his aircraft, and that he did not provide it as a political contribution.

In March, he traveled to Cobb County, Ga., on a plane owned by an entity connected to Waffle House, the Georgia-based restaurant chain. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Other potential DeSantis rivals have made headlines for their use of private jets. Both as South Carolina governor and as ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley faced criticism for flying on private planes owned by wealthy South Carolinians.

In 2020, The Associated Press reported that donors gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in private air travel to Donald J. Trump’s fund-raising committee. The donors included Ben Pogue, a Texas businessman whose father later received a presidential pardon.

Still, Mr. Trump — who owns his own plane — has repeatedly sought to draw attention to Mr. DeSantis’s travel, claiming the private planes were effectively campaign contributions and “Ron DeSantis is a full-time candidate for president.”

On a somewhat related note...

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2023/05/23/student-who-tracked-elon-musks-jet-now-tracking-ron-desantis-too/

On May 17, the Florida governor’s nine-seat private Cessna flew round-trip from Tallahassee to Tampa, where Gov. Ron DeSantis held a bill-signing news conference at a Christian school.

Two days later, the plane’s flight path surfaced on Twitter on a new tracking account dubbed @DeSantisJet, run by a Clermont college student named Jack Sweeney.

If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Sweeney, 20, is the same University of Central Florida student who last year started a controversial account tracking the private jet of Tesla and Twitter owner Elon Musk. That account, @ElonJet, drew the ire of Musk himself, who suspended the account (and those of journalists who covered it), threatened legal action against Sweeney and prompted Musk to announce bans for any account “doxxing real-time location info of anyone.”


Both the Musk and DeSantis accounts are based on flight data compiled by tracking enthusiasts and available to the general public, as are accounts Sweeney created to track jets owned by Russian oligarchs. He’s also tracked flights from the likes of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift and Drake.

The DeSantis account is particularly noteworthy, as it was created shortly after the governor signed a bill allowing him to redact his travel records on state and private planes from public record — just before this week’s expected announcement of a 2024 presidential campaign.

DeSantis said this month that, while the bill was “not necessarily something that I came up with,” it was “motivated by a security concern.”

“I think the issue is, with the security situation, how you do patterns of movements if you’re somebody that is targeted, which unfortunately I am, and I get a lot of threats,” he said. “That could be something that could be helpful for people that may not want to do good things.”

Critics have argued the law is more about eliminating government transparency on the eve of DeSantis’ White House bid. Last week, The New York Times reported that DeSantis is relying on a network of donor jets to shuttle him around the country, including visits to key primary states, like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Those records are largely shielded from public view, making it difficult to track who’s paying for DeSantis’ travel.

Sweeney’s account specifically tracks a single jet owned by the state, not others on which DeSantis may have traveled — although, as the account notes, “if we become aware of those flights, it will also be shared here.” Sweeney also notes that DeSantis may not necessarily be on every flight tracked by the account.


Sweeney has in the past taken down jet-tracking data voluntarily. He removed an account following a plane owned by tech impresario and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban after Cuban promised him Mavs tickets.

But he’s made clear that, while he’s willing to consider compensation in exchange for removing flights, he won’t do so just because he’s told.

“I’m definitely not going to just take it down,” he told the Tampa Bay Times last year.

"next president" my ass.

dude aint ready for primetime.

Twitter barely works, how they going to start producing live interviews?

i hate to say it but he's gonna wash the floor with all these dudes.

the party is a Trump cult now. they don't even WANT anyone else.

and as soon Trump gets off a silly quip at their expense? it's really a wrap for these guys.

so you got that old school archie bunker bigotry in there lol.

but meatball ron cant get offended because then he would be too pc/woke lol.

but that might make Meatball Ron funnier

his vanilla ass makes Staten Island Brazhool Italians look ethnic by comparison

guess not

Which is laugh out loud funny to me.

It's effective because Desantis is so thin skinned and out of his depth

But he's oftentimes unintentionally and intentionally hilarious, as much as I hate to admit that.

Case in point:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/258262904091058176?lang=en

Between “Rob” and “Meatball Ron” I was laughing. Especially since Ron isn’t going to say shit but you know he is furious inside.

shit is hilarious.

bro about to go out like scott walker.

and all the charisma and charm of an unwashed asshole because he's really fucking dangerous.

