Josh Marshall: You Must Watch This New DeSantis Explanation
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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-must-watch-this-new-desantis-explanation
This new video of Ron DeSantis’s 10th explanation of who he was funding in Texas really has to be seen to be believed. (Video below.) He says that he can’t ship migrants from Florida, as the state legislature authorized money to do, because there aren’t enough migrants coming into the state. There’s no “mass movement”. It’s just one or two people at a time driving to Florida. There’s no way to deal with that efficiently because there aren’t enough people. (Needless to say, however people are entering the state, if the state is overrun you just pick them up locally.) But, he says, he has “intelligence” operatives in Texas and they have learned that from “30% to 40%” of migrants in Texas intend to come to Florida.
In other words, there’s a tidal wave of people apparently about to come. Just not yet. Follow? Good.
So what to do? The most efficient way to deal with this is to go to Texas, profile people who seem likely to later come to Florida and fly them to states run by Democrats. That means “the chance they end up in Florida is much less.”
I guess if you want to be really, really generous you might say that people might be less willing to get bamboozled into being flown north if they’re already in Florida where they want to be as opposed to in Texas. But I think it goes without saying that the cost and inefficiency of the DeSantis plan is great enough to eliminate any benefit. And also: if you hoodwink migrants into going to Boston they can also just get on a bus to go to Florida. San Antonio to Miami is almost as far as Boston to Miami.
The barbarity of DeSantis’s actions should not obscure the hilarity of what is clearly an after the fact explanation of what happened and why? We can be pretty confident that the reason he’s resorting to this explanation is because he really, really doesn’t want to discuss who he’s working with in Texas. What individuals? What activist groups? Again, the explanation is absurd on its face. There’s no mass migration of migrants into Florida. So to move them at scale you need to get them in Texas and send them north. So they don’t end up in Texas.
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who is currently pursuing the same far-right authoritarian barbarism as governor of FL.
Those who voted for tRump have demonstrated that they will vote for, so far, ANYTHING to oppose Democrats. Including for continuation of crimes against humanity, mostly targeted at Hispanic/Latino immigrants. And he's been dramatically and horrifyingly destructive of liberal principles and practices over the past four years. Can't say he hasn't come through.
That includes, again, the previously unengaged Hispanic and Cuban Floridians who kept Florida red by voting for the first time to elect/reelect tRump and FL's Republicans.
I certainly hope you're right, though, that more are wobbly this time than in 2020 when tRump himself was running. They have many genuine reasons to worry.
