Many see Florida governor Ron DeSantis as the new Trump-in-waiting. To help his ascent to power, the National Review launched a pre-emptive strike against his chief critic.
Smearing her with irrelevant (and selectively-quoted) looks at her pre-employment history, they tell the story of a state-government whistleblower by...only talking to the people she blew the whistle on! Bent on revenge, her former employers now obligingly divulge her personnel file (which the National Review again selectively quotes). If you want the real story, turn to a local Florida PBS channel, which distills it down to two irrefutable sentences — which are backed by actual documents they obtained from the state.
"Internal emails at the [Florida health] department confirm that her [Rebekah Jones] superiors asked her to remove raw data from the dashboard after new reports showed the disease circulating in Florida as early as January. If she did, no outside party would be able to analyze the data. But Jones refused."
The real game here is obvious. The National Review would like everyone to please stop remembering that Governor DeSantis screwed up Florida’s Covid response, because DeSantis is going to be the next Trump. So they want us to start believing DeSantis’s lies without question. So in a newer hit piece the National Review even tries splitting hairs about Jones' latest run-in with Florida's press secretary.
But what they can’t hide is the MSNBC clip at the bottom of their story, which clearly shows their reporter finally being challenged over the falsity of his central claim.
Again and again, the National Review has tried to insist Florida’s numbers were perfect — at one point, Cooke actually called them “kosher!” And their story makes the mind-boggling assertion that really, the only person on planet earth who ever had any questions about DeSantis’s numbers were Rebekah Jones. There’s just one problem: that’s a big lie. MSNBC actually brought on Dave Aronberg, Palm Beach County State Attorney, who lays down the truth, saying:
"Keep in mind, [Rebekah Jones] is not the first to accuse governor DeSantis of a lack of transparency. Months before she was fired by the Department of Health, months before she became a whistleblower, The south Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper came out with a scathing expose entitled Secrecy and Spin: how Florida's Governor Misled the Public on the Covid-19 Pandemic! And they accuse the governor of suppressing data that was unfavorable to his administration, dispensing dangerous information, and promoting the views of political hacks instead of the public health officials. And they said that he hid information about the spread of Covid in nursing homes, prison and hospitals, and that the state's calculation of its positivity rate was different than the methods used in most other states, and that it over-emphasized the negative tests, and thus came up with an artificially low positivity rate compared to other states.
And then the Press also found that the state knew that they had Covid here as soon as January of 2020 -- 175 cases by February of last year. So all of this stuff is fair game. All of this stuff deserves scrutiny. And none of it originated with Rebekah Jones...
"Then there's the curious case of the medical examiners. They had data that showed that the state's death total was higher than the state's data. And so to remedy that discrepancy, the state of Florida ordered the medical examiners to stop publishing their data -- I guess under the principle that if you close your eyes, the problem goes away. Well, that was undone because of political pressure. Finally they allowed the medical examiners to publish their information, but not before it was redacted -- a lot of parts redacted. And the state's medical examiner chair said this was a sham…
"Florida has not been fully transparent, and it's not just Rebekah Jones who says so. She deserves all the scrutiny she's getting... But there's a larger issue at play here, and we shouldn't gloss over it."
The real game here is obvious. The National Review would like everyone to please stop remembering that Governor DeSantis screwed up Florida’s Covid response, because DeSantis is going to be the next Trump. So again, they want us to believe DeSantis’s lies without question. And the biggest lie of all is that the questions about Florida’s bad numbers were simply dreamed up in Rebekah Jones’ head, and nobody else in the world ever had a whiff of doubt.
That isn’t true. And don’t let the National Review try to con you otherwise...