The "substance" of his announcement, his alignment with white supremacist oligarchs and employment of white supremacists like Rufo combined with his record shows he's a true believer and a sadist.

i'll take trump over desantis any day.

trump is scary in his own way, but he mostly wants the job just for his own self-aggrandisement.

desantis really wants to do some facism shit. like, in a real way.

He sounds like prick, has terrible presence and no charisma

Zero political acumen

But whatever he learned in Guantanamo, he applies to The American Culture Wars with great savvy

That like Rudy, he always has 3 things to say: noun, verb, woke.

And when someone said, at least trumps escalator didn’t break when he was halfway down it for his announcement.

At the rate 3 Strikes Biden and the top cop are going it shouldn't be too difficult to beat them. Does DeSantis have any glaring policy weaknesses as big as Biden and Kamala?

>Does DeSantis have
>any glaring policy weaknesses as big as Biden and Kamala?

a woman or a Black man like Tim Scott

Certainly as deplorable as him, but probably would be considered a touch too ethnic for his crowd. Tim Scott is too awkward imo and was a 30 yo virgin. Trump won't mess with someone like him.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/desantis-bill-limits-liabilities-private-spaceflight-companies-rcna86410

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday signed into law a spaceflight bill that protects companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin from legal liability if crewmembers or passengers are injured or killed during missions.

The Spaceflight Entity Liability bill, or CS/SB 1318, was one of 27 bills he signed a day after launching his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination during an event on Twitter with its owner, Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX.

The new law effectively shields SpaceX and other commercial space companies from lawsuits in the event that anyone on their rockets or capsules are seriously hurt or killed.

The bill now requires crewmembers and passengers to acknowledge the risks of spaceflight by signing a waiver that contains the following statement: “WARNING: Under Florida law, there is no liability for an injury to or death of a participant or crew in a spaceflight activity provided by a spaceflight entity if such injury or death results from the spaceflight activity.”

Injuries may include damage to land, people, equipment and animals, in addition to “the potential for you to act in a negligent manner that may contribute to your injury or death,” according to the bill.

An analysis of the bill by the Florida Senate found that it “has the potential to limit the cost of litigation to businesses engaging in spaceflight activities.”

Florida’s “Space Coast,” or the area around NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, has been a hot spot of commercial space activity, as companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin look to expand launch services for both the government and the private sector.

Aerospace activities contribute about $17.7 billion in revenue to Florida’s economy, according to Space Florida, a government agency that aims to promote aerospace economic development across the state.

The Spaceflight Entity Liability bill was sponsored by Republican Sen. Tom Wright, and passed unanimously in the state Senate and with little debate in the Florida House.

We were in Ohio last weekend for a funeral. While driving thru Columbus, there was an add that came up on the radio. It was your typical "Hot Hip-Hop and R&B" station.

The ad listed a bunch of things Desantis has done that harm black, brown & LGBT folks. It said that even though you may not live in Florida, Desantis is aiming for the White House where he can put policies like these in place across the country. They encouraged people to not visit Florida or do any business there.

Of course, living in Florida, I haven't heard any ads like this. I know about the NAACP warning about travel in Florida (warnings were also issued by a Latino group & an LGBT group). I haven't heard any radio spots here criticizing Desantis (yet).

Are these kinds of ads playing in your cities?

Leonard Leo, the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority, led the advisers who helped DeSantis reshape the state court

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/20/gov-ron-desantis-used-secretive-panel-flip-state-supreme-court/

For decades, the ambitions of Florida’s Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning state Supreme Court.

That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected.

The court let him erase a congressional district with a large Black population. It opened the door to a law making it easier to impose the death penalty. Now, it’s poised to rule on the governor’s plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state.

The hard-right turn was by design. DeSantis seized on the unusual retirement of three liberal justices at once to quickly remake the court. He did so with the help of a secretive panel led by Leonard Leo — the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority — that quietly vetted judicial nominees in an Orlando conference room three weeks before the governor’s inauguration.

“So what I do is I convene a group of people that I trust — some people in Florida, some people outside of the state who you would know, who I’m not going to say, because you know, it’s private,” DeSantis later said on a conservative podcast. “Then they put these candidates through the wringer.”

