Ron Perón's DeSantistan (with Gal Suburban)
The Florida governor is "Ted Cruz Lite." That doesn't make him any less dangerous.
On the PREVAIL podcast two weeks ago, Florida resident Moscow Never Sleeps argued that Ron DeSantis checks all the boxes that GOP political campaign strategists look for when seeking out viable presidential candidates. DeSantis is the Republican governor of a large purple state who just resoundingly won re-election. He is in complete control of the state legislature. He’s young, reasonably photogenic, ruthlessly ambitious, and already making a name for himself on the national stage (that name might be “DeathSantis,” but whatever). Not only that, but he enjoys the backing of Rupert Murdoch and the News Corp empire, which has parted ways with the last Florida fascist to run for president.
On today’s PREVAIL podcast, I asked another Sunshine State resident, the ace OSINT researcher Gal Suburban, what she thought about having her state’s governor on top of the GOP ticket. She took a long pause. She sighed. And she said, “DeSantis is—he’s so dangerous.”
My guess is that this time around, the Republicans will coalesce around their candidate relatively quickly, as they did with George W. Bush in 2000, rather than return to the chaos of 2016, when Trump headed to the Republican National Convention with his position hardly assured. That would help them with messaging, with fundraising, with endorsements. On the flip side, it would lock them into a candidate who is—despite checking all those boxes—deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed.
Gal pulled no punches when discussing DeSantis’s vulnerabilities: “He’s not great in debates. He’s a fucking asshole; people don’t like him, probably as much or more than they don’t like Ted Cruz. He’s very Ted Cruz Lite. I mean, his wife runs the show. He has no emotive capability. He can’t make eye contact with people. He’s just not as charismatic and as quick on his feet, I think, to compete on a national stage. That’s not to say that he won’t try, and that there won’t be a bunch of fucking idiots who are like, ‘Ohhh! Yeah! Freedom!’ . . . I mean, they’ve been able to push through unlikeable, distasteful people before.”
The real danger presented by Ron DeSantis, it says here, is neither his unlikability nor his distastefulness, but his despotic nature. The guy is a fucking fascist, full stop. He regards Florida as Lukashenko does Belarus. He is Ron Perón, ruling DeSantistan with an iron fist.
When I say he’s a fascist, what I mean is that DeSantis behaves, as governor of the third-largest state in the Union, like the strongmen written about in Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book. For example:
DeSantis dumbs down his message to be more “populist.”
To watch DeSantis fail to properly install a mask on his smug face, you’d think he was not that bright. But that’s an act. The guy went to Yale undergrad and Harvard Law before serving in the U.S. Navy’s JAG Corps. He ain’t Lauren Boebert. He only pretends to be a dummy to appeal to the dummies who vote for him.
DeSantis attacks science.
He’s responsible for the state’s stupid, politicized covid-19 response policies that have helped kill untold numbers of Floridians—the official count is 84,176, but the real number is much higher; hence “DeathSantis”—and he continues to spew vaccine disinformation:
Florida has lousy vaccine rates for adults and children, and few residents seem interested in getting boosted. The state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, is no fan of vaccines.
As MSNBC’s Michael A. Cohen wrote in a recent column:
An analysis from Brown University’s School of Public Health found that more than half the Covid deaths in Florida from January 2021 to April this year could have been prevented had those individuals gotten vaccinated. In fact, according to the Brown study, Florida is 13th per capita in preventable Covid deaths — a ranking undoubtedly influenced by DeSantis’ laissez-faire approach to the pandemic compared to other states. And according to a recent study by two Yale School of Public Health professors, “excess deaths during the pandemic were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats in two states, Ohio and Florida.” Moreover, “the partisan gap in death rates increased significantly after vaccines were introduced.”
Presumably, DeSantis is smart enough to know better but, like Jared Kushner, prioritizes politics over public health.
DeSantis appeals to racists.
Florida has [checks notes] an anti-critical race theory law. It is being applied to erase Black history.
DeSantis routinely attacks the LGBT community.
Because he wants to be the exemplar of the straight, white, Christian patriarchy, he must demonize anyone who doesn’t check those boxes. His “Don’t Say Gay” law, ridiculous as it sounds, is effectively causing self-censorship in schools—one of the objectives:
And DeSantis often rails against the trans community. That’s one of this fascist’s favorite targets. As I wrote previously:
Here he is at a press event from last year, extolling a cruel bill banning trans athletes from participating in sports:
Being able to compete in a variety of sports in Florida, fortunately, has opportunities across a wide range of sports and we’re very competitive in a number of different sports, provides our young girls with opportunities that really teach them lessons that last a lifetime. And I think the same is true for all of our sports. It certainly was true for me growing up here in the state of Florida, being able to compete and it took me to college. It’s taken many of our girls to college to be able to get an education and to compete. So we believe that it’s very that the integrity of those competitions are preserved, that these opportunities are protected. And I can tell you this, in Florida, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports. That’s what we’re doing and we’re going to make sure that that’s the reality.
