The much too early 2024 election thread

[N.E. Brigand]

With his eye appparently on 2024, nationally syndicated radio talk show host Jesse Kelly, a conservative who used to be a regular correspondent for Fox News, wrote today that America "needs a dictator" because Americans "are not worthy of freedom," and he predicted that a "dictator is coming."

Why do so many Republicans hate America?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I know that the potentially dire future of the U.S. is no laughing matter, but the entertainment value is ramping up.

[N.E. Brigand]

I guess there's nowhere for DeSantis to go but up after that.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I assume you are referring to the fact that his Twitter launch crashed?

[Dave_LF]

Never underestimate their ability to find new depths

[RoseMorninStar]

What? Trump? There are quite a few people in my neighborhood who refer to him as an 'Angel Warrior' (I'm not kidding).

[N.E. Brigand]

The Donald Trump campaign is attacking Ron DeSantis for having supported Donald Trump.

[N.E. Brigand]

At presidential candidate and Florida governor Ron DeSantis's urging, Florida has made it pretty easy for a few noisy parents to ban books in Florida schools. If a parent merely claims that a book is offensive, it pretty much gets pulled from the shelves. The most recent victim of this nonsense was Amanda Gorman, the young poet who spoke at President Biden's inauguration. Claiming that Gorman's book-length version of that poem, The Hill We Climb, included "indirect hate messages" -- and misidentifying the book's author as Oprah Winfrey -- a Miami Lakes woman named Daisy Salinas got her children's school to remove it from the library. Never mind that Salinas admits she hasn't read the entirety of the short book. Never mind that the specific pages Salinas cites can in no way be claimed to promote hate. It's no longer available to students who formerly could read it.

So this is interesting:

"The Florida mom who sought to ban Amanda Gorman’s poem says she’s sorry for promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

“I want to apologize to the Jewish community,” Salinas told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday. She was saying sorry for a Facebook post she shared in March offering a summary of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious antisemitic forgery written more than a century ago in Russia.

“I’m not what the post says,” Salinas said. “I love the Jewish community.” ...

Salinas’ post about the Protocols included a list of steps depicting how “Jewish Zionists” would achieve world domination. The graphic included stages such as “Place our agents and helpers everywhere,” “Replace royal rule with socialist rule, then communism, then despotism,” and “Sacrifice people (including Jews sometimes) when necessary.”

Reached by JTA on Wednesday, Salinas confirmed that the post about the “Protocols” was hers and apologized for it, saying she hadn’t read it beyond the word “communism.” Salinas said her aversion to communism stems from her Cuban identity. She added that English is not her first language.

“I see the word ‘communism,’ and I think it’s something about communism,” she said. “I didn’t read the words.”

I do feel sorry for Salinas's kids.

[N.E. Brigand]

This official DeSantis campaign launch video is every bit as strange as others have said:



Among other faults, I think that the video suffers a bit from what Michelle Goldberg describes here: it's "deeply, fatally online".

[N.E. Brigand]

It appears that Ron DeSantis may be breaking the law by having his Florida gubernatorial staff solicit donations for his presidential campaign from Florida lobbyists (source: NBC). These lobbyists feel pressured to donate because they need the governor's office to support their efforts.