Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign has not been going well. This is partly because DeSantis has the personality of a wet dishrag and it turns out even Republican voters aren't particularly inspired by that. The other part of it is because big-money Republican donors have been turned off by DeSantis' inability to rise above his dishrag personality to at least "wet sponge" or "leaky garden hose" level.
That means we're now seeing fresh reports about how DeSantis will be "rebooting" his campaign, just you wait and see. What will be the focus of this new reboot? Apparently the DeSantis camp has decided their candidate wasn't enough of a preening fascist asshole, so they're going to up his preening fascist asshole traits to "still mad about Bud Light" levels. Yeah, that'll bring the voters in. What Republican voters really want is someone who can pivot from being super-duper mad at the Walt Disney Company to being super-duper mad about an international beer conglomerate.
Sweet merciful crap, has this guy ever had a moment of joy in his life? His every public appearance stinks of a man who's still angry over being potty-trained as a toddler, a man who's spent his whole life since that moment seething with resentment at his mom, and Big Toilet, and society at large. The man makes Hannibal Lecter look like a quirky free spirit.
Yes, the latest DeSantis move is to shore up his petty fascist asshole bonafides by using the power of the state to punish AB InBev, makers of Bud Light, over a micromarketing move that saw Bud Light boost one trans influencer but caused every far-right redneck in the country to melt the entire f--k down.
Using his gubernatorial Twitter account, DeSantis boasted that "we've kneecapped ESG in Florida" (ESG stands for "environmental, social, and government" investing, which DeSantis absolutely hates because the numbers guys on his campaign staff told him he needed to), and that he's "calling for an investigation" into AB InBev's "Bud Light marketing campaign and falling stock prices."
"All options are on the table and woke corporations that put ideology ahead of returns should be on notice," boasts the new International Decider of Beer Marketing.
The DeSantis premise is fascinating. By “fascinating” we mean flat-out stupid and that no courtroom in the land will be touching it with a 10-foot pole, so it's mostly just another Florida government-sponsored act of harassment. After some Bud Light marketing executive paid out a pocket-change amount in order for trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney to hold up a beer can and pretend it wasn't commodified cat piss, anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives had an absolute fit and vowed to boycott Bud Light forever and ever rather than share one of their favorite brands of commodified cat piss with those sort of folks.
This was not an organic call for boycott, mind you. It came about mostly because Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and other heavy hitters in conservative circles boosted the holy hell out of the supposed outrage. It was just another day of conservative culture wars that conspicuously revolve around all the same enemies German Naziism called out in its own list of undesirables. Republicans vowed revenge against the company, and the stock price fell ... by about a whopping 1% year to date.
So now DeSantis is claiming that because DeSantis helped promote a boycott against Bud Light, which knocked maaaaybe about 1% off AB InBev's stock price, that's causing the Florida pension fund to dip (if it even is), which means it's all AB InBev’s fault because they were the ones who made DeSantis' eliminationist buddies mad in the first place. And so in a letter attached to his gubernatorial tweet, he's asking the state board of administration to investigate whether or not Florida should be suing the company for breaching its obligations to shareholders by making conservatives mad.
Again, this is not an actual legal argument. If this were an actual legal argument, any shareholder could sue any company for any single marketing campaign that didn't work out as the marketers anticipated, and that is not a thing. So what DeSantis is really doing here is issuing a press release reminding the Trumpian base that he is a candidate willing to take even the most pissant of MAGA grievances and turn the powers of government against whichever person, group, or corporation is perceived to have gone against conservatism's holy will.
It's not a legal argument, but it is a massive First Amendment violation of the kind the Republican base is now demanding the government commit on a daily basis. Stepping on the First Amendment is DeSantis' whole campaign, from Disney to Bud Light to college professors to "drag shows" to any company caught giving a damn about "equality." It's literally all the man does.
As for the supposed campaign "reboot" the DeSantis camp is planning, aside from deciding that the new mortal enemy is going to be cans of beer instead of the Walt Disney Company, the rest of it appears to be an exercise in wishful thinking. NBC News reports that we can expect "fewer big speeches and more handshaking in diners and churches," which puts DeSantis squarely in the venues he absolutely sucks at due to the aforementioned wet dishrag problem. The campaign is trying to sell this as moving to an "insurgent" style of campaigning, but the harsher truth is that the DeSantis campaign is already in fairly dire financial straits and booking large event venues costs money. Showing up in random diners and churches does not cost money, or at least not six-figure sums, so that's where DeSantis will be spending his time for the next few months as he waits for his campaign to slowly bleed out ... or for opponent Donald Trump to be sucked into a jet engine and die.
In the meantime Florida's still dealing with a new malaria outbreak, but that's the sort of public health issue that DeSantis doesn't give a flying shit about and will only give a flying shit about if somebody suggests a new way to make the problem worse. If the mosquitoes were registered Republicans, he'd be pushing for a new Florida law banning bug repellent.
Sign the petition: Investigate Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott for human rights abuses.
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