The left is very, very afraid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. While he may not have the charisma of former president and current GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, he also does not come with all the drama of the former occupant of the Oval Office, and he has a proven record of getting things done in the Sunshine State.
DeSantis is widely expected to announce his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election this week, and that has our mostly biased national media frothing at the mouth. Last week, TIME ran a cover with “art” depicting the governor looking slightly deranged and peeling an orange—a creepy photoshop clearly intended to inflame Trump and his supporters, but as my colleague Bonchie reported, the accompanying “takedown” failed to make DeSantis look bad and if anything made him “seem more based.”
And just for good measure, DeSantis has the horns above his head on the Time magazine cover pic.twitter.com/ajRbaFLd60
— Vision4theBlind (@Vision4theBlind) May 19, 2023
The Huffington Post also weighed in, buffoonishly comparing DeSantis to “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader. DeSantis may rub some people the wrong way, but as far as I know, he’s never choked people to death with the power of his mind alone. Prepare yourself for endless headlines in the coming months along the lines of, “No One Is More Dangerous For The White House Than Ron DeSantis — Including (insert your own villain here: Trump, Hitler, Magneto, the Joker, whoever).”
Enter the New York Times, which in recent years seems to be running a contest among its reporters to see who can claim the title of “most biased.” After refusing to give back the Pulitzer prize they received for falsely covering the Russia Collusion narrative, the paper has seemingly given up entirely on pretending to be at all credible and not just a leftist mouthpiece.
On Saturday, they were at it again with an innuendo-filled piece trashing DeSantis’ use of private planes. The snide opening line tells you exactly where it’s going to go:
For Ron DeSantis, Sunday, Feb. 19, was the start of another busy week of not officially running for president.
Now I’ll admit, I don’t mind a little snark here and there—I believe it can help get across a point in an opinion piece—but it has no place on the front page of what was once considered America’s paper of record. Also, you would never in a million years see such a tone taken with their spiritual master, Saint Joe Biden.
The paper listed a number of private flights that the governor has taken in private jets owned by rich donors that they imply are deeply shady. However, they quickly undermined their own argument:
DeSantis, who is expected to formally announce his candidacy next week, is hardly the first politician to take advantage of the speed and comfort of a Gulfstream jet. Candidates and officeholders in both parties have long accepted the benefits of a donor’s plane as worth the political risk of appearing indebted to special interests or out of touch with voters.
Ahead of his expected White House bid, Ron DeSantis has relied heavily on rich allies for private air travel around the U.S., a New York Times review found. Some of these donors have business interests in Florida. Others have been shielded from the public. https://t.co/OxH5csJhuP
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 20, 2023
It’s certainly not the first time the paper has tried to belittle the red-state governor:
Allies have abandoned him. Tales of his icy interpersonal touch have spread. Donors have groused. He has dropped in polls.
In six short months, Ron DeSantis’s 2024 run has faltered before it has even begun. https://t.co/LEzNydm0Ka
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 13, 2023
DeSantis and his team have said they’ve followed all applicable laws and rules in disclosing his travel. However, the Times points out that a Michigan non-profit paid for some of the flights, and won’t say where it got the money.
Okay, fair enough. I don’t begrudge the outlet for doing some actual digging—it’s what they used to be known for. In this piece, they actually appear to have done a fair amount of research, and if DeSantis has bent some rules, he needs to answer for that.
The real problem here is the staggering double standard. Here, the paper is running an almost 2,000-word absolute snoozefest of a story about what appear to be rather routine flights, but they continue to ignore some of the most stunning political scandals of our era—all which happen to involve Democrats.
There is now conclusive proof that the CIA meddled in the 2020 presidential election. There is strong evidence that the president engaged in unethical pay-for-play operations in order to enrich the Biden family while Joe was vice president. There is a whistleblower alleging that Biden’s DOJ gave preferential treatment to the president’s son Hunter. There’s the bombshell Durham Report, which showed among many other malfeasances that the DOJ treated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton very differently. The Times coverage on all these stories has been thin at best.
Speaking of Hunter, they refused to cover the shocking revelations from his laptop from hell for years.
Perhaps there’s something here—maybe DeSantis has been a little loose with accepting plane rides from donors (although they certainly did not prove that in this article). But has the Times covered Joe Biden’s ethical issues, where as president he’s stayed in the homes of billionaires without laying out a cent?
As we’ve seen during the travails of the endless efforts to “get” Donald Trump, the corporate media will grasp at any straw attempting to take down successful GOP politicians, while completely ignoring startling abuses of power by Democrats.
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One thing is clear from all this—the mainstream, corporate, lamestream, legacy media, whichever word you prefer—is absolutely terrified of Ron DeSantis, mostly because he’s largely achieved the things he said he would. They will do anything to stop him.
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