After taking office in January 2019, DeSantis appointed three new justices in two weeks, flipping the court from what he described as a 4-3 liberal majority to a 6-1 conservative advantage.

More recently, two justices appointed by past Republicans stepped down and took more lucrative jobs with allies of the governor, allowing DeSantis to handpick his own stalwarts.

The governor’s efforts have yielded one of the most conservative state Supreme Courts in the country, reflecting Florida’s shift from a politically competitive state to a testing ground for culture war legislation over immigration, race and sex education that is now at the heart of DeSantis’s presidential bid.

He repeatedly points to his overhaul of the state court as a sign of how he would approach the judiciary if elected. He has called Justice Clarence Thomas “our greatest living justice” and pledged to move the U.S. Supreme Court even further to the right than President Donald Trump did.

In Florida, the governor’s confidential vetting process for the high court was one of the earliest examples of what would become a signature tactic of his administration — testing the boundaries of executive authority, while defying protocols aimed at transparency and accountability. It also foreshadowed the governor’s allegiance to the Federalist Society, the organization led by Leo that worked behind the scenes at the national level to build the conservative Supreme Court supermajority that overturned the right to abortion.

DeSantis’s “core is not the Bible. It’s not the Catholic Church. It’s the Federalist Society and its constitutionalist principles,” said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, a religious conservative group that closely monitors judicial appointments.

The governor is battling to keep private the names of the other advisers who worked with Leo in a court case that could have sweeping ramifications for access to government records in Florida. But people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential panel, confirmed several participants to The Washington Post. The elite group of conservatives included a former U.S. senator from Florida and Chris Kise, now a top member of Trump’s defense team in his classified records case. The panel grilled the judicial nominees about whether their principles matched those of the Federalist Society, which has pushed conservative and libertarian judges onto the nation’s courts through multimillion-dollar influence campaigns fueled by secret donors.

“That panel was truly unprecedented when you consider Florida’s tradition of government in the sunshine,” said Craig Waters, a lawyer who was the state Supreme Court’s spokesman for 35 years. “The result is a court that lacks diversity of viewpoints, and that’s very troubling in terms of checks and balances.”

DeSantis, who has denounced diversity initiatives in higher education and the corporate world, has nonetheless touted the gender and ethnic makeup of his judicial appointments, which have included two Hispanic men, two Hispanic women and one Black woman.

The governor’s office declined to answer questions from The Post about his judicial appointments and relationship with Leo. DeSantis has picked five of the seven justices currently on the court, the most of any governor in a generation. “A huge, huge legacy,” he said recently.

“As governor, Ron DeSantis took a state Supreme Court from being one of the worst in the country to probably one of the best in the country, if not the best,” Leo told The Post in a rare interview.

A shadow panel
DeSantis was at Harvard Law School when he joined the Federalist Society, a club founded in 1982 to challenge liberal ideology in legal academia. An archived page of the group’s website from the 2002-2003 school year shows a close-cropped “Ronald DeSantis” in a collared shirt among 22 first-year students.

Leo, the organization’s executive vice president at the time, came to speak to the group in April 2003, the site shows. It’s not clear whether DeSantis, who is now 44, attended, but the 58-year-old Leo has said they first met while DeSantis was a law student. They reconnected after DeSantis’s election to Congress in 2012; Leo donated to his campaign and helped fundraise for his leadership PAC, according to campaign records and an invitation obtained by The Post.

After DeSantis narrowly won election as governor in 2018, one of his first moves was to bring in Leo to help him replace the high court’s three most liberal justices, who were stepping down in accordance with the state’s mandatory retirement age of 70.

DeSantis’s approach departed from a process established in state law dating back to the 1970s, when a string of public corruption scandals led to the abolishment of “patronage committees” openly used by governors to install supporters on the court. Instead, nonpartisan judicial nominating commissions — with members chosen by the governor and the Florida Bar — were set up to screen applicants for circuit and appellate courts and make recommendations for appointments.

