Ron DeSantis's War on Freedom rages on
It's not a war with Trump, though, so the media is ignoring it
Welcome to a new edition of the SWORD newsletter, a project devoted to exposing Ron DeSantis’s reign of terror in Florida and stopping him from taking that cruelty and corruption to the White House.
SWORD has already earned an enormous amount of attention for some of our gambits, including flying plane banners over Mar-a-Lago (we can have multiple targets) and putting up billboards mere blocks from the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee. As DeSantis gets closer to declaring his presidential campaign, we’re gearing up for our next set of stunts, including a billboard in Iowa that is certain to humiliate him and draw attention to his shady history.
It costs money to do those things, so we will soon be opening up paid subscriptions. If you want to pitch in to the project, you can pledge to buy a paid subscription or donate to our GoFundMe (or both!). All proceeds will go directly toward our work — this is all a labor of love and nobody is making a cent off of it.
OK, now on to the important stuff!
DeSantis, no stranger to torture, leads his own war on freedom
Make sure to mark yesterday’s date on your calendar, because if Ron DeSantis winds up in the White House and you’re forced into hiding to avoid the secret police that he sends after subscribers of this newsletter, it’ll be days like Monday that facilitate his rise to power.
With Donald Trump’s impending arrest again dominating the news cycle, DeSantis, by virtue of being seen as his chief rival for the 2024 GOP nomination, wound up as the focus of two very different stories. The day actually started on a positive note, as the Washington Post published a solid story about DeSantis’s time as a JAG lawyer in charge of ignoring human rights complaints and authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.
Hundreds of “enemy combatants,” held without charges, had gone on hunger strikes. As pressure grew to end the protests, DeSantis later said, he was part of a team of military lawyers asked what could be done.
“How do I combat this?” a commanding officer asked in 2006, as DeSantis recalled in an interview he gave years later to a local CBS television station.
“Hey, you actually can force-feed,” DeSantis said he responded in his role as a legal adviser. “Here’s what you can do. Here’s kind of the rules for that.”
DeSantis is described as a focused, diligent aide who helped to oversee the brutal treatment of uncharged detainees during some of the prison’s brutal years, participated in an investigation that probably served as a coverup for a triple homicide, and came back from the experience fully convinced of the righteousness of that work and the necessity of the United States continuing to imprison and torture people.
The story serves as a solid primer for DeSantis’s early days as a war criminal and goes some way to explaining how he hardened his enthusiasm for violating human rights, but it (by necessity, given the space it had in the paper) leaves out most of the sordid details of his time at Gitmo. The story, driven by a few mentions in his recent obligatory presidential campaign memoir, follows on the heels of several stories published earlier this winter about Ron’s year of authorizing waterboarding.
The most damning stories about DeSantis at Guantanamo thus far were released by an independent reporter last summer, but they’ve been largely overlooked up until now. A fair amount is based on the memories seared into the mind of one of the detainees that DeSantis oversaw, so it can get a bit haunting and graphic:
Media attention is slowly building around DeSantis’s time at Guantanamo, but it’s hardly breaking into the larger public awareness. In some ways, it’s a symptom of a larger tragedy. This week marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War, which is largely now viewed as a failure, but one that seems to be consigned to the past, with no consequences for the monsters responsible for its prosecution and crimes. If the Today Show is hosting George W. Bush to show off his shitty paintings, it’s going to be a challenge to get the public to pay attention to DeSantis’s JAG story.
Injecting his crimes into public awareness isn’t impossible, but it won’t be the political media that does it. By about 10 am on Monday, a second DeSantis story emerged, pitting him against Donald Trump. Obviously, this caught the attention and focus of a much broader swath of media.
DeSantis was asked at a press conference what he thought about Trump’s supposed impending arrest. The governor fumbled the question, as he does in every unscripted moment of his public life, and went on a tear about George Soros-funded prosecutors (gotta get that anti-semitism in there) before pivoting to a clumsy diss about not knowing what goes into paying hush money to a porn star.
The line made him look like a discombobulated loser, like George Costanza fumbling his “jerk store” comeback crossed with a high school weenie. (Not that we’re condoning what Trump did, but DeSantis always comes off like a predator preacher moralizing to his dispirited congregation.)
The delivery was irrelevant, though, because it was a clear enough shot at Trump that news outlets have been able to splash it across headlines and cable news segments for the last 36 hours. There’s now even an entire Google News subsection dedicated to the exchange, which was given even more oxygen by DeSantis’s limp attempt to follow up his first insult in a more controlled forum provided by renowned hack Piers Morgan. The bottom-feeding British journalist wrote about the interview in the NY Post, which then became the basis of a New York Times story this evening.
Story choice is its own form of editorializing because it indicates what a news organization views as valuable and worthy of further exploration. National news organizations have made their priorities clear this week by swarming DeSantis’s dumb exchanges with Trump and ignoring the horrific things that are happening at his behest in Florida right now.
(This sort of TMZ political coverage is how Trump won in 2016, making it clear that they’ve learned nothing since then. It also may not help DeSantis, but that’s beside the point.)
On Monday, a proposed six-week abortion ban passed through the state Senate Health Policy Committee, bringing the state one step further from all but abolishing reproductive care for millions of people. DeSantis has explicitly endorsed a ban after signing a 15-week ban just last year. One Republican voted against the bill in committee, but with a supermajority in both chambers, this ban is essentially guaranteed to pass.
When enacted, the abortion ban will prove devastating to people all across the South, and there will be blood on DeSantis’s hands. Based on his time at Guantanamo Bay, he probably won’t have much of a problem with that.
For as little attention as the abortion ban received, the egregious housing bill that the legislative GOP advanced on Monday went even more ignored, even though Florida became the least affordable state in the nation last year.
Quickly, some background: Inaction by a state government in thrall to real estate developers has sent housing prices and rents soaring to unprecedented heights. Last November, the people of Orange County took matters into their own hands, as 59% of voters gave the green light to enact a year of (very watered down) rent control via ballot initiative in November. The state real estate lobby sued to kill the initiative, citing the state’s strict preemption codes that make it hard for local governments to enact regulations like rent control.
The initiative has been caught up in court ever since, so just to be safe, Republicans advanced a bill on Tuesday that will not only ban rent control but also outlaw modest measures meant to protect largely low-income renters. And today, the GOP pushed forward with a drag ban despite their “undercover” agents disproving every specious argument to do so.
The governor that’s relentlessly pushing the “Free State of Florida” as a model for the nation is in reality constructing a state in which the government has become the arbiter of morality and continues to crack down on both individual freedoms and local democracy. When somebody tries to tell you that Ron DeSantis is a populist, send them this email.
desantis is a nazi, clear and simple. There is nothing decent about him. Please continue to bring these facts to light. Once the campaign starts to cross the country, people need to know what a disgusting person he really is. Thank you for your billboards and banners. The word needs to get out, and it's obvious the media finds no merit in covering the worst details of the nazi in Florida.
DeSantis embodies evil.