What's happening in DeSantistan 2.0

Wow. The stuff you learn. Though not actually shocking

 

DeSantis aides are plainly fans of The Wire.


But his statement rests on patchy, incomplete crime data. About half of the agencies that police more than 40% of the state’s population are missing from figures the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) used for a statewide estimation.

Participation in national data collection is even lower. In Florida, only 49 agencies, representing less than 8% of police departments, were included in an FBI federal database last year, according to a Marshall Project analysis. This means more than 500 police departments in Florida — including many of the largest agencies, like the Miami Police Department, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department — are missing from the national context. Florida’s participation rate is the lowest of any state in the country.


It’s not just crime data. In Florida, current and former public officials pointed to examples where the DeSantis administration altered or used data for political gain.

Recently, the Tampa Bay Times reported that DeSantis’ choice for Florida surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, omitted key data from a state analysis to support his claims against COVID-19 vaccination.

Crime claims scrutinized
Crime claims scrutinized - Tampa Bay Times

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he apparently considers himself some kind of super-macho hero. of course, Trump portrays himself the same way.
that's simply weird.

 

I'm sure that you know they purchased Ybor Square in Ybor City (historic district eastern outskirts of Tampa.) They did not, however, occupy all of the premises. The now closed Spaghetti Warehouse occupied the building directly across from theirs in the Square. If you sat in the glassed in room, you could watch the members coming and going. The men generally wore white dress shirts and black slacks. I was having lunch with my secretary there one day and just happened to be wearing their color combination. The guys at the table next to ours were making a few comments about them, so I stood up so they could see what I was wearing and said "We'd love to have you come over and learn more about what we do and what we are about. Stay an afternoon, a day...maybe longer." As they were trying to come up with excuses why they couldn't, my secretary starting choking from laughing so hard while she was eating. I had them going for a minute or two, she ruined it.

 

Oh yeah. Also an old cigar factory on Habana just north of Tampa Bay Blvd. Rehabilitated the building nicely, due to the oodles of money they have. But they are around more than most of us know

 

oodles of cash that they keep with that tax free status.

does all that property now come off the city tax rolls forcing residents to pay more to keep the tax base the same?

 

I know I'm too "online," but there are some interesting connections and influences down these rabbit holes.

Pedro Gonzalez, the former Trump supporter and recently-infamous DeSantis influencer, talked about Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) in his writings. I don't think the reach of these sorts of guys should be minimized even though they're not household names.

In addition to the homoerotic, homophobic, hyper-masuline, and/or chauvinist sentiments, they are also very consumed with the topic of race and how their racial ideologies are best marketed so they don't turn off those who would be offended by the most obvious and aggressive appeals to racism and nationalism.

Exclusive — Rising Conservative Influencer Pedro Gonzalez Regularly Espoused Racist and Anti-Semitic Sentiments in Private Messages

Constantly defending Fuentes despite his well-documented Holocaust denial and antisemitism is a running theme of the messages Gonzalez sent throughout 2019 and early 2020. In one, for instance, Gonzalez claimed Fuentes was not actually denying the Holocaust but was acting as a “troll” to challenge the “orthodoxy” and compared Fuentes to “Bronze Age Pervert,” or BAP for short. BAP, for the record, is the pseudonym of a far right-wing online personality who wrote a book titled Bronze Age Mindset that paints America in a really dark place. Some reports, per the Daily Beast, have identified BAP as “Costin Vlad Alamariu, a Yale University political science PhD of Romanian extraction,” but Alamariu has never publicly confirmed he is in fact BAP.

***

In another message, Gonzalez said he finds a blend between BAP and Fuentes as the “future” of the American right. “Like it or not, somewhere between BAP and Fuentes is the future,” Gonzalez wrote. “It will be open to race realism, it will be anti-Zionism, it will be hostile to LGBTQ, and it will prefer strength over weakness. All of those things were present in America 1950.”

He even said BAP is an example that an explicitly racist person could in fact lead a movement in American politics. “So the idea that people who express views that can be called racist are not capable of leading movements isn’t true, because BAP is doing just that,” Gonzalez wrote.

