We won't let Ron DeSantis get away with it
We won't let Ron DeSantis get away with it
And we'll reshape the news every day if that's what it takes
Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.
As I wrote last night, a few friends and I are working together to hold Ron DeSantis accountable for the deeply immoral and often illegal decisions he continues to make as a governor that desperately wants to be a president. Today was a particularly busy day in our ongoing DeSantis media blitz and trolling campaign, so I wanted to share with you all some of the tactics and stunts we’ve been pulling to keep the focus on his crimes instead of his political prospects.
Many of our actions have been greeted with a lot of press interest and viral buzz, while others have served to infuriate conservatives on the ground in Florida. They’re also helping to psych up and engage Democrats in Florida and beyond that might otherwise feel defeated by or become numb to the bombardment of malice and seemingly unstoppable deluge of bad and harmful policy. My thoughts on why these sorts of intangible wins and community experience are important can be found right here and here, but to sum it up, I believe they are integral to creating a motivated, aggressive, and effective political operation over the longhair.
It takes a fair amount to keep these things going, so if you like what you see and want to be a part of it, you can become a premium member to the newsletter or donate to our fund — either way, the money will go toward making Ron DeSantis furious, embarrassing conservatives, and literally reshaping the news down in Florida and across the country — just check out one of the actions that the coalition did earlier this summer.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s first dalliance with human trafficking was shocking, but not surprising. In fact, in hindsight it feels like it was inevitable, the culmination of four years spent aggressively pushing the bounds of his legal authority and amping up the cruelty of fascistic gambits.
It’s become abundantly clear that the 47 desperate, asylum-seeking migrants from Venezuela that DeSantis had shipped to Massachusetts were kidnapped at the governor’s behest. It was done without hesitation, because the prospect of public accountability has long since disappeared.
The national political media cannot help but see DeSantis’s stunts through the prism of partisan politics, leading to irresponsible and nauseatingly cynical stories like the one published in the New York Times tonight. The story declared DeSantis a political winner for the cruel stunt, normalizing mass kidnapping as a PR strategy in a shadow presidential primary.
Meanwhile, few people are listening to the heartbreaking testimony of the actual victims, because human interest doesn’t drive conversation in DC. Anticipating that pivot to horse race coverage, a few collaborators and I have been working overtime to keep focus on DeSantis’s crime. We’ve been going since last week, and I want to highlight some of our antics. They’ve earned plenty of media attention down in Florida, but for everyone else, hopefully this is both cathartic and instructive about how we should treat these scumbag fascist wannabes.
Let’s work backwards, starting with the two stunts we pulled today. First, we flew a plane banner across Orlando, calling DeSantis a human trafficker.
The plane banner was seen in Disney World and got some attention on Reddit, while local Fox 35 reached out to ask us whether they could use the footage (we obviously authorized them to blast it far and wide). Orlando Weekly also covered the stunt.
Shortly after the banner flew across central Florida, we crashed Ron DeSantis’s fundraiser in Boca Raton. Well, not us personally — we sent a mobile billboard that blasted out the press conference that took place last week in Martha’s Vineyard and first outlined the horrible details of the kidnapping plot. It was loud enough for the entire block to hear:
There was another message on the side of the billboard, too — I recommend clicking through the tweet below to see the entire thing.
We’ve actually made a habit of posting up outside of Republican mega-donor fundraisers with mobile billboards that draw attention to the participants and their heinous crimes. Last week, we sent one to the mansion of tech zillionaire Keith Rabois, who was hosting a massive fundraiser for Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Charles Grassley, and just about every major Republican Senate candidate, including JD Vance, Blake Masters, and Dr. Oz.
Rabois, part of the so-called PayPal mafia with Peter thief and Elon Musk, was booted out from his job as COO at the tech company Square for sexual harassment back in 2009. That scandal was predated by years of horrible activity and outbursts that got him essentially kicked out of Stanford Law School. A few years ago, he scampered back to again work under Thiel at the Founders Fund. Must be nice to have rich friends.
So, with that context in mind, check out the billboard we sent to greet Rabois and his crowd of thirsty Republican sociopaths:
Last Thursday was a busy day for us, as it kicked off our ongoing DeSantis trolling. We had no real choice, as news outlets were already falling prey to the allure of horse race analysis and failing to do justice to the sheer monstrousness of it all.
We were ready for the this to happen, and within a few hours, we began flying a banner that said “RON DESANTIS HURTS CHILDREN” over Central Florida. The message conveniently referred both to DeSantis’s migrant kidnapping and his other anti-child policies, including the “Don’t Say Gay” law, the destruction of public education, outing trans kids, denying parents unemployment, etc, and many more. Here’s that banner:
This is just the start for us. It took a few weeks of haggling with a billboard company in Tallahassee, but we just got the green light to put up a giant poster across the street from the Governor’s Mansion that should absolutely humiliate and infuriate DeSantis. It’s more mocking than policy-based, but that’s just as important when you’re dealing with a fascist bully whose only real credentials are his soullessness and cruelty.
Imagine a version of this across from the Governor’s Mansion:
We had to change the first word — the company was afraid of being sued — but the rest will be the same. It will be huge. A destination for people in the capital city.
We’re also in the finishing stages of putting together a website that highlights his deep ties to white nationalists and ongoing refusals to condemn Nazis that march with his campaign signs. As outrages pile up, it’s easy to forget things like that, but I’ve never seen a politician not named Steve King be so unwilling to do even pretend that they oppose neo-Nazis.
Now, here’s where I get to the ask. All of this costs money, and we don’t have any big donors or nonprofits helping us out. We’ve all put our own cash into the pot, and now we need a few thousand dollars more to put up our billboard across from the governor’s mansion and get the website up.
As the national media continues to fall into the trap of normalizing DeSantis and his fascist tendencies, it’s up to us to keep his crimes and inhumanity front and center. To do that, we need to wrest control of people’s eyeballs and the internet’s attention. Big stunts and gestures work, and it’s time to fight fire with fire.
Every cent donated to our fund goes right to our campaigns. We don’t take a dime. We aren’t consultants pocketing a big chunk of money or a PAC spending all of it on paying ourselves. This is all going toward taking down Ron DeSantis’s self-styled tough guy image, and every stunt we do pays off in multiples with earned media coverage that reminds people that he’s really just a dork doing a bad Trump impression and working out his Napoleonic complex on children.
The next two actions will be even bigger and earn more attention than what we’ve done before. They’ll get people on our side cheering, create a rallying point and help to poke a hole in this seemingly invincible aura DeSantis has created around himself. We have to do it now, before it’s too late.
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I appreciate your efforts and your cleverness. I think funding organizing like Florida Rising or other on the ground groups in Florida is more effective in bringing change. Does all your stunts while fun really change any votes? Or at best make a one day media story?
I don't mean to be harsh- I could be totally wrong. Let me know your thinking on this.
Thanks for all that you do.