The changes ushered in a generally liberal state Supreme Court that lasted for decades. It rejected Republican proposals for taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools, expanded casino gambling and a 24-hour waiting period before abortions. A law signed by Gov. Jeb Bush (R) in 2001 broadened executive control over the commissions and weakened the bar’s role, laying the groundwork for a conservative takeover.

Flipping the court “reduced a roadblock to getting my legislative agenda to ‘stick,’” DeSantis wrote in his book, “The Courage to Be Free.” “For years, the old liberal court had acted less as a judicial body than as a political council of revision, blocking conservative policy enacted by the legislature.”

As governor-elect, DeSantis received a list of 11 nominees the judicial nominating commission had chosen from a pool of 59 applicants in the final weeks of Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s term. He and Scott had a chilly relationship from the outset, and the governor-elect didn’t yet trust the sitting governor’s commission or its choices, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential process.

So he turned to Leo for an ideological backstop. He had been a top adviser to Trump on judicial appointments, including for Supreme Court Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who helped lead DeSantis’s transition into office, said in an interview that DeSantis envisioned Leo leading a “concierge screening process” to recommend which of the 11 nominees to choose.

“It was just Ron and the Fed Soc crew, and they made it clear they didn’t need any other help,” Gaetz said. “Ron delighted in the intellectual heft Leo brought to the transition.”

Under Florida’s open government laws, the judicial nominating commission’s interviews with court applicants were advertised and open to the public. By contrast, when Leo and his unofficial panel met with the finalists in Orlando over two days in mid-December 2018, neither the press nor the public was invited.

DeSantis described to conservative podcaster Hugh Hewitt how the nominees faced Leo and the other advisers, who later offered their assessments: “They will go into a room, and you’ll have six or seven pretty big legal conservative heavyweights, and they have to answer questions. And I’m not there for that, but then I get debriefed by them, and then I’ll sit and do interviews with each individual candidate.”

Leo and the panel asked the finalists about interpreting the Constitution according to its original intent and without applying more-current social, political or cultural lenses, as the Federalist Society advocates, according to the people familiar with the process interviewed by The Post. Those principles of “originalism” and “textualism” have been cited by Federalist Society judges in courts across the country to strike down legal protections for women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the LGBTQ community.

“The reason why I think that’s the right way to do it is because you have to have some objective measure to go by,” DeSantis said in a Federalist Society speech in late 2019. “It can’t just be flying off the seat of your pants philosophizing and imposing whatever idiosyncratic views you have on society under the guise of constitutional interpretation.”

Soon after his inauguration, with the panel’s recommendations in hand, DeSantis established a new conservative supermajority on the court at the same time Republicans dominated the state legislature.

The governor publicly acknowledged Leo’s involvement months later. Two of the early judicial appointments, Barbara Lagoa and Robert Luck, confirmed Leo’s role in written testimony to Congress after Trump appointed them to a federal appeals court in 2019. Lagoa said Leo and the panel did not ask about how she would decide particular cases. “I do not know how that group was selected,” she wrote. Luck said he didn’t recall the questions from what he described as “an advisory committee” that included Leo.

After the governor’s office resisted disclosing the names of the other advisers, a lawsuit filed last fall accused DeSantis of breaching public records laws. In January, state Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey accepted DeSantis’s claim of “executive privilege.”

“To effectively discharge his constitutional duty, the Governor must be permitted to have access to candid advice in order to explore policy alternatives and reach appropriate decisions,” Dempsey said.

That ruling is being appealed. Government watchdogs worry that the governor could cite executive privilege to aggressively deny public records requests.

“We are entitled to know how the people on the court of last resort in the state of Florida, that hears the most important matters, were selected,” said Justin Hemlepp, a First Amendment lawyer representing the plaintiff.

But people familiar with the process identified a number of the panel’s members to The Post. They included Kise; George LeMieux, a former U.S. senator who is chairman of the board of a major Florida law firm; and Joe Jacquot, who served as deputy chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and went on to be general counsel to DeSantis. DeSantis in his book identified another participant he describes as a friend: Robert Giuffra, a nationally known litigator at a New York-based white-shoe law firm. Ben Gibson, a Tallahassee lawyer who has served as counsel to the Florida GOP, notes in his professional biography that he advised DeSantis on his first three judicial appointments as general counsel to the transition team.

