Ron DeSantis and Big Sugar

Continuing our discussion of The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, by Ron DeSantis… in the opening post regarding this book, I noted that a Boston progressive had confidently condemned DeSantis for aiding and abetting actual slavery that the Florida sugar industry was managing (humans arriving and departing the U.S. on ships in chains). It turns out that Ron DeSantis might be Big Sugar’s worst enemy. The bad blood started when Big Sugar backed Ron’s gubernatorial primary opponent in 2018. DeSantis was quitting Congress because he knew that he wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything with Democrats about to obtain a majority in the House.

By April [2018, the campaign luck] changed. A shadowy political group started blanketing the airwaves throughout Florida with false attacks against me. The group was funded by entrenched corporate interests in Florida, led by U.S. Sugar Corporation, Putnam’s biggest supporter. The ads were false and completely ridiculous. But we couldn’t answer them, because I did not have enough money at this early point of the campaign. And Big Sugar’s ads were airing nonstop on virtually every conservative-leaning news source on TV and radio. At about the same time, Putnam started airing ads to boost his own image and to portray himself as a strong conservative. To Republican voters who did not know anything about Putnam, these ads presented a compelling narrative.

Ron eventually overcomes Big Sugar’s candidate and Democrat Andrew Gillum. Once installed in Tallahassee, Ron’s agenda quickly comes into conflict with Big Sugar’s interests.

Before taking office, I flew up to DC to meet with President Trump. My goal was to convince him to direct the Army Corps to manage the lake in a more balanced manner. “Mr. President, I need your help regarding the discharges of algae-laden water from Lake Okeechobee,” I told him. “What do you want, money?” the president asked. “Well, eventually, yes, but immediately I need help with the Army Corps of Engineers,” I replied. “Oh, the Army Corps is the worst!” he thundered. “I mean, they are good people, but they have the worst red tape in the entire government!”

During my first week in office, I acted. I issued a far-reaching executive order to reorient Florida’s water policy in a better direction, convened a task force that could offer recommendations for legislative reforms, appointed independent members to the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District, and proposed historic funding to support water quality, infrastructure, and restoration. While Big Sugar did not like it, most people across the political spectrum in Florida were thrilled. We ended up securing major funding support and enacting water quality legislation. We made clear that the old ways of doing business were over.

In May 2022, the Tampa Bay Times wrote “Gov. Ron DeSantis has openly sparred with the industry since his two terms in Congress and during the 2018 gubernatorial primary, when he won the endorsement of the Everglades Trust…” From June 2022, Miami Herald: “DeSantis vetoes bill favoring sugar growers over Everglades”.

Related:

ARIA’s Christmas sugar display…

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Ron DeSantis’s book

I have begun to read The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, despite my general aversion to this genre of literature. I consider reading Ron DeSantis’s book to be a duty both as a blog publisher and as a new Floridian. Progressive academic friends in Cambridge feel that they already know Mr. DeSantis. One noted, during my most recent visit, that DeSantis is responsible for importing slaves into the United States to pick sugar cane. “They come on boats in chains,” he said, “and aren’t paid.” Why don’t journalists from New York-based media enterprises ask Mr. DeSantis about his slave importation operation at press conferences? “They know that he won’t answer.” Why didn’t the progressive himself go down to Florida and picket outside the Governor’s Mansion for the slaves to be released? He’s a member of the laptop class and can work from anywhere. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t willing to invest the price of a plane ticket to protest the actual slavery that he has identified on U.S. soil.

For folks who don’t feel that they already know everything worth knowing about Ron D, read on…

The book starts out rough, in my opinion:

Most Americans instinctively know that something has gone wrong with our country over the past generation.

How is Ron going to win with this message? Successful politicians generally tell Americans that they are the world’s greatest people living in the world’s greatest (and richest) country. A vote for the politician is a path to slightly increased greatness, not a recovery from a nosedive. The language gets a little softer later in the introduction:

Our nation needs immigration policies that recognize and enforce the country’s sovereignty, not just by having a wall at the southern border but also by quickly repatriating those in the country illegally. An erroneous claim of asylum should not give a foreign national a ticket to settle in the interior of our country. Nor should the legal immigration system have policies such as the diversity lottery and chain migration; instead, the immigration system should be merit-based; favor assimilation, not mass migration; and be geared toward benefiting the wages of working-class Americans.

