Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, as well as Orlando-area taxpayers. Oh, and Black voters.

 

The Republican-controlled Florida Senate quickly voted Wednesday to dissolve Disney World’s Reedy Creek Improvement District and for a congressional redistricting map that eliminates two Black districts and tilts the balance of the delegation more Republican.

Both measures were pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which one Democrat called a “hijack” of the Legislature’s duties.

Lawmakers originally came to Tallahassee on Tuesday to take up a congressional map drawn by DeSantis’ office after he vetoed two maps approved by the Legislature during the regular session.

But less than an hour before the special session began, he expanded it to include a bill dissolving Reedy Creek, which independently governs the Orlando resort, and another bill retracting a special carveout that protected Disney from liability in the so-called Big Tech law from 2021.

Just a day later, the Senate voted 23-16 to dissolve Reedy Creek, with Sen. Jeff Brandes of Pinellas Park the only Republican to vote against Sen. Jennifer Bradley’s bill. The Senate voted 24-15 along party lines to approve Bradley’s bill retracting the Disney carveout, which was found unconstitutional by a federal judge.

Critics of the governor say the bills were meant to punish Disney, Florida’s largest single-site employer, for opposing the so-called “don’t say gay” law signed by DeSantis last month.

The bills were filed almost as soon as he called for the expanded session, raising questions about who wrote them and whether the sponsors were forced to carry them for the governor.

Democrats assailed their Republican colleagues for capitulating to DeSantis out of fear of facing primary opponents or having their projects vetoed from the budget rather than acting as the independently elected lawmakers they are supposed to be.

“I didn’t think we were going to acquiesce and let the governor hijack that process,” Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Black Democrat from Miami Gardens, said during the morning debate on the Senate version of the redistricting bill. “What we now see in the Senate we used to only see in the House. We used to be happy when bad bills came to the Senate because that’s where bad bills came to die.”

“If this is going to happen from now on, there is no need to show up,” Jones said.

[ OPINION: Vengeful DeSantis stampedes lawmakers to attack Disney ]

Jones, and other senators, Democrat and Republican, conceded that the redistricting map was going to wind up in court no matter what the outcome. Democrats were especially critical of an amendment added Tuesday that requires all lawsuits challenging the redistricting map to be filed in Leon Circuit Court, an attempt to sidestep the federal court in Tallahassee where most election cases have been challenged and found unconstitutional.

The map DeSantis introduced achieves his stated goal to eliminate the minority-majority District 5 that sprawls across North Florida from Jacksonville to Tallahassee and replaces it with a district that is only 12% Black. It also diminishes the Black voting population in District 10 in Orlando, moving a large number into the Republican-friendly District 11. The map reduces predominantly Black districts from four to two.

 

Tennessee did the same thing with Nashville's congressional district and got away with it.

 

Seriously, all Republicans, and Republican voters care about, is punishing the people who are not on their side, to the point of costing taxpayers millions, and disenfranchising as many Black voters as they can get away with.

 

It's all punishment of those people, all the time.  Anyone who doesn't toe the line is made to suffer by the power of the state. A government of white grievance retribution, for angry white folk, by angry white folk, and the rest of us are increasingly being targeted.

They want that nationally. They're likely to get it.

Going Out To Farm Country

The Democrats finally figured out what I've been saying for over a year now: in order to win rural voters, you have to stop falling for the culture war rope-a-dope and go directly to the Biden infrastructure bill programs that are designed specifically to help rural folks and help them directly with those programs.

The Biden administration is rolling out a new initiative to help rural communities, as Democrats work to halt an erosion of support for the party in rural America.

The new effort, led by the Agriculture Department, will deploy federal staffers next month to rural areas in five states. They'll will help communities there take advantages of federal resources, including funds from the infrastructure law and the covid relief package that President Biden signed early in his presidency.

Several of the places where staffers will be deployed are also expected to be battlegrounds in the midterm elections this fall, including Arizona and Georgia — where Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) are facing tough reelection fights — and districts represented by Reps. Tom O’Halleran (D-Ariz.), Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.) and Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.).

The administration plans to expand the initiative this summer to Puerto Rico and five more states, including Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, all of which are home to top-tier Senate races.

The White House says political considerations had nothing to do with deciding where to start the program, which the administration eventually hopes to expand to all 50 states.

“We overlaid counties of persistent poverty with the distressed community index and the CDC's social vulnerability index,” a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “And those three indices created, in essence, a bullseye.”

The administration included “qualitative factors” and aimed for geographic diversity when choosing the second set of communities, the official added. 

 

Show the people what good you can provide for them and their communities. Whocoodanode?