The group’s backroom conversations with the nominees tainted the process, according to Mary Adkins, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law who has studied the state Supreme Court. “If the public isn’t watching, we don’t know what kind of information they’re getting and passing along to the governor. So it kind of subverts the purpose” of the judicial nominating commissions, Adkins said.

Kise was the only adviser reached by The Post who would comment about the interviews. “The process was a very fair and effective process, and the governor selected three outstanding jurists,” Kise said.

Jason Unger, a Republican lawyer who led the official judicial nominating commission when DeSantis was elected, said he wasn’t aware at the time that DeSantis was also seeking advice from Leo and others. But he said that was the governor’s prerogative.

“It was perfectly normal and appropriate for him to reach out to lawyers he knew and respected to help with the vetting process,” said Unger, who served on the official commission from 2008 to 2019, under three governors.

Handpicking justices
Early in his first term, DeSantis had built the clear conservative majority he’d sought on the state Supreme Court. But with several justices appointed by his Republican predecessors still serving, it wasn’t fully DeSantis’s court yet.

That would soon change.

Justice Alan Lawson announced his departure in April 2022, shortly after his colleagues chose one of the governor’s new appointees for chief judge. Lawson, a Scott appointee, went on to launch a law firm with Jason Gonzalez, a top adviser to DeSantis on judicial appointments.

In a recent podcast interview, Gonzalez said Lawson told him he was among the first to know he was stepping down from the court.

“He gave me the opportunity to go tell the governor, which was a nice honor that he gave me,” Gonzalez said. “Of course, the governor gets to appoint his replacement. So I knew he’d be excited to know that.”

Gonzalez, who said in the podcast that he met DeSantis years ago through the Federalist Society, did not respond to requests for comment.

Lawson, 62, said in an email to The Post that after a long career in state government, he left the court of his own volition. “This was a very personal decision and was made without the pressure of any outside influence,” he said, adding that he decided to help start the firm after a three-month sabbatical.

DeSantis secured another opening when Justice Ricky Polston, 67, resigned this year — just a few months after seeking and winning a new six-year term, as judges appointed by the governor must periodically do to keep their seats. Polston, who had been appointed by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, was recruited to work as general counsel for the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. by its new chief executive, Tim Cerio. Cerio is also a DeSantis appointee to the judicial nominating commission, which would help pick Polston’s replacement. Polston declined to comment.

Cerio said in an interview that the governor and his allies had no role in his efforts to lure Polston off the court. “That was my idea. I recruited him,” he said.

DeSantis used Lawson’s retirement to install Renatha Francis, a Jamaican-born circuit judge he had tried to add two years earlier. In response to a legal challenge, the high court had unanimously rejected her because she had not been a Florida Bar member for 10 years as required. DeSantis allies point to the decision as evidence of the court’s independence.

The governor successfully added her to the court in 2022 after she had crossed the bar threshold.

In his book, DeSantis wrote about looking for judicial nominees unpopular with the professional bar, legal academia and the media. “I insisted on justices who were willing to reject these elite influences, and I hoped for nominees who would relish defying them.”

Polston’s vacancy initially attracted only three applicants. Longtime prosecutor Victoria Avalon, who was among 15 applicants after the deadline was extended, bluntly told the commission in her May interview that the apparent lack of interest reflects a widespread impression that DeSantis had already settled on a favorite. “I am not throwing shade at the judiciary, but that is the perception on the street,” Avalon, who has unsuccessfully applied to be a judge several times, said in an interview.

Fred Karlinsky, the commission’s current chairman, declined to comment.

A conservative court
With its new right-of-center majority, the Florida Supreme Court has repeatedly enabled DeSantis’s political agenda — and soon will decide his legacy on abortion rights.

In the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, the governor proposed a congressional map that expanded the number of Republican-friendly seats and eliminated a northern Florida district represented by a Black Democrat. The map was challenged by voting rights groups that argued it would dilute the power of Black voters, but the court declined to interfere.

More recently, DeSantis signed a law reducing the number of jurors needed to recommend a death sentence to the lowest threshold of any state with capital punishment. The law followed a series of court decisions making it easier to impose the death penalty, including the reversal of a ruling requiring a unanimous jury.