This sort of thing happens so infrequently that DeSantis had to import aggrieved parties from out of state to grouse about it. At that press conference, he trotted out Selina Soule, a girls track athlete from Connecticut, to share her story of losing to “two male athletes who self-identify as girls” whom the state allowed “to compete in girls’ sports.” I’m sure that it sucked for Soule to lose in such a manner; she probably felt like she’d been cheated. But this unlikely scenario is unworthy of the attention lavished upon it by the governor of the nation’s third largest state. For one thing, that situation is exceedingly rare; it is orders of magnitude more likely for a trans kid to not play high school sports at all because of the attendant gender-related obstacles than what DeSantis is so panties-twisted about. For another, the end result of this is…someone gets a bronze medal instead of a gold. In the grand scheme of things, so fucking what? More than half of all trans kids attempt suicide. Trans kids are already the most vulnerable population going, already face enormous social obstacles; we’re going to deny them all the right to play high school sports because Selina Soule’s pissed she came in third?
I know this might seem trivial compared to the covid death count, but every time he opens his fat mouth about trans people, he puts them in greater danger.
DeSantis treats the media with outright contempt.
He eighty-sixes journalists he doesn’t like from his press conferences:
DeSantis subjugates women.
Is Florida trying to impose an extreme anti-abortion ban in the state? Of course. It’s called House Bill 5, and it seeks to ban abortion at 15 weeks. Fortunately, the Florida Supreme Court issued an injunction, and the law is not in effect. But until the bill is nuked, it remains a threat.
To state the obvious: There is nothing more authoritarian than the state forcing a woman to carry to term a fetus she does not want. Also, many women will be harmed, and some will die, if this law goes into effect. DeSantis does not care.
DeSantis demonizes minorities.
Remember when his de facto operative, Perla Huerta, flew refugees from Texas to Florida, with the promise of help, only to re-route them to Martha’s Vineyard as a disgusting political stunt? That’s vintage strongman behavior.
DeSantis surrounds himself with loyalists, even if they are shady af.
Among those close to DeSantis are the pardoned felon Roger Stone, the convicted shit-heel Joel Greenberg, and the SCIF violator and alleged sex trafficker Matt Gaetz. There’s a colorful cast of secondary characters associated with the larger Florida GOP—Gal Suburban discussed the lot of them last year on PREVAIL—who are also Team DeSantis. Oh, and Brazil’s ousted president and would-be dictator Jair Bolsonaro was holed up in Florida during his coup. Too, Florida prosecutors tend to be extremely reluctant to charge anyone in the governor’s circle. I’m sure it’s the same in Belarus.
DeSantis is not exactly squeaky clean himself.
Everyone knows about DeSantis, when he was a young teacher, going to keggers with his underage students and being way too flirty, right? Well, after that, he was a JAG in Iraq and then at the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention camp. His role there was to make sure everything the military did was very legal and very cool—including, presumably, the horrors of Abu Ghraib. As another Florida resident and OSINT researcher, Matt Uelmen, told me, “what [DeSantis] really was in history [was] a lawyer for empire covering up war crimes.” Most of DeSantis’s activities at GITMO—as with most of his service in general—is redacted, so we can’t know for sure what he was up to. But it sure seems like he was, as Uelmen puts it, “the Abu Ghraib fixer.”
DeSantis’s control over the supine Florida Statehouse is so absolute that he can do almost anything he wants.
“The way he can manipulate the state to create this, like, authoritarian stronghold over the people here, through the legislature, who will just do anything,” Gal Suburban muses. “I guess I wonder if DeSantis would want to leave such a strong position, you know?”
Gal continues: “They’re trying to create this Little Venezuela or something. Sometimes I almost think, well, maybe he’d rather secede [than run for president], and be his own little federation of DeSantis fuckwads.”
Farfetched? Maybe. But in Florida, anything is possible.
In the end, Trump was too volatile, too undisciplined, and too dumb to successfully engineer a coup. DeSantis is not. A wannabe strongman like Ron Perón has no place at the head of a party hellbent on the overthrow of democracy.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S4 E16: SEASON FINALE: Charley Horses in DeSantistan (with Gal Suburban)
In the Season Finale of S4 of PREVAIL, Greg Olear talks to ace OSINT researcher Gal Suburban about the J6 Committee, the sudden preponderance of classified documents, the slowness of the DOJ, McCarthy as Speaker, Jack Smith, George Santos’ Florida connections, Organic Fresh Coin, the importance of defense spending, Brazil, Mike Flynn, Ginni Thomas, roosters, and puppies. Plus: a new anthem for Florida.
Follow Gal Suburban:
https://twitter.com/gal_suburban
Subscribe to Gal’s Substack:
Sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/greg
PROGRAMMING NOTES
Today’s episode is the finale of Season Four. I will be on podcast break for the next three Fridays. Season Five of PREVAIL will drop on February 17.
There will be a new live Five 8 show tonight. Please stop by:
After the regular show, LB and I will have an “After Hours” for members only. To join, click here.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore. Governor Ron DeSantis speaking with attendees at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida.
Greg, Great analysis of Ronny. He is more frightening than DJT because he is intelligent but a fascist scumbag. For numerous reasons, one of which was the conversion of FL into a red state, we sold our Cracker shack and left the Big Bend red Trumplandia and returned to MA. We miss the warm weather but not the dumb political environment. Besides being among liberals everyday feels good and reinforces our fantasy thinking that things will work out for the good guys.
The more the Republikkkans attack Democrats, the deeper the hole they dig for themselves to fall into. Not only are they wasting an opportunity to do something productive, they are getting paid to do it, a stupid waste our taxpayers moneys. Someone should put a cease and desist order on them and Murdoch's empire for harassment and noise pollution.