Ron D will not deport migrants, but repatriate them.

Looking for useful life advice?

People often talk about the need for a student-athlete to “balance” the demands of the classroom with the requirements of sports. For me, I rejected the idea that I would strike a balance between academic achievement and athletic success, because I was not willing to give less than 100 percent to either baseball or my academics. So instead of balancing, I just did everything to the hilt and let the chips fall where they may.

He gave 110 percent while at Yale, in other words? Or 200 percent? I am not sure how to put this into practice since my capacity is about 50 percent on my best day.

We learn about Ron and Casey’s working class and military roots. Ron worked during high school and college, e.g., for an electrical contractor, while Casey’s sister was a USAF C-17 pilot. (Even today, the DeSantis family has minimal wealth.) Ron’s own military service made him skeptical of America’s recent war aims:

It was just as obvious that we would not succeed in establishing a pro-American, Western-style democracy in Iraq. This was simply outside the capability of any military force to achieve. The cultural differences were too vast for Iraq to embrace Madisonian constitutionalism. In fact, the Iraqis considered “freedom” to be submission to sharia law, not the enactment of a liberal democracy.

(The U.S. would be a lot friendlier to the immigrants that we claim to welcome if Michigan and Minnesota adopted sharia law. Why should Muslim immigrants, many of whom are asylees or refugees who are fleeing violence, have to accept a debauched society? They didn’t come to the U.S. because they love the way that the U.S. is, but because they would have been killed if they had stayed in their home countries.)

Ron was inspired by Barack Obama:

Once I left active duty, I began to think more and more about how our country was moving in the wrong direction, especially under the leftist agenda of the Obama administration.

What did he learn as a Congressman?

Ingrained in Beltway thinking is a contempt for average voters, particularly voters who reject leftist ideology.

That’s certainly consistent with my experience of D.C.! Also, Ron turns out to be one of the few Representatives who actually reads the bills.

The book does get more substantive. Leafing through, I found the following, for example:

Our reforms included protections for political candidates against being deplatformed, which is a way for Big Tech to interfere in elections. What is stopping Big Tech companies from shutting off Republican candidates from social media platforms during the stretch run of an election? If someone hosts a get-together for a candidate and provides refreshments, that must be accounted for as a campaign contribution, yet a tech company can upend an entire candidate’s campaign, and that is somehow not considered interference with an election. The reforms also included transparency requirements for the social media companies’ content moderation policies, and required that users be given notice of changes to those policies. The opaqueness of how Big Tech arrives at its censorship decisions means that it is easy for them to move the goalposts to stifle views the industry does not like.

I’m actually surprised that Twitter, Facebook, and Google allow Republican candidates to use their platforms at all. Any of these firms could cite the following analysis of the January 6 insurrection and say that it wasn’t safe to allow Republicans to speak.

I hope that some readers will read along with me!

So far I’m dismayed that Ron hasn’t adapted his message to be more like conventional politicians’. Crushing it in Florida against an all-abortion-care-all-the-time fossil does not mean that he can crush it with voters nationwide in 2024. Americans in general are the most timid and compliant humans ever to occupy this planet. The Floridians who wanted the freedom to leave their houses, breathe without masks, send children to school, not inject their children with experimental drugs, etc., are outliers on the spectrum of American cowerhood. Young/cognitively sharp/competent/energetic/effective sounds good, but Americans in 2020 chose a new president who does not have any of these qualities.

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Can we all agree on a $15 minimum wage now that it is worth $11?

Various state governors are arguing for a $15 per hour minimum wage. Examples:

and

Wikipedia says that the 15 number was put forth in 2012. How much are 15 of today’s Bidies worth in 2012 dollars? $11!

Let’s assume that these $15 minimum wage laws finally get implemented all around the U.S. What will happen to labor force participation? Some of the advocates for this higher minimum wage say that it will go up, which seems like a safe bet if we just expect regression toward the mean (see chart below).