The court also did away with long-standing protocols requiring judges to take courses in diversity and fairness, describing them as “overbroad” in a ruling at the same time the governor was cracking down on similar efforts in higher education.

Barbara Pariente, one of the three liberal justices who retired after DeSantis took office, blamed what she called the current court’s lack of “respect” for precedent on a clubby appointment process.

“Our method of selecting justices and other appellate judges has gone from a merit-based system to a much more political one that’s influenced by a view of judicial decision-making that favors those in power who are willing to agree with the governor’s agenda,” Pariente said.

But to hard-line conservatives like Stemberger, who worked for decades to replace what they viewed as the “activist” liberal majority with conservative justices rooted in the antiabortion movement, “it’s become the court of our dreams.”

Under DeSantis, the court has impaneled statewide grand juries useful to the governor as political ammunition. The juries are typically approved by the high court and overseen by a statewide prosecutor picked by the attorney general — currently Republican Ashley Moody, a DeSantis ally.

In 2019, DeSantis requested a grand jury to investigate security failures surrounding the 2018 mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school; he later cited its report in suspending four Democrats on the Broward County School Board. A 2023 grand jury report blasted President Biden’s immigration policies and laid the groundwork for more-stringent penalties DeSantis recently signed into law.

The governor last year requested a grand jury to probe alleged fraud by coronavirus vaccine manufacturers, arguing that the vaccines were falsely advertised as preventing transmission. In fact, the companies touted studies showing the shots were effective at blocking symptoms and preventing serious illness.

Previous governors sought grand juries to investigate more wide-ranging issues of insurance, health care and securities fraud, but the process has become more politicized under DeSantis, said Jacksonville lawyer Hank Coxe, a former Florida Bar president.

“The creation of the statewide grand jury system was to identify and eliminate organized criminal activity,” he said. “Its current use does the original legislative intent an injustice.”

In coming months, the court will rule on a law DeSantis signed last year that outlaws abortions after 15 weeks. A six-week ban he approved this year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade also hangs in the balance. For decades, the state court has affirmed that an unusually explicit privacy clause in the Florida Constitution protects the right to abortion. Even its chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, whose appointment by DeSantis was hailed by religious conservatives, once wrote that one purpose of the privacy amendment was to buttress the right to abortion.

“That case is going to be a very important indicator of where the court’s going,” said Neil Skene, author of a 2017 book on the high court. “It will be seismic in terms of abortion rights and women’s rights and to see how this court approaches the reversal of a major constitutional precedent.”

On the presidential campaign trail, the court makeover is a major talking point for DeSantis. “We now have the most conservative state Supreme Court in the United States,” he said to loud applause at a recent event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

DeSantis also has pointed to the judiciary to draw distinctions with the Republican front-runner. He said last month that unlike Trump, who could serve only one more term, he would “have the opportunity to fortify” a far-right court over eight years. And this month, he said he would one-up Trump’s appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I would say we’ll do better than that,” DeSantis told Hewitt in another podcast episode. “I respect the three appointees he did, but none of those three are at the same level of Justice Thomas and Justice Alito. I think they are the gold standard.”

Got staffers sharing videos with Nazi imagery, got the reveal of African-American history curriculum debacle, got Florida schools about to use PragerU in the classroom. Not to mention the state Covid death news. The insurance company news. And what's it getting him?

Marbles called it. I honestly wish he would make it out of the primary to see what Biden would do to him in the general. It'd be a fucking bloodbath.

America's next president? Be serious.

the African American History shit was just.. smh.

Man, I hope this thing snowballs into an all out war between Desantis and the black Republicans. The dude is such a terrible candidate.

***

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/28/disgusting-black-republicans-livid-over-desantis-slavery-attack-00108776

By BRAKKTON BOOKER

07/28/2023 02:40 PM EDT

The bitter fight between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Rep. Byron Donalds over a line about slavery in the state’s revised African American history standards is infuriating several prominent Black conservatives.

Several told POLITICO they fear the issue will play into Democrats’ characterization of Republicans as favoring a whitewashing of American history. Most saw it as an unforced error at the time when Black Republicans feel they’ve been making significant strides within the party.

