9 months ago
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Florida governor and raging anti-education autocrat Ron DeSantis is still running for president. In recent weeks, the DeSantis campaign has run into some predictable problems: People don’t really care for his campaign, and it’s hard to generate the kind of money needed to keep a big campaign going when you aren’t nearly as popular among your constituents as the other guy.
Recent polling has shown that DeSantis’ posturing as a more savage version of Donald Trump has not worked. Never fear! The guy that showed the world that if you attack historically marginalized children and participate in Jim Crow-era voter suppression you will still get Republican votes in Florida has a solution: more of the same, but with a little bit of a DeSantis spin. DeSantis came out this week offering up the same things that pass for policy in the Republican Party: blaming “elites” while offering up nothing more than cuts to programs relied upon by people who aren’t elites. However, DeSantis is adding his own special version of QAnon-adjacent rhetoric as a signifier that he’s someone the MAGA base can count on.
During a barbecue in Rye, New Hampshire, DeSantis offered up a bit of the old ultraviolence when boasting about what he would do to the “deep state.” DeSantis told the audience he would start “slitting throats on day one.” What does that mean? I guess he’s not so much promising public executions as he is hinting at the kind of assassination techniques conspiracy theorists usually attribute to vague “deep state” actors?
RELATED STORY: DeSantis shamelessly tries to take credit for something Democrats built