Speaking of minimum wage, a reader sent me “Spanish husband is ordered to pay his ex-wife £180,000 for 25 years of unpaid housework based on minimum wage throughout their marriage” (Daily Mail). Divorce lawsuits aren’t lucrative in Europe compared to in the UK/US (see Real World Divorce) and the statutes reflect the assumptions that (1) that people of all gender IDs are capable of working for wages, and (2) a person who gets hold of children should not expect to support him/her/zir/theirself off those children. Because of these assumptions, alimony may not exist and child support profits are limited. Constrained by these new laws, a judge in Spain figured out that she could order a divorce lawsuit defendant to pay his plaintiff under a back wages theory.

Judge Laura Ruiz Alaminos, sitting at a court in Velez-Malaga in southern Spain, calculated the figure based on the annual minimum wage throughout the couple’s marriage…

The separated couple share two daughters and the ruling states that Ivana had spent almost all of her time looking after their family and working as a housewife during their marriage.

The mother-of-two, who wed her ex in 1995 before asking for a divorce in 2020, has said she is happy with the payout after years of hard work.

The couple’s marriage was governed by a separation of property regime, which Ms Moral’s husband had asked her to sign at the start of their marriage.

It specified that whatever each party earned was theirs alone, with them only sharing possessions.

She told [the reporter] that she has now spoken out about her case as she wants women to know what they are entitled to.

Minimum wage seems insulting for the work of being married!

(Note the misleading language in the above. Spain is a “no-fault” or “unilateral” divorce jurisdiction. Once the wife had decided to divorce her husband, she was guaranteed to get her wish and the husband’s wishes were irrelevant. But the legal proceeding is characterized as a request in which the defendant had some agency and control. The most common example of this is in the American media in which a court order following a trial is characterized as a “divorce settlement”, as though the parties had negotiated and come to a mutually satisfactory agreement.)

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The folks who borrowed $31 trillion did not destabilize the American financial system…

… it is the folks who don’t want to borrow another $31 trillion who are guilty of destabilization.

October: “U.S. National Debt Tops $31 Trillion for First Time” (nytimes)

This month: “Speaker Drama Raises New Fears on Debt Limit” (nytimes)…

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California finally secured the House speakership in a dramatic vote ending around 12:30 a.m. Saturday, but the dysfunction in his party and the deal he struck to win over holdout Republicans also raised the risks of persistent political gridlock that could destabilize the American financial system.

Economists, Wall Street analysts and political observers are warning that the concessions he made to fiscal conservatives could make it very difficult for Mr. McCarthy to muster the votes to raise the debt limit — or even put such a measure to a vote. That could prevent Congress from doing the basic tasks of keeping the government open, paying the country’s bills and avoiding default on America’s trillions of dollars in debt.

The only way to stabilize our economy and currency is to borrow and spend more!

Speaking of the economy, here are a few photos from my old neighborhood in Cambridge, Maskachusetts. The marijuana stores are thriving while the bicycle shop went bankrupt:

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When will George Santos be Speaker of the House?

The media is full of reports about House Republicans being unable to agree on a Speaker. New Yorkers say that they are smarter and more sophisticated than everyone else in the U.S. Thus, the obvious choice is the Representative whom these hyperintelligent voters selected: George Santos. Would Mr. Santos be the first immigrant to serve as Speaker? That would be very exciting indeed!

Separately, I am also waiting for Sam Bankman-Fried to be nominated by Joe Biden as U.S. Treasury Secretary and confirmed by Senate Democrats.

Related:

  • New Yorkers say that voters in Arkansas are stupid. Tom Cotton is their choice (two Harvard degrees and a former U.S. Army Ranger)
  • New Yorkers say that voters in Florida are stupid. Ron DeSantis is their choice (Yale and Harvard degrees; former U.S. Navy officer)
  • a tweet from the Democrats’ thought leader:
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Will Jews have to pay reparations to Kanye West?

Ye (formerly Kanye West) said that Jews controlled the media and, to show how wrong he was, Jews got him removed from all media. He was at least briefly back on Twitter, though, thanks to the non-Jewish Elon Musk. If Congress and Joe Biden get organized with a reparations system for Black Americans (see below), will Jews end up paying Kanye’s $8/month verification fee? And also Louis Farrakhan’s? (“Farrakhan has accused Jews of controlling the media, government, and global economy, along with being behind the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow laws, and black oppression in general. He regularly calls Jews “Satanic” and has repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler as a “very great man.””)