“It raises eyebrows,” said Diante Johnson, president of the Black Conservative Federation, who is supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. “Ron DeSantis is not the candidate for Black conservatives and that’s what constantly, constantly exhibits to us.”

At issue are the new education standards for how Black history is taught in Florida schools that DeSantis signed into law last year. The revised guidelines, released this month, require educators to instruct middle schoolers that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Donalds, who largely praised the guidelines as “good, robust and accurate,” took issue with the idea of “personal benefit” and said that part is “wrong and needs to be adjusted.” Donalds supported DeSantis for governor but has backed Trump in the presidential primary.

That prompted an onslaught from the DeSantis camp. Christina Pushaw, the director of rapid response for the DeSantis presidential campaign, mused, “Did Kamala Harris write this tweet?” referencing the vice president’s recent trip to Florida, in which she denounced the new standards.

DeSantis dug in, disparaging his fellow Republican with one of the worst insults one can lob: comparing him to a Democrat. “Are you going to side with Kamala Harris and liberal media outlets or are you going to side with the state of Florida?”

To some prominent Black Republicans, it was a DeSantis misstep. And one that comes as his campaign is attempting to jump-start its flagging operation.

“It’s just not a good position for the DeSantis campaign to take. And they’re doubling down and that’s what’s even more disgusting,” said the Black Conservative Federation’s Johnson.

In recent days, allies of former President Donald Trump rushed to Donalds’ defense, characterizing the DeSantis camp pushback as a smear campaign.

“As the direct descendent of a slave, I have a hard time understanding Governor DeSantis’ position that transferrable skills learned in bondage are somehow a net benefit,” said Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), an ally of Donalds. “If Ron DeSantis spent more time doing the job the people of Florida elected him to do and less time on his failing Presidential campaign, perhaps Florida’s curriculum on slavery would more accurately reflect the pain and heartbreak experienced by millions who suffered through the original sin.”

For another of DeSantis’ rivals in the presidential primary, the controversy provided an opening. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is among the five Black GOP members of Congress, added to the chorus of Black conservatives criticizing DeSantis for supporting Florida’s revised educational standard.

“There is no silver lining in slavery,” Scott said. “Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was just devastating.”

DeSantis responded to Scott on Friday, once more by accusing him of echoing Harris.

“Part of the reason our country has struggled is because D.C. Republicans all too often accept false narratives, accept lies that are perpetrated by the Left,” he said during a swing through Iowa. “And to accept the lie that Kamala Harris has been perpetrating even when that has been debunked, that’s not the way you do it.”

Longtime Republican strategist Deana Bass Williams, who worked on Ben Carson’s presidential campaign, lauded Donalds for his restraint. “They should be grateful that Congressman Donalds did not torch them,” said Williams, who is neutral in the GOP presidential primary.

Donalds is rumored to be considering a gubernatorial run in Florida in 2026.

Mandie Jones, a longtime Republican strategist in Florida and former aide to former Republican Gov. Rick Scott, now the Sunshine State’s junior senator, did not read too much into the public rift between DeSantis and Donalds, and added there are some advantages to this war of words.

“This in particular is beneficial to the larger discussion of race and politics,” Jones said. “This is the type of stuff that in the primary we get to see those nuances in the conversation.”

Many Black Republicans find themselves in a quandary: on the one hand having to push back on perceptions that slavery has positive attributes, but also fighting the perception that if they voice criticism, it leads to questions of whether they are sufficiently conservative.

Harrison Fields, Donalds’ spokesperson, captured this in a tweet. “If you condemn CRT & refuse to support BLM, black Republicans are called a coon, sellouts, & Uncle Clarence. If you vocalize minor distaste with a sentence in a curriculum that lauds skills developed by slaves during slavery, black Republicans are called Democrats and frauds,” he said.

Mostly, Black conservatives sounded frustrated they’ve been thrust into the conversation on the merits and benefits of slavery at all.

CJ Pearson, a Black Gen Z conservative activist said, “I think it’s absurd we’re having a debate about whether slavery was good for Black people in 2023.”

nah bitch theyre siding with history.

some of these folks honestly know no black people outside of their handpicked pawns.

