Do You Expect Anything Different From Florida?

They are crawling out of the swamps, they heard the call and are answering it. Trump, DeSantis, the Sirens with their seductive singing and enchanting music are calling the creatures out of the Florida swamps.

Neo-Nazis Gloat as Florida Becomes a Magnet for Hate
As white supremacists from as far as Canada revel in intimidating Sunshine State residents, critics blast DeSantis for his silence
The Rolling Stone
By Tim Dickinson
September 14, 2023

NEO-NAZIS HAVE BEEN ecstatic in the wake of their headline-grabbing action outside Orlando earlier this month. White nationalists with handles like “Dietrich,” “Red Pill,” and “Scotty Big Balls” greeted each other with shouts of “Hail victory!” on a Sept. 10 Telegram livestream. Echoing the sentiments of many participants, “Combat Carl” told listeners it was “probably the best weekend of my life.”

The march represented a merger of two neo-Nazi hate groups with different styles — the hard-edged BloodTribe, aka Blutstamm, whose Maine-based leader Christopher Pohlhaus has a runic face tattoo goes and goes by the name “Hammer”; and the Goyim Defense League, a meme-savvy group whose antisemitism is steeped in layers of irony, led by Jon Minadeo II, who calls himself “Handsome Truth.” This was the largest, but only the latest, of a series of high-profile neo-Nazi actions in Florida.

More than 50 members of both groups joined together on Sept. 2 — wearing red shirts and dark shorts, with most covering their faces with black masks. Some toted massive swastika flags, and their hate march culminated with a demonstration on a freeway overpass in Altamonte Springs, where the neo-Nazis performed stiff-armed Hitler salutes and shouted antisemitic threats like, “Jews get the rope!”

Many of these haters were not Florida natives. As detailed on the livestream, they’d traveled from as far Canada and California, spending thousands of dollars on flights and hotels to participate in this show of intimidation in the Sunshine State. And this joint mobilization was augmented, on the same day, by a third neo-Nazi group that rallied just a few miles away, outside DisneyWorld. Members of the Order of the Black Sun staked out an entrance to “the most magical place on Earth,” holding placards reading: “Have you thanked Hitler today?”

The songs of the Sirens are calling them from far and wide.

What have you heard from the DeSantis? Crickets!

”Talk to anybody from any of these marginalized communities. There is a fear on the ground,” says Nikki Fried, who was the highest ranking Jewish woman in the history of state government, stepping down from her cabinet post at the beginning of this year to lead state Democrats. She tells Rolling Stone she’s floored to be living through a moment of American history where she has to “denounce Nazis in my home state — and have a governor who refuses to do so.”

We never had this before, they were scared to crawl out of the swamp, but Trump lured them out to do his dirty work for him and he rewarded them by calling them “Very fine people.” And the Republican party have been courting them ever since.

DeSnatis tried obscure them with a red herring…

But that is advice Governor DeSantis’ camp has, at times, found difficult to follow. In Jan. 2022, a group of hardcore haters staged a rally in Orlando, chanting slogans like “the Jew is the devil” and hoisted hateful banners over freeway overpasses. But when called on to condemn them, Team DeSantis first lofted a false-flag conspiracy theory, instead. In a since-deleted tweet, spokesperson Christina Pushaw asked: “Do we even know if they are Nazis?” and suggested that the hate mongers could have been, “Dem Staffers.”

[…]

The governor has since observed a strategy of silence in response to neo-Nazi actions in the state — even when hate groups have invoked his name and political imagery. In July 2022, a group of neo-Nazis set up camp in front of a right-wing youth conference in Tampa, holding lightning bolt ‘SS’ flags, Nazi posters, and a banner reading “DeSantis Country.” One held a sign trolling DeSantis as “our glorious leader.”

DeSantis is following in the footsteps of Sergeant Schultz of Hogan's Heroes… “I know nothing, nothing!”

DeSantis himself gave a similar answer in response to a Jewish voter who questioned him directly about neo-Nazis sporting his flag, during a “conversation with the candidate” that aired in early August in Manchester, New Hampshire. Without directly condemning the haters, DeSantis bragged that he’d made Florida the most “pro-Israel state in America,” spent millions on security for Jewish day schools, and vowed to “defeat the scourge of anti-semitism.” As for the neo-Nazis waving his banner: “Those are not true supporters of mine,” he said. “That is an operation, to try to link me to something so that it smears me.” DeSantis added: “They are trying to divide, by using that as a weapon against me.”

Don’t look behind the curtain!

The dark truth is that white identity politics and scapegoating of minorities is now part and parcel of the MAGA agenda. Trump made his corner of the GOP a safe space for racists by popularizing the birther conspiracy; slandering Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “drug dealers”; pursuing a “Muslim ban;” and by insisting that the tiki-torch bearing Charlottesville marchers — who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” in 2017 — included “good people.”

He doesn’t want to antagonize their loyal white nationalists base, the Republicans want to keep them mad so that they vote.

The only way we are going to bring about change is to VOTE! Vote as if your life depends upon it because it does.