Speaking of Farrakhan, the Twitter Righteous apparently never banned him despite his denial of Science (example below implying that ivermectin is effective against SARS-CoV-2). Marjorie Taylor Greene was banned for saying that COVID vaccines did not prevent COVID infection/transmission (ultimately it turned out that Science had always believed and said this). Why didn’t the Misinformation Team promote Online Safety by banning Farrakhan?

It looks like the Anti-Defamation League supports reparations (example 1: example 2). (CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is closing in on $1 million/year according to IRS filings so he can afford to pay Kanye a significant amount.) I would love to see tweets from Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan talking about all of the stuff that they did with the reparations they received from Jews!

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Matt Taibbi’s story about Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story

Have folks tried to follow and understand the story about Twitter’s pre-election-2020 suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and other material that politicians asked them to deep-six?

I think there is supposed to be a narrative in here, but it is so chopped up by the presentation as individual tweets that it is tough to follow.

Has Matt Taibbi mostly proved that Twitter needs a substantial re-thinking to be suitable for long-form text? (I think tweets should be allowed at any length up to the standard relational database CLOB (character large object) limit of 2 billion characters, but a reader sees only a short summary (that long-form authors are forced to craft) until he/she/ze/they clicks “more”)

Readers: Have you figured out whether there is anything of interest in this reveal of internal Twitter machinations?

Update: In the official NYT version of history, Twitter’s shaping of what viewpoints people could express (or send to each other in private messages) never happened. The front page of the NYT time has space to talk about “notable diversity” of the U.S. World Cup team, but there is nothing about the Twitter files reveal. (Separately, I dispute that the US team is diverse. There are no gender ID requirements for World Cup players and yet for some reason players of only one gender ID have been selected.)

(Joe Biden’s granddaughter also does not exist according to the NYT. A search for plaintiff “Lunden” Roberts or granddaughter “Navy Joan” yields no results on nytimes.com.)

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When will the Ministry of Truth get to work?

It has been a month since Elon Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter. Changes are happening at a fast pace, potentially proving SR-71 pilot Paul Crickmore’s point “You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3.”

According to President Biden, this is a platform for lies. FoxBusiness:

President Biden mentioned Elon Musk and Twitter during a fundraiser Friday night …

“Elon Musk goes out and buys an outlet that sends — that spews lies all across the world,” Biden remarked. “There are no editors anymore in America. There are no editors.”

The president seemed to suggest there was no longer any moderation on Twitter, a claim echoed by several others on the platform who are also critical of Musk.

“How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake? What is at stake? So there’s a lot going on, a lot going on. But we have an enormous opportunity, enormous opportunity,” Biden added.

Biden’s comments soon after a White House tweet bragging about the Social Security cost-of-living increase was flagged by Twitter for lacking “context.” The White House later deleted the tweet.

If there are lies there must also be truth, right? Here are some lies that ultimately resulted in Marjorie Taylor Greene being “permanently suspended” from Twitter:

The Truth at the time (August 2021) was that vaccines do prevent infection and spread of COVID-19. As of November 5, 2022, the above tweet remained inaccessible via a search for “the fda should not approve the covid vaccines (from:mtgreenee)”. Twitter returned the following screen:

For those who sought to read something critical of the Federal government, in other words, Twitter reminded them to cease their thoughtcrime and read only official Federal government sites.

I guess it was fair to say that there was a Ministry of Truth operating within Twitter in August 2021 and even earlier this month.

But if Joe Biden and the rest of the U.S. government want Twitter to prevent lies from being published, does it makes sense for each social media platform to decide what is a lie and what is the truth? Advertisers are supposedly demanding that Twitter eliminate lies from its platform (yet the cash-seeking Democrat running against Ron DeSantis was allowed to lie with impunity; see Twitter won’t suspend a politician who lies to get money?), but how can they have confidence unless Twitter follows an official source of truth and flags anything that contradicts that source? We don’t want Facebook and Twitter to have different concepts of lie vs. truth, do we?