He’s been explicitly running to the right of Trump, thinking he can pull the true believers that way.

they start telling the truth about each other lol.

all the shit they dismissed, ignored, defended, etc. is now on the table.

byron donalds speaks out against repubs saying slavery was beneficial to black people...and now theyre in his mentions posting his mugshots from drug and fraud charges lol.

its like how trump started exposing how shitty desantis has been for florida (especially during the pandemic) after 2 years of right wing media (and sadly mainstream media) acting like desantis handled everything great.

Hee always had zero personality and never was at all ready for prime time. All those “he’s the future of Republican Party!” and “He won the pandemic!” hot takes look ever more stupid now.

but he is just Florida man once he left the state.

No personality and scared af to answer any tough questions.

He's built the bona-fides the modern Republican base wants.

NO ONE - NO ONE can compete with Trump. Once he's gone wo do you think wins - Asa Hutchinson?

It'll be Ted Cruz types. It'll be Desantis.

He's going to be the V.P. pick - that's the most he could possibly of done against Trump.

And if Trump dies (he is pretty old and fat) then DeSantis will be the candidate they run (to lose) against Biden. (unless he's smart enough not to run.)

All DeSantis needs is to get on amphetamines and watch a bunch of Batman episodes where the Joker runs for mayor and watches a bunch of "bro-Comedy."

Get Desantis UP and let him crack wise and he'll be another Republican GOD.

He was never going to be the guy. He's never going to be the guy.

It's a wrap for Ron. He's done. His future's so dim he's got to wear a blindfold.

Making him the VP nominee does nothing for Trump. They do that and Biden George Jefferson walks back into the presidency. DeSantis brings NOTHING to the table. He's a walking liability. He gets you no independent voters, he gets you no middle of the road Republicans. He doesn't excite anyone other than edgelord extremely online nazis. He gets you nothing that you don't already have. He can't even be the "adult in the room" that Pence was supposed to be. Plus, Harris would leave him bleeding out on the debate stage worse than Newsom did.

Biden would curb stomp him head to head so that's not going to happen.

Wish people would stop saying shit with absolute certainty when it's not even remotely grounded in reality.

He looks bad right now, but Biden lost numerous times in a similar fashion on the primary and just waited his turn. Kamala kind of did a similar thing as well. They still have the same weaknesses they always had and just stick it out until the party gets behind them.

Ron DeSantis will still be Ron DeSantis in 2028 and beyond. He's not 1/2 of 1/4 of the candidate Joe Biden was.

He's got no record to run on, he's dumb, and most of all he's repellant. The more you see/hear him the less you like him. He's a fucking nag. He's that one aunt you don't like.

Nobody is getting arrested for Ron, people wouldn't storm a Denny's for Ron much less the capitol.

He's proof positive that this shit doesn't work without Trump a Trump-like figure.

He's the anti-trump. All of the cruelty and none of the charisma and that's not what is gonna scratch the itch for these people.

If Trump was so easy to replace/succeed they would have thrown him to the wolves already but they know he's the key. Once you've gone down that road you can't just throw any old asshole up there anymore. They're in for a penny, in for a pound now.

>He's got no record to run on, he's dumb, and most of all he's
>repellant. The more you see/hear him the less you like him.
>He's a fucking nag. He's that one aunt you don't like.

but he has a lot of bitch in him and he knows it which is why he hid from the media.

Plus he's short.

Even beyond his repellant policies, he's physically not appealing.

in a week she went from saying we've never been a racist country to this weirdness

https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1749246401005949286?t=Tjz6upA8LrbIxMaAzr4lRQ&s=19

I have this discussion all the time with my brother, I say Nikki Haley is a problem in the general election, she can beat Biden. He says the racist Maga will never fall in line behind an Indian woman.

I am beginning to think he is right.


**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

it will be because trump blows it up because she didn't kiss the ring like the others

most people don't see her as Indian until it's brought up

I don't doubt she caught some bullying at times but in both variations she's just saying what she thinks people want to hear. 'these people want everyone to stfu about race and those people are obsessed with it' .she just sucks at pandering

Trump even though he lies more than anyone, you can tell he's not saying something because his team of strategists is telling him to, he just says whatever pops into his psychotic brain, and there's an element of genuineness in that. Vivek (kissed the ring) tried to mimick it, but other than youth, why would maga want a cheap brown cover band over the original?