Children can work in meat lockers, but drag shows are too much

Dangerous — and idiotic — hypocrisy

Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.

I’m all about accountability, so let me start with an apology: Please forgive me for not embedding some embarrassing high school photos of Ron DeSantis at the bottom of Sunday’s newsletter. I made a promise at the top of that email, and after ripping through Senate leadership, I just straight up forgot to punctuate it with several images of Ronald DeSantis during what had to be a stint working as a 21 Jump Street undercover cop.

Allow me to rectify my mistake now:

Mickey Mouse is trembling with fear right now

Hard to believe that guy grew up to become a sneering bully who spends a fair chunk of his time bullying queer children, desperately trying to harass Mickey Mouse, and getting dumped by his friends.

Now that we’re caught up on Ron DeSantis’s unfurling humiliations, tonight we’re going to catch up on a number of important stories that we’ve been covering here at Progress Report. There are some major updates in the Texas GOP’s war on democracy, the Florida GOP’s war on civil rights, Iowa’s war on children, Senate Democrats’ war on themselves, and more.

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Day of Hate in Florida

So the thing about Ron DeSantis’s fight against Disney is that as much as it makes him look like a complete loser and moron, it does serve the purpose of distracting from the truly vicious stuff happening to kids in his state.

On Tuesday, members of the state House debated a number of transphobic and homophobic bills, including a strict ban on gender-affirming care and a more extreme version of the infamous bathroom ban that turned North Carolina inside out less than a decade ago.

Rep. Randy Fine, the baby man bigot who called me the kind of Jew that justifies antisemitism a few weeks ago, stuck by his bill to ban children at drag shows, even after it emerged late last week that his wife features in and hosts an annual drag show in front of children.

Florida Republicans are monsters, and almost guaranteed to succeed with their supermajority, but that didn’t stop protestors from showing up and getting creative. At one point on Tuesday, they rained underwear painted with protests down on the prudish lawmakers.

Iowa Plans To Starve Out Children

After pulling an all-night on the floor of the state Senate trying to convince observers and themselves that they aren’t terrible people, the Republican supermajority voted at just shy of 5 am to approve the most extreme rollback of child labor laws since the Great Depression.

That’s not hyperbole, either, as you’ll see below.