Tipsheet

Endless: Media Explode With Another Flurry of Deranged Lies About Florida

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  May 24, 2023 1:05 PM

The targeting of Florida is obviously no coincidence, considering what's happening later tonight.  Journalists have viewed the state's governor as a serious threat to their ideological and partisan interests for years, and have treated him as such throughout his time in office.  The hysteria is only growing more shrill as Ron DeSantis readies his presidential campaign, which the media is determined to defeat.  As usual, they're running with sloppy, inaccurate, and hysterical nonