Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s first dalliance with human trafficking was shocking, but not surprising. In fact, in hindsight it feels like it was inevitable, the culmination of four years spent aggressively pushing the bounds of his legal authority and amping up the cruelty of fascistic gambits.

Rounding up dozens of desperate, asylum-seeking migrants that have already been locked up for weeks, telling them lies to coerce them onto a plane, and then sending them 2000+ miles north to a strange place where they have no friends, family, or even a dollar to their name — and funding it all with federal dollars that you refuse to spend on providing the people you actually govern with expanded health care, unemployment, or quality public schools.

It was kidnapping, as immigration attorneys have plainly stated, and even based on the text of the state budget that supposedly gave DeSantis the right to fly undocumented immigrants elsewhere in the US, possibly even illegal by Florida Republicans’ fleeting standards. This may be the first scandal that actually sticks to DeSantis for more than a minute, in part because activists kept it in the media for all of Thursday until national media landed in Massachusetts to start digging into the situation.

Not every outlet has done justice to the sheer monstrousness of it all, of course — the New York Times’ headline was “Migrants Land in a Political Drama,” which is sociopathically antiseptic — but we’re making sure the extraordinariness of the situation breaks through. By Thursday afternoon, just hours after the news broke, a few friends and I sprung to start flying this banner, referring to his migrant stunt and his other anti-child policies (“Don’t Say Gay,” the destruction of education curriculum, denying parents unemployment, etc) , over Central Florida:

We just flew this plane banner saying DESANTIS HURTS CHILDREN over central Florida to let folks know DeSantis is a monstrous individual who uses migrant kids as political props. Vote this reprehensible individual out of office and lets make sure he never holds power again. pic.twitter.com/xJxqJxhTLE

The banner above was an emergency spend, and it cost a decent bit of money given the last-minute timing.

Want to help us do more of these? You can donate to our DeSantis trolling GoFundMe right here!

It’s worth it, I promise. That banner purchase was made just hours before we sent this mobile billboard to a giant GOP event in Miami. Tech zillionaire Keith Rabois was hosting a massive fundraiser for Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Charles Grassley, and just about every major Republican Senate candidate, including JD Vance, Blake Masters, and Dr. Oz.

Now, for context: Rabois, part of the so-called PayPal mafia with Peter thief and Elon Musk, was booted out from his job as COO at the tech company Square for sexual harassment back in 2009, a scandal that was predated by years of horrible activity and outbursts that got him essentially kicked out of Stanford Law School.

We firmly believe that you have to be absolutely blunt when it comes to getting political messages to connect, and when you’re dealing with such evil goons, there is no holding back. Earlier this week, I actually posted a mock-up of a billboardthat we are working to get put up across from the Governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, and Daily Kos users were incredibly generous in helping us get enough money to put it up.

The only problem? Lamar, the billboard company, refused to mount it for us because they didn’t like the term “dictator.” This was the day before DeSantis kidnapped all those migrants and sent them up to Massachusetts, but when we asked again today, that horrible stunt hadn’t changed their minds.

We’re likely to tweak the language — using “disaster” instead of “dictator” — because while we hate having to modify our fair criticism, it’s worth it to make that small sacrifice to get such a blunt and embarrassing message up in front of DeSantis’s smug face all the time.

The only hiccup will be whether there’s any risk of copyright violation, which would require further changes — we’ll basically have to play with the image enough for it to constitute parody. But that’s fine — we’ll figure out a way to do it.

We used a fair bit of our funds on airplane and mobile billboard, and so while we’re kicking in some more money ourselves, we could use some more help. The goal is to continuously troll DeSantis to humiliate him in front of his voters and pull stunts to keep his crimes in the news. Our next one is likely to do something with his role in the insane utility corruption scandal that has engulfed Florida — I actually just produced a big report on it at my day job at More Perfect Union:

NEW: Ron DeSantis is at the center of yet another major political scandal. DeSantis appointees have allowed the state's largest power company to increase Floridians' utility rates by billions. Why? The same power company is running a vast effort to buy GOP control of the state. pic.twitter.com/Ip2fAW22te

As you can see, we’re really dedicated to this thing — we’re now even calling ourselves SWORD (or Sworn Enemies of Ron DeSantis) as a half-serious joke. We’re putting everything we’ve got into taking this guy down this fall, or at least tarnishing him to the point that the media can’t write syrupy articles hyping up DeSantis’s presidential prospects without noting that he’s a Nazi (we’re also working on a website all about his ties to white nationalism, coming by the end of September!).

And by the way, here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote in my newsletter about why Ron DeSantis is a terrorist:

The ingrained sense of American exceptionalism makes it impossible for most to admit, but the extraordinary number of preventable Covid deaths are casualties of domestic terrorism pursued by GOP governors and political celebrities.

Florida has long been known to underreport its Covid deaths, but the official count is still rather grim. This weekend, the state hit 80,000 Covid casualties, more than half of which were preventable deaths that occurred after vaccines became widely available. At 40,000 unnecessary Covid deaths, Florida is neck and neck with Texas for the most preventable deaths in the nation, and there’s little secret as to why so many people suffered entirely avoidable demises.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis brags about defying federal guidance on Covid prevention during his shadow presidential campaign speeches, he’s really boasting of actively sabotaging scientific efforts to save lives and eradicate the virus. And in doing that, he’s boasting about his body count.

DeSantis punished school districts that insisted on requiring masks, appointed a deranged anti-vaxxer as his surgeon general, and pushed expensive Covid treatments over vaccines. During the early parts of June 2020, he declared Florida open for full business, an attempt to seize the national spotlight that led to the state suffering the most excess deaths in the nation.

This spring, his surgeon general recommended against kids receiving vaccines, and in July, DeSantis inexplicably told a fawning crowd that they were more likely to come down with Covid after receiving a booster shot.

DeSantis has all but admitted that the 40,000 people and counting that have died over the past 20 months, and the thousands that died during the summer prior, were collateral damage in his ideologically radical pursuit of power.

The number of dead Floridians has been exponentially greater than the number of people slain on 9/11, yet the national media covers the governor of Florida’s sustained attacks on his own constituents like a football analyst breaks down an offensive formation or play call.

You can read the whole thing here...