Related:

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Aerial Underground Railroad

“The pilots flying passengers across US state lines for abortions” (Guardian, October 30):

All Steven knew was what time and where. A part-time pilot from the Chicago area, he was picking up a total stranger in his single-engine plane, a passenger who needed to fly more than a thousand miles, across state lines, from the midwest to the east coast.

The passenger was seeking reproductive health services and needed to travel to a state where they could access them. Steven is just one of hundreds of pilots across the US, who have been volunteering the use of their small planes to fly people seeking abortions and other services from states that have outlawed it to states that haven’t.

The effort to connect volunteer pilots with patients is led by Elevated Access, a non-profit organization based out of Illinois. It was founded in April in response to a growing number of women being forced to embark on expensive and time-consuming journeys in attempts to obtain abortions.

What about pregnant men? They will have to Ride the Dog (Greyhound)? A photo on the organization’s web site shows what appears to be a pregnant man in the passenger seat (front right; the pilot sits front left in most fixed-wing aircraft):

How many owner- and renter-pilots are passionate about these issues?

Indeed, since the supreme court formally stripped away federal abortion protection rights in June, Elevated Access has seen a giant uptick in volunteer pilots, with 870 pilots offering to transport patients across state lines for abortions and gender-affirming care.

How many have a valuable gender ID?

Elevated Access was set up to ease those difficulties, using the 3,000 general aviation airports scattered across the country. It recently marked a milestone by completing its first all-female pilot mission, involving seven states and two solo female pilots flying a 1,400-mile relay to transport a client. Only 6% of pilots in the US are women, it noted.

The partners?

As a referral-only organization, Elevated Access connects passengers to pilots through referrals by its partner organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation.

Here’s an interesting analogy:

“I think as pilots, we’re very proud of the freedom we have and so it seems appropriate for me to use the freedom I have to help out people whose much more fundamental freedoms – [such as] rights to medical care or decisions about how they want to control their own body – are being jeopardized right now.”

What if the better analogy is the pregnant person is the pilot and the baby is the passenger? Let’s consider EgyptAir 990.

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) recorded the captain excusing himself to go to the lavatory, followed 30 seconds later by the first officer saying in Egyptian Arabic “Tawkalt ala Allah,” which can be translated as “I put my trust in God.” A minute later, the autopilot was disengaged, immediately followed by the first officer again repeating the same Arabic phrase which can be also translated as, “I rely on God.” Three seconds later, the throttles for both engines were reduced to idle, and both elevators were moved 3° nose down. The first officer repeated “I rely on God” seven more times…

(The very first time I flew a turbojet, the Cessna CJ3 demo pilot deadpanned “You’ve disconnected the autopilot. Do you want to declare an emergency?”)

Gameel Al-Batouti was certainly controlling his own body, as the quoted pilot above says is the correct situation, and he got what he wanted. But the passengers did not get what they wanted, i.e., to emerge alive at the end of the journey.

(The article contains some misinformation, implying that pilots must file flight plans in order to travel by air. In fact, unless one wishes to fly via reference to instruments (in the clouds), no flight plan is typically required.)

Ph.D. and Ivy League grad Deplorables in a chat group reacted to this:

  • Does this mean that I can fly for free as a pregnant man ?
  • Can I get preggers every month? Oh, I might fly for abortion and change my mind and fly back and fly there again and…
  • aborting takeoff is not an option
  • They think they are Underground Railroad heroes.
  • Are planes that belong to Abortion Air are stored in coat hangars?
  • Also after each baby killed one can paint a little baby skull 💀 on the side of the plane

The organization’s mission:

Elevated Access recognizes that not all people have access to the healthcare they need due to stigma in their community. Because we believe everyone deserves access to healthcare such as abortion and gender-affirming care, our volunteer pilots provide free transportation to get people where they can get the care they need to live their best life.

What about a healthy baby subjected to abortion care at 24 weeks, as is legal “on-demand” in Maskachusetts (abortion care after 24 weeks is legal if one doctor thinks it is a good idea)? Is he/she/ze/they living his/her/zir/their best life?

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Should Ron DeSantis buy some empathy if he wants to be president?

