On Sunday, Ron DeSantis will kick off his “Little Big Liars Tour” for 2022 in Arizona and New Mexico before traveling to Pennsylvania and Ohio next Friday.
As the Governor’s $2 billion bailout for the insurance industry continues to do nothing to stabilize the market or lower premiums for homeowners, another report showed Orlando and Miami in the top three cities for highest rent increases in the country over the last year, and thousands of students across the state returned to the classroom without a full-time teacher, Ron will be abandoning his constituents for some presidential campaign stops.
Let’s meet the Trump-endorsed Little Big Liars the Governor will be appearing with over the next week.
In Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake based her entire primary campaign on the Big Lie. She’s called for imprisoning Arizona’s Secretary of State over baseless claims of election “crimes,” promoted far-right conspiracy theories about voting machines, and to this day is still demanding the 2020 results in Arizona be decertified. Lake previously questioned whether elections could be trusted if it took days to count the votes, until it took days to count the votes in her primary win.
Staying in Arizona, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, whose campaign was powered by millions from billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel, has said he would have voted against certifying the election had he been in the Senate in 2021 and recently declared, “I think there’s always cheating, probably, in every election,” before going on to fully accept the results of his victory. An interesting turn of events to be sure.
In Ohio, Ron will hit the stage with Republican Senate candidate JD Vance, a private equity executive who cast doubt on the 2020 election results when he appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast to denounce mail-voting and stated, “I think at a basic level we already know mostly what happened” in regards to non-existent widespread voting fraud. Vance at one point called Donald Trump “cultural heroin” but later came around to the former President and has made the racist replacement theory conspiracy a centerpiece of his campaign. Maybe Florida State Senator Dennis Baxley can make the trip also.
Last but certainly not least is Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, fresh off refusing to answer any questions under subpoena by the House January 6 Committee. Mastriano was a leader in the Big Lie movement, paying thousands of dollars to charter buses to the January 6 insurrection and attending the rally himself, was part of a plan to arrange a slate of false electors in Pennsylvania following the 2020 election, and has repeatedly associated himself with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement. The Mastriano campaign also paid for campaign consulting from the far-right website Gab, a haven for racist and anti-semitic hate speech, and Mastriano has recieved the endorsement of Gab founder Andrew Torba whose most recent anti-semitic statements occurred just last month. Hopefully Dr. Oz can make it in from New Jersey for the festivities.
Ron DeSantis should feel right at home among these Little Big Liars, considering he was calling for overturning the will of the people two days after the election in 2020.
“Much like in an HBO miniseries, Ron and the rest of America’s Little Big Liars have based their political careers on pure fiction and deception,” said DeSantis Watch Constituencies Director Natasha Sutherland. “Just like the extremists he’s campaigning with, no amount of bad acting can hide that Ron spends all his time doing the bidding of billionaire donors, subverting democracy, and cozying up to conspiracy theorists in order to advance his own political career. Floridians worried about whether their child has a full time teacher or struggling to pay rent or their property insurance premiums deserve better than a Governor who would rather travel the country like a Hollywood socialite than get to work on their behalf.”