 

Wow. As I am sure you know, the Roger Stone/Proud Boys also have a strong homo-erotic but still racist overlap

 

I know people in the restaurant and construction business who are not happy with the results of this as they are losing employees and cannot find replacements.

Florida construction and agricultural workforces diminished after new immigration law takes effect (msn.com)

A new law that took effect in Florida on July 1 is already hitting the state's agricultural and construction industries hard.

The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in May, makes it a third-degree felony for people to use a false identification to get hired for work. Any business that is found to knowingly employ those unauthorized workers could have its license revoked and face daily fines. Additionally, hospitals that accept Medicaid are now required to question a patient's immigration status, driver's licenses given to undocumented immigrants in other states are invalid, and it's a third-degree felony to knowingly transport undocumented immigrants into the state.

An estimated 772,00 undocumented immigrants lived in Florida in 2019, with many working on construction sites, farms and packaging facilities. Migrant workers began leaving the state once DeSantis signed the new law in May, The Wall Street Journal reported, including those who are authorized to work but are married to someone who isn't. A spokesperson for DeSantis defended the law, saying that businesses that hire undocumented immigrants "instead of Floridians will be held accountable."

At multiple construction sites in Miami, workers shared with the Journal that they have lost about half of their crews; one man said he knows people who went to Indiana, where they could make $38 an hour instead of $25 and not have to worry about running afoul of the immigration law. Tom C. Murphy, co-president of Coastal Construction, told the Journal there was already a labor shortage before the law went into effect, and while "we fully support documentation of the immigrant workforce, the new law is aggravating an already trying situation."

 

Yeah, there are some differences and yet some overlaps. I doubt it's statistically possible that all of these men are gay. I'm sure many just feel emasculated and dis-empowered by feminism. But the homo-eroticism on the right is notable, counter-intuitive and fascinating.

Many have said that Roy Cohn was gay. Roger Stone has described himself as "trysexual," (for having tried everything) and asked whether it was anybody's business if he were bisexual as some suspect. Maybe Stone was joking, but what he reportedly said about Cohen was pretty telling in terms of how they view the intersection of sex and power.

"Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate."

 

I think that's right and being "weak" and "effeminate". And the Proud Boys have put out some interesting group photographs, let's say

 

To bring it back to the Wire, you have to be gay Omar style

 

Love it. What a great character

 

There was a local proud boy provocateur here who ran some astroturf "news" website, would always try to do Veritas stuff with local Dems for his site and disrupt events. Claimed to be gay, but could have been part of the act, I dunno. Probably moved on to bigger and better things, like insurrections or becoming an FBI informant.

 

A lot of classics being banned, at least temporarily, in Orange County as too sexual

“The last thing I would have expected to be rejected is Milton,” said one English teacher, noting that John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” published in 1667, is considered a “cornerstone of Western literature.”

The teacher said she was “gobsmacked” when she saw “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was rejected initially and angry when novels she’d taught for Advanced Placement literature classes, including “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving, were nixed, too.

I have a feeling this may backfire and actually benefit society, presuming these books ever become available to kids. A lot of them who would've never touched these classics before will now seek them out for the supposedly salacious content. They will be extremely disappointed, at least from the few I have read. But they will have been exposed to some of the classics, at least until they realize there's really nothing too exciting in terms of so-called sexual content.

 

They’ve gone VERY conservative because they’re afraid of the wrath of DeSantis ever since they required masks and he flipped out.

He is such a vindictive asshole.

 

I can see why Milton was banned, it makes Satan look cool

 

All truth. I am sure they are looking for an educator to attack and prosecute as an example, just to intimidate. Beside being vindictive, it is also calculated to produce a less informed populace.

But I am still amused at some 16 yo boy picking up Milton or Shakespeare and expecting a thrill because he was told this stuff was too salacious for adolescents to read

 

Given the sort of stuff widely published across the internet, one would think the bar for salaciousness might have moved in the opposite direction if anything. I recently decided to check out a series on HBO that is controversial and I assumed was going to be super raunchy and wondered if they decided to have an x-rated show or something. It was basically skinemax.

 

What series?