This "pro-life" Republican fights for puppy killers
This "pro-life" Republican fights for puppy killers
The incestuous world of pro-inbreeding GOP politics
Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report. I hope you had a great week.
It’s a packed newsletter tonight, chockful of party power brokers and lobbyists doing insane things as well as a look at new developments in tech policy that will undoubtedly impact you. Let’s get to it.
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Sickly puppies are being bred and sold at exorbitant prices to working-class customers in Ohio, explosive new lawsuits and public records reveal. State officials have thus far refused to intervene with the ongoing animal cruelty and financial scam, marking a rare recent win for the president of Ohio’s state medical board and the state’s leading anti-abortion organization.
That there’s a direct link between dying puppies, a health oversight board, and the anti-choice movement is a prime example of Ohio’s notorious corruption and the cynicism of far-right politics.
At the center of the bizarre triangle is a conservative lobbyist named Mike Gonidakis. A close confidante of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, Gonidakis is the president of Ohio Right to Life and an anti-vaxxer serving his third term on the state medical board, which he led as president during the height of the Covid pandemic. One of the state’s busiest influence peddlers, he splits his time lobbying for healthcare clients, emerging cannabis monopolies, and Petland, one of the nation’s largest pet store chains and the only one that still sells puppies.
Gonidakis focuses on government regulation for the Ohio-based company, which has assembled a long record of abusing the lax oversight laws that its anti-choice, pro-hydroxychloroquine man in Columbus has been central to getting through the legislature. When Grove City passed ordinances that barred pet stores from selling puppies in 2016, Gonidakis rallied Ohio Republicans to pass a preemption law that nullified the ban and prevented other local governments from interfering with Petland’s right to peddle congenitally doomed dogs.
To ensure its passage, the bill was larded up with all kinds of other provisions, including a ban on beastiality, establishing the outer limits of Ohio Republicans’ tolerance for animal abuse.
Two years later, Gonidakis was able to intercede on a grassroots campaign to enact far more stringent rules via a ballot initiative by cajoling Republicans into passing a law that contained enough loopholes that the company’s animal cruelty could persist.
In January, three heartbroken and aggrieved dog owners filed lawsuits against multiple Petland stores and the company’s corporate parent, alleging that Petland employees coerced them into purchasing dogs that were born with severe disabilities and diseases that caused them to suffer physical impairment, extreme pain, and unmanageable incontinence.
Last week, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a follow-up report that found at least 36 similar cases of gravely ill puppies being sold to unsuspecting buyers since 2019. The Humane Society said it fielded over 100 complaints from dog owners dealing with such a nightmare situation that year alone.
When the paper asked reps for the state Attorney General and Agriculture Commissioner whether they planned to look into the epidemic, each responded that they “had no basis to mount an investigation.”
Many of the owners were forced to foot enormous veterinarian bills and watch in despair as their tiny canine companions writhed in pain and convulsed with sickness before dying.
In one case, a crestfallen owner was left with no choice but to euthanize her Jack Russell terrier puppy, which had been originally bred at a puppy mill despite Petland’s promise that it was from a more ethical, small-scale breeder. Others were all but paralyzed, their bodies underdeveloped and sight stolen by genetic deformities and diseases, all compounded by neglect.
The preemption law was such a success for his client that Gonidakis formed a 501(c)(4) with the diabolical name Citizens for Responsible Pet Ownership, which handed out campaign donations and sought to get laws protecting retail sales of puppies introduced and passed in other states.
In 2016, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed what would soon become known as a “Petland bill” into law, tossing out anti-puppy mill ordinances in Phoenix and Tempe. Bills were also introduced in Wisconsin, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Michigan, and Florida, among other states, but none of them ultimately led to any signed law.
It wasn’t for lack of spending, either; GOP state Rep. Wilton Simpson, who introduced the bill in Florida, received $125,000 from Petland alone. It was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who later learned to love pre-emption laws.
The sting of defeat followed Gonidakis home to Ohio last fall, when the state’s voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution. At least this “pro-life” Republican still gets to oversee the painful death of puppies, I guess.
I take zero pleasure in saying this, but well, we were right: Nikki Fried has been an abject disaster as chair of the Florida Democratic Party.
When Fried, a former corporate lobbyist and state commissioner of agriculture, took over the beleaguered state party, she promised to rebuild it “from the ground up.” Instead, she has all but razed what remained of the Florida Democratic Party, having overseen a dramatic decline in fundraising and terrible slump in voter registration, and more recently, ignited civil wars in key local parties and cost Democrats more than a dozen local elections that no Democrat should lose.
Things have gotten so bad that one begins to question Fried’s basic understanding of political organizing. Take her decision in late November to cancel the Florida Democratic presidential primary, when she cited arcane procedural rules to roll over the protests of some of the state’s party’s most passionate members. There was no obvious benefit to canceling the primary — it came well before the “uncommitted” protest vote movement — and the downside should have been obvious.
Even a blowout primary election gives parties runway to actively engage and register voters, organize volunteers, work out the kinks of a get-out-the-vote operation, and raise money. It keeps the party and its presumptive nominee in the news instead of surrendering all headlines to the opposition, engages voters, and helps down-ballot candidates in their own elections.
