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We trolled Ron DeSantis in front of his right-wing fanatics today and we're gonna do it again [1]

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Date: 2022-09-11

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis likes to portray himself as a tough guy. He pushes the image hard, even in those giant ill-fitting suits that make him look like he was dressed by a 10-year-old. DeSantis appears at every press conference flanked by police officers, standing front and center as if he’s their field commander, ready to lead them into the line of fire. He speaks largely to hand-picked friendly audiences, and screams at reporters when they do get in and dare to ask questions.

He is a man with such deep-seated insecurity, he actually climbed into the cockpit of a fighter jet in a recent Top Gun-themed ad that explicitly and repeatedly insisted that he was a tough guy who never backed down from a fight. DeSantis did serve in the military, but as a lawyer for the Navy after he attended Harvard Law School.

When DeSantis does face a tough question and can’t just yell at a reporter, he instead opts to runs away. That’s what he did a few weeks ago, when asked about his clear desire to ban abortion outright in Florida, presuming his hand-picked state Supreme Court judges overturn Florida’s constitutional right to reproductive freedom.

That incident has gone largely unremarked upon, just like every other terrible thing he’s said and done. So we decided to take the fight to Ron DeSantis and remind the world of his extreme anti-choice agenda.

First, using our own money and a handful of donations, we flew this banner over Daytona Beach. It gained so much traction and eyeballs that even the Florida Democratic Party and Charlie Crist tweeted about it:

x Ron DeSantis wants a total abortion ban in Florida and we are letting folks know by flying this banner over Daytona Beach today. pic.twitter.com/19s5rfBlFe — Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) September 11, 2022

Then, we hired this mobile billboard to park outside the National Conservative Conference at a hotel outside Miami to both remind everyone of DeSantis’s position on abortion and show the goons attending that conference that their great new white hope is a phony who stammers and then runs away when confronted with a single difficult question:

x Ron DeSantis is giving a speech in Miami right now and we have this mobile billboard truck right outside showing Floridians that DeSantis wants to enact a total abortion ban in the state and how he cowardly runs away from the question when asked by reporters. pic.twitter.com/t32cEmOCwZ — Thomas Kennedy (@tomaskenn) September 11, 2022

My partner in legal trolling, Thomas Kennedy, is DeSantis’s chief antagonist, so he posted the video. It ensured that the governor and his team saw it. He drives them nuts because he's willing to hold their feet to the fire. It often results in them kicking him out of events, which is illegal, since he’s a reporter in public spaces. They don’t care, of course.

We have no party sponsor or outside financier. Again, both the mobile billboard and the plane were paid for out of our own pockets, plus a handful of donations (including some from this Daily Kos community!). We’ve got further plans to expose DeSantis, humiliate him, and make sure Floridians fully understand the depth of his reactionary depravity. There’s a billboard that will go up soon that looks like this:

It will be wider, and either in Tallahassee or Miami

The media, bent on false objectivity and desperate for a heavyweight to face off against Donald Trump in the 2024 GOP nomination fight, has largely given DeSantis a free pass, so it’s really up to us to make sure the message gets out. We could really use your help — we only have so much money in our own accounts, and want to blanket Florida with images calling out DeSantis’s lies and corruption, exposing his extremism, and puncturing his ridiculous and delusional self-image as a swaggering tough guy.

DeSantis has to win re-election this year before he can run for president, and polls are surprisingly tight. We can do this.

Any and all donations are deeply appreciated! Thank you!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/11/2122332/-We-trolled-Ron-DeSantis-in-front-of-his-right-wing-fanatics-today-and-we-re-gonna-do-it-again

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