Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis likes to portray himself as a tough guy. He pushes the image hard, even in those giant ill-fitting suits that make him look like he was dressed by a 10-year-old. DeSantis appears at every press conference flanked by police officers, standing front and center as if he’s their field commander, ready to lead them into the line of fire. He speaks largely to hand-picked friendly audiences, and screams at reporters when they do get in and dare to ask questions.

He is a man with such deep-seated insecurity, he actually climbed into the cockpit of a fighter jet in a recent Top Gun-themed ad that explicitly and repeatedly insisted that he was a tough guy who never backed down from a fight. DeSantis did serve in the military, but as a lawyer for the Navy after he attended Harvard Law School. 

When DeSantis does face a tough question and can’t just yell at a reporter, he instead opts to runs away. That’s what he did a few weeks ago, when asked about his clear desire to ban abortion outright in Florida, presuming his hand-picked state Supreme Court judges overturn Florida’s constitutional right to reproductive freedom.

That incident has gone largely unremarked upon, just like every other terrible thing he’s said and done. So we decided to take the fight to Ron DeSantis and remind the world of his extreme anti-choice agenda.

First, using our own money and a handful of donations, we flew this banner over Daytona Beach. It gained so much traction and eyeballs that even the Florida Democratic Party and Charlie Crist tweeted about it:

Ron DeSantis wants a total abortion ban in Florida and we are letting folks know by flying this banner over Daytona Beach today. pic.twitter.com/19s5rfBlFe

Then, we hired this mobile billboard to park outside the National Conservative Conference at a hotel outside Miami to both remind everyone of DeSantis’s position on abortion and show the goons attending that conference that their great new white hope is a phony who stammers and then runs away when confronted with a single difficult question:

Ron DeSantis is giving a speech in Miami right now and we have this mobile billboard truck right outside showing Floridians that DeSantis wants to enact a total abortion ban in the state and how he cowardly runs away from the question when asked by reporters. pic.twitter.com/t32cEmOCwZ

My partner in legal trolling, Thomas Kennedy, is DeSantis’s chief antagonist, so he posted the video. It ensured that the governor and his team saw it. He drives them nuts because he's willing to hold their feet to the fire. It often results in them kicking him out of events, which is illegal, since he’s a reporter in public spaces. They don’t care, of course.

We have no party sponsor or outside financier. Again, both the mobile billboard and the plane were paid for out of our own pockets, plus a handful of donations (including some from this Daily Kos community!). We’ve got further plans to expose DeSantis, humiliate him, and make sure Floridians fully understand the depth of his reactionary depravity. There’s a billboard that will go up soon that looks like this:

The media, bent on false objectivity and desperate for a heavyweight to face off against Donald Trump in the 2024 GOP nomination fight, has largely given DeSantis a free pass, so it’s really up to us to make sure the message gets out. We could really use your help — we only have so much money in our own accounts, and want to blanket Florida with images calling out DeSantis’s lies and corruption, exposing his extremism, and puncturing his ridiculous and delusional self-image as a swaggering tough guy.

DeSantis has to win re-election this year before he can run for president, and polls are surprisingly tight. We can do this.

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...