That final point should underscore the ludicrousness of Fried’s later attempt to spin the primary cancellation as essential to focusing on local races, as Democrats got their teeth kicked in during Tuesday night’s municipal elections.
The numbers are stark: Republicans flipped seven offices, including mayorships in places where Biden won by 50 points in 2020. Three of the losses came despite investment from Fried’s “Take Back Local” operation, which was aimed at protecting Democrats in seven important local offices.
Fried has tried to argue that some of these losses would have happened regardless of whether the presidential primary had been canceled, but if that’s the case, it’s because Democrats have hemorrhaged supporters.
The party now trails the Florida GOP by more than 875,000 registered voters, a gap that’s grown by nearly 300,000 since October. Expect that number to continue to grow in the wake of Fried’s sudden decision to break party rules, throw the chairs of the Miami-Dade and Palm Beach County Democratic Parties under the bus, and fire them just weeks before the election.
Last April, Fried parachuted into an abortion rights protest and got herself arrested alongside activists and legislators. The newly elected Democratic Party chair split as soon as she was bailed out, leaving her fellow protestors — the core of the Democratic base — to sit in jail late into the night, until a few lawmakers and local leaders could finish getting the cash from friends to secure their release.
Those details weren’t included in the media coverage that followed, but Fried made sure to plaster the photo of her in cuffs everywhere, and even sell the replicas of the shirt that she wore.
A friend who is active in Florida politics suggested to me that Fried has turned the state party into her own personal exploratory campaign ahead of another run for governor in 2026, which both makes perfect sense and frankly beggars belief.
On the one hand, she’s put her face on virtually all Florida Democrats’ communications (see below), even materials used during canvassing to get out of the vote for actual elections with other candidates. At the same time, running for statewide office requires a strong party infrastructure with as many registered voters as possible. It’s unclear whether Fried is aware of these basic facts, but there’s reason to believe that perhaps all her years as a lobbyist numbed her to the mechanics of political movements.
There’s no question that Fried took on a major challenge when she stepped in to lead the Florida Democratic Party. The state had already begun its drift from purple to red state years before her ascension, leading to Ron DeSantis’s 20-point romp in 2022 and giving the GOP a supermajority. Rebuilding was always going to be an uphill task.
At the same time, this was the moment to do it. Between DeSantis’s ambitions and the state GOP’s ongoing wars on children, queer people, immigrants, working people, and books, Fried has had one opportunity after another to turn national outrage into fundraising dollars, candidate recruitment, and enthusiastic volunteers. She has not been successful at any of those things.
Instead, Florida Democratic Party leaders continue to depress their voters and embarrass themselves with a rare level of cluelessness. Based on a tweet that the party posted on Tuesday night, I’m not even sure that its leaders know the meaning of democracy:
“Tonight, President Joe Biden was declared the automatic winner of the Democratic primary and allocated 224 delegates from Florida. In November, we have a choice between continued progress or the end of our democracy as we know it.”
It doesn’t get much more obtuse than that — or so I hope, anyway. If Fried continues to operate the Florida Democratic Party as a vanity project, the nation’s third-largest state will likely become a safe red stronghold for decades going forward, making it a dangerous place for so many of its residents and a source of ongoing federal power for the GOP.
I’m back in New York after a work retreat sent me to DC and then Pennsylvania for my first foray outside of the city this year. While I made it back all in one piece, my computer did not enjoy as smooth a journey. The battery — or maybe a motherboard? — is officially busted, and it’ll be a week until Apple can fix and send my poor sweet laptop back to me.
How much it will cost is unclear: Even though I bought the premium insurance (cost: $299) when I purchased the computer 11 months ago, I may still have to pay another $299 for the actual repair. There is no real alternative to paying up to $600 right now, though Apple’s anticompetitive policies may not be long for this world.
This week, the Department of Justice filed a landmark antitrust suit against Apple, alleging that its mobile App Store forces developers and consumers into bad deals. Apple’s hardware also continues to be subject to government action, even if New York’s “Right to Repair” law was riddled with so many tech loopholes that access to key parts and cheaper, independent repair is still out of reach for most (including myself).
Apple and other tech companies are now using the NY law as model legislation, which is why headlines like this one are ultimately debunked by courageous lawmakers and further reporting. Democrats in Oregon held strong under Silicon Valley lobbyist pressure and earlier this month passed the nation’s strongest “Right to Repair” law, providing advocates with an alternative vision to hold up.
“Right to repair” polls astronomically well and has become a key part of the Biden campaign’s economic pitch, with different permutations and purposes highlighted depending on the audience. In the Midwest, the rise of computerized tractors, for example, has allowed John Deere to coerce small farmers, long accustomed to fixing their own equipment, into paying the company for expensive parts and repair instead.
Whether lowering opportunity costs factor into people’s conceptions of their own financial health remains to be seen, but taking down tech monopolies’ cynical schemes to entrap Americans and milk them for all they’re worth is the sort of corporate governance that we’ve been missing for decades and decades.
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I know very little about Nikki Fried, but Democratic turnout has been abysmal across the board in recent primaries.
This problem goes far beyond Fried, and there seems to be little effort by the national Democratic leadership to address this issue.
Activists are doing what they can, but the pervasive mantra of "both parties are bad" (particularly among GenZ) and the unrelenting media bias is an ominous sign for November.