It is too early to say that DeSantis is done
What Did Ron DeSantis Tell Us After the Midterms? Which Republican Candidate Is Yours? The Case for a Man Who Can Defend President Biden
We will say something about Mr. DeSantis one day. As with the candidates who ultimately surged back to victory, the strengths that made Mr. DeSantis seem so promising after the midterms are still there today. He still has unusually broad appeal throughout the Republican Party. His favorability ratings are stronger than Mr. Trump’s. He is still defined by issues, like the fight against woke, which have broad appeal to all his party members. If this was enough to be a strong contender in January, there’s reason it might be again.
If DeSantis is supposed to be Trump minus the unnecessary drama, why did he stumble into a prolonged and serially mortifying dust-up with Disney? He must have been annoyed by the corporation’s opposition to his “Don’t Say Gay” bill. He is easily annoyed. He got what he wanted when it came to legislation, so there was no need to punish Disney or make them fight harder because he already got his way. He wanted, well, drama. There’s also the rationale as well.
Why did Ron DeSantis sign the abortion ban in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy when he’s a moreelectable candidate than Donald Trump? It is not a liability for the Christian conservatives in Republican primaries, it is a liability for the moderates and independents after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. It makes a pancake out of that pitch.
It is easy to see how Mr. DeSantis has fallen over the last few months as a sign of weakness, but the polls tend to show a large group of voters open to both candidates. They might be prone to lurch one way or the other, depending on the way the political winds are blowing.
Social Media Censorship: The Campaign of Donald J. Musk and the Birth of a Space of Conservatives: A Case Study in DeSantis
Of course, the fact that he could mount a comeback doesn’t mean he will come back. His campaign’s decision to announce his bid on Twitter tonight forfeits a rare opportunity to be televised live on multiple networks in favor of a feature, Twitter Spaces, that I don’t even know how to use as a frequent Twitter user. Even if the campaign is run differently that it has so far, Donald J. Trump will not be defeated by a perfectly run Republican campaign.
Since taking over Twitter last year, Musk has amassed tremendous support and admiration from Republicans who have long accused social media platforms of unjustly censoring conservative speech. Musk has used this grief to point out that the company’s previous leaders were bias against conservatives and has offered up a bunch of internal Twitter documents as proof. Carlson was fired from Fox News, and since then, he and The Daily Wire have moved their shows to social media.
The campaign of Republican Ron DeSantis officially filed for the presidential race on Wednesday, the same day as the GOP primary election.
Poll numbers in the Republican primary have fallen over the last several weeks, but the popularity of Musk could serve as a boost to the candidate. A recent Morning Consult survey showed Trump overtaking DeSantis amongst GOP primary voters by 38 percent.
He said he would soon sign a “digital bill of rights” that would prevent state and government officials from consorting with social media companies.
DeSantis read his speech launching his campaign in the Sacks-hosted room around 25 minutes after the event was originally scheduled to begin. Musk said his account was breaking the system and he had to switch it over to David.
“Man, I think we melted the internet there,” Sacks said in a separate Space he created with his account after the first one shuttered. “I think it crashed because when you multiply a half million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented. But with my meager followership it seems to be working much better.”
The problems were caused by overloading of the servers, but Musk, one of the only people to actually speak in the first Space, said it was not clear what went wrong. Over 600,000 people were tuning into the Musk-hosted room before it ended.
The result obscured a number of Mr. DeSantis’s arguments and made him reluctant to give money. The promise of competence was a Republican selling point and made the first impression less than ideal. Mr. Trump and President Biden both mercilessly mocked the rollout.
His aides said Mr. DeSantis raised $1 million in an hour, a sizable amount but far from the record for a presidential kickoff, with no details provided about how many individual donors gave small contributions.
The Biden campaign bought ads to show Biden donation pages in case someone were to search for terms such as “DeSantis disaster” and “DeSantis flop.”
Alternative Accreditation Schemes and the University (The Case Against The D.E.I. Irrelevance of Censorship)
The problems with the university and ideological capture were not the result of an accident. Well, guess what? How are you able to become an accreditor? You’ve got to get approved by the U.S. Department of Education. So we’re going to be doing alternative accreditation regimes, where instead of saying, ‘You will only get accredited if you do D.E.I.,’ you’ll have an accreditor that will say, ‘We will not accredit you if you do D.E.I. We want a colorblind, merit-based accreditation scheme.’”
The conversation detoured into complaints about the horrors of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair magazines and into discussions of cryptocurrencies and the “de-banking” of “politically incorrect businesses.”
