The Daily Beast, famed neoliberal gossip rag second only in carcinogenic toxicity to HuffPo, published maybe the stupidest fashion-based hit piece ever, titled “Casey DeSantis Is the Walmart Melania,” over a jacket the governor’s wife wore. She didn’t purchase it with a 5000% markup from Saks Fifth Avenue, so they don’t approve.
Via The Daily Beast:
The First Lady of Florida showed up on the campaign trail in Iowa this weekend wearing a ghastly black leather jacket—American flag on the front, an alligator and the silhouette of her state on the back, with the sneering words, “Where Woke Goes to Die”—that brought to mind nothing so much as the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.
Iowa and Florida: Where woke goes to die…
….thanks to the leadership of @KimReynoldsIA and @RonDeSantis. pic.twitter.com/G1F4Y4NZrJ
— Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) June 4, 2023
People like Katie Baker, executive editor of The Daily Beast and author of this screed – which gets worse – don’t understand how off-putting these cute little thinkpieces are to the vast swathes of Americans in fly-over country because they don’t actually know any of them.
Their world, confined to Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, and perhaps the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard on weekends and holidays, is small and getting smaller.
This is also why the caricature straw men they erect of the MAGA hayseeds rummaging through clearance bins at WalMart on their way to Cracker Barrel are so overwrought and unnuanced; they don’t actually have any real-life specimens to study.
And it’s the reason, I might add, why they don’t realize how hated they are as the corporate state media. Trump did a lot to help them understand, but I’m not sure they’ve internalized the message.
Continuing:
Casey DeSantis’ coat is just like her husband Ron DeSantis’ campaign: Crude. Grasping. Saying the ugly part out loud. Whereas Trump would wink-wink at the fascists—who can forget his dog whistle to the “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville—DeSantis wants to peel off Trump’s base by being even more explicit about who he intends to target. You can see it right there on his wife’s jacket: DeSantis’ Florida is where the woke go to die—and a lot of other people die as well.
These kinds of hit jobs have the opposite of the intended effect due to their pettiness and mean-spiritedness – towards, no less, a non-politician.
The obscene article predictably pivots, as it inevitably was going to, to standard COVID talking points, LGBTQ+++™ propaganda, etc. Baker even insinuates the jacket is insensitive to the victims of the Pulse nightclub and, if you’ll indulge their delusions, lynching victims from the Jim Crow era.
Florida under DeSantis has had one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation, even as he’s exulted in his anti-mask policies. And as the governor whips up anti-LGBT sentiment and bans books on race, Casey’s jacket and its message of death also bring to mind the horrific Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, not to mention the state’s shameful history of Jim Crow-era lynch mobs and the Rosewood massacre. But of course, DeSantis and his cronies want to prevent kids from learning about any of that by censoring their library books and AP curricula.
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