Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) is not holding back when he is voicing his support for 24-year-old Long Islander Daniel Penny, who was recently released on $100000 bond after being arrested for the chokehold death of 30-year-old homeless man Jordan Neely in a New York subway. And it doesn’t stop there. In fact, DeSantis is promoting a Legal Defence Fund for Daniel Penny.
Jack McCordick wrote on Vanity Fair that DeSantis is cheering on the killing of Jordan Neely in order to catch up with rivals should he run for the Republican presidential primary for 2024.
It’s fairly obvious why DeSantis is juicing these conspiracies. Just this morning, The New York Times released a report detailing DeSantis’s pre-presidential campaign woes: “Allies have abandoned him. Tales of his icy interpersonal touch have spread. Donors have groused.”
DeSantis may have a more personal reason for labeling political opponents with the Soros slur as well. In February, erstwhile Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who once praised DeSantis for having “BDE” (“Big DeSantis Energy,” of course), tweeted an article reporting that Soros had endorsed the Florida governor. (Soros had simply said he thought DeSantis was the “likely” nominee.) A month later, Trump shared a Truth Social post that nicknamed DeSantis “Ron DeSoros.” Earlier in May, The New York Times reported that the nickname had appeared more than 12,000 times on news and social media sites since January.
In response, DeSantis has doubled down on some of the ultra-MAGA right’s favorite anti-vaxx and election denial conspiracy theories. “It’s a tug of war over who is going to grab the all-important conspiracy constituency,” one professor who studies QAnon told the Times.
Perhaps the greatest irony of DeSantis’s attack on “the Left’s pro-criminal agenda”, however, is this: Florida’s murder rate is much higher than New York’s.
Some state that vigilante justice is at odds with the mantra of “law and order”.
“NYC is not Gotham,” Comptroller Brad Lander said. “We must not become a city where a mentally ill human being can be choked to death by a vigilante without consequence. Or where the killer is justified & cheered.”
This, with many Republican politicians having the audacity to talk about dealing with mental illnesses in the USA after a gun massacre.