Chloe Maxmin, a Democratic state senator in Maine who won in rural, Republican-leaning districts in 2018 and 2020, said she didn’t think her constituents especially care about bickering in Washington. Instead, they’re troubled by a sense that the Democratic Party doesn’t value them.

“Rural voters are not listened to,” said Maxmin, who wrote a forthcoming book with her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, on wooing back rural voters. “They’re not heard. Their voices are not integrated into the Democratic Party. And so why should they listen to us?”

What advice does she have for Democrats trying to win in rural areas this fall?

Knock on as many doors as they can, she said.

“I can't even tell you how many times I've showed up at a house and just the simple fact that I drove down someone's dirt driveway, knocked on their door, left my cell phone number — it's just that basic act of showing up wins votes,” she said.

 

And yes, that does include programs to help Black farmers too.

The RIght-Wing Noise Machine, Con't

The problem with GOP disinformation on social media is that one, it's easy to spread, and two, the right-wing disinformation machine rewards those who do spread it willingly and directly. That's the case with Chaya Raichik of NYC, who discovered that retweeting viral political TikTok videos on Twitter made for the perfect format for "owning the libs" and especially her attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. Now, her two-year campaign has gotten her nearly two-thirds of a million followers, including several major influential cable TV and talk radio appearances.

 

Chaya Raichik had been working as a real estate salesperson in Brooklyn when, in early November 2020, she created the account that would eventually become Libs of TikTok.

Under her first handle @shaya69830552, she minimized covid, cast doubt on the election results and promoted a dubious story about a child sex trafficking ring. On Nov. 23, 2020, Raichik changed handles, this time going by @shaya_ray and identifying herself publicly as a real estate investor in Brooklyn. She began doubling down on election fraud conspiracies using QAnon-related language. Early that December, she joked about launching a clothing line titled “voter fraud is real.”

In January 2021, Raichik started talking about traveling to D.C. to support Trump on Jan. 6 at the Stop the Steal rally. When violence broke out at the Capitol that day, she tweeted a play-by-play account claiming to be on the ground. “They were rubber bullets from law enforcement. 1 hit right next to me,” she said. She posted videos from the crowd and spoke of tear gas being deployed nearby. After saying she left the riot, she used Twitter to downplay the event, claiming that it was peaceful compared to a “BLM protest.”

Later that month, Raichik cycled through two more Twitter names, this time focusing on state politicians. First under the handle @ChayaRaichik and the display name “Chaya Raichik,” and then under the new handle, @cuomomustgo, she railed against New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), calling for him to resign. She promoted the efforts to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). She also began posting about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), calling him “actually brilliant.”

By early last March, she pivoted to a parody account titled @houseplantpotus, pretending to tweet as if she was a houseplant living with President Biden. She revamped her avatar to look like a small shrub with Biden’s face on the leaves. At that point in time she also claimed to be proudly Orthodox Jewish, live in Brooklyn and work in real estate in her Twitter bio.

But the house plant parody never took off. On April 19, 2021, she pivoted her account once again, this time to Libs of TikTok.

Just four months after getting started, Libs of TikTok got its big break: Joe Rogan started promoting the account to the millions of listeners of his hit podcast. He mentioned it several times on the show in August, then again in late September. “Libs of TikTok is one of the greatest f---ing accounts of all time,” he said. With his seal of approval, Raichik’s following skyrocketed.

Libs of TikTok gained more prominence throughout the end of last year, cementing its spot in the right-wing media outrage cycle. Its attacks on the LGBTQ+ community also escalated. By January, Raichik’s page was leaning hard into “groomer” discourse, calling for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be “fired on the spot.”

Her anti-trans tweets went especially viral. She called on her followers to contact schools that were allowing “boys in the girls bathrooms” and pushed the false conspiracy theory that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats. She also purported that adults who teach children about LGBTQ+ identities are “abusive,” that being gender-nonconforming or an ally to the LGBTQ+ community is a “mental illness,” and referred to schools as “government run indoctrination camps” for the LGBTQ+ community.

“Libs of TikTok is shaping our entire political conversation about the rights of LGBTQ people to participate in society,” Drennen said. “It feels like they’re single-handedly taking us back a decade in terms of the public discourse around LGBTQ rights. It’s been like nothing we’ve ever really seen.”

 

A one-woman show, feeding the right-wing outrage beast with instant, viral red meat, day after day. No wonder then she's become a superstar in the red state echo chamber.

And there are thousands and thousands more like her. If you want to know how things got so dark, so quickly around here, it's people like Raichik.