Due to the death of democracy and the success of fascism, the Tyrant of Tallahassee continues to govern Florida. What if Ron DeSantis wants to be El Presidente? I’m not sure that he can do it unless he changes some of his harsh ways. The majority of Americans are indifferent to whether a politician is senile and incompetent so long as he/she/ze/they appears to possess “empathy.” The peasantry thinks that a politician who feigns concern for the peasants will implement policies that help the peasants (central planning always favored over the market, therefore, because only central plans carry explicit intentions).

Ron DeSantis has been highly competent, e.g., supervising the response to Hurricane Ian so that the barrier island bridges were restored within weeks and electric power, which he’d been working on for years, bounced back even sooner. But he can also be kind of mean, which is the opposite of empathy. I cringed when he talked about looters being shot. “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ focus on ‘looting’ causes outrage” (Orlando Weekly):

We go through this with every storm. Nobody wants your waterlogged electronics and soggy couch.

“We want to make sure we maintain law and order,” said DeSantis, before floating the idea that thieves are taking boats into damaged areas to steal from flooded homes. “You can have people bringing boats into some of these islands… I would not want to chance that if I were you, given we’re a Second Amendment state.”

Wouldn’t it have been sufficient for him to say, only if asked, “Florida has a lot of great police departments and a tradition of public order. Also, there are plenty of armed citizens.”? As the article cited above notes, there aren’t a lot of great looting opportunities in flooded neighborhoods.

We also have the debacle of a government that can’t figure out who is eligible to vote and therefore must rely on what potentially confused residents say. Ron DeSantis could express empathy for those who couldn’t figure out whether they were entitled to vote instead of prosecuting them. See “Florida voter has election fraud charges touted by DeSantis dismissed” (ABC):

A Florida man had his election fraud charges dismissed on Friday, making him the first of 20 people who Gov. Ron DeSantis announced had been charged with voter fraud in August, to beat his case.

Robert Lee Wood, who faced one count of making a false affirmation on a voter application, and one count of voting as an unqualified elector, had his charges dismissed on the grounds that the prosecutor lacked appropriate jurisdiction.

Wood was facing up to five years in prison and $5,000 in fines and fees, for allegedly illegally voting in the 2020 election.

When the charges were announced on Aug. 18, DeSantis said at a press conference that local prosecutors had been “loath” to take up election fraud cases.

“Now we have the ability with the attorney general and statewide prosecutor to bring those [cases] on behalf of the state of Florida,” he said.

But a judge found on Friday that the statewide prosecutor did not have jurisdiction over one case in Miami. Statewide prosecutors, which are an extension of the Attorney General’s office, are prosecuting all of the election fraud cases that were brought in August.

That includes Wood, who was charged with second-degree murder in 1991. Wood registered to vote in 2020 after being approached by a voter rights advocate at a grocery store. Wood claimed he did not fill out the form, rather he just signed it, according to the affidavit of arrest filled out by an FDLE agent.

The form includes a section which asks the applicant to either verify that they are not a felon, or if so, to declare that their right to vote had been restored.

Voter rights advocates say that provision is especially confusing because of the passage of Amendment 4 to the Florida Constitution in 2018, which restored all felons their rights to vote except for those convicted of sex felonies or murder charges.

Later, another condition was added requiring voters with felonies to pay off their fines and fees before having their rights restored.

In a state of 22 million people, prosecuting 20 people for improperly voting is unlikely to change any election outcome, even if hundreds more are motivated to read the fine print. So, in my view, all that the prosecutions do is make DeSantis appear to lack empathy. Convicted murderers might not be “the best people” as Donald Trump would put it and maybe we don’t want them voting (though I would rather exclude those who’ve had their student loans forgiven and haven’t yet worked for at least 8 years and let convicted felons vote! Convicted felons at least know a lot about prison and criminal justice system) but we can still express empathy towards them.

I don’t think that DeSantis can become president if he continues on this track. The migrant flights to sanctuary states and cities can work because they show true empathy for the migrants (wanting to see them loved and cared for by “In this house we believe…” signers in Maskachusetts, for example). But some of the stuff that DeSantis says and does seems gratuitously mean and/or could be improved hugely by a change in tone.

Maybe DeSantis can just buy some empathy with his $300,000 in net worth?

From NBAA, Empathia, Inc.:

Readers: What do you think? Who is a fan of what Ron DeSantis does, but thinks he is losing potential votes by the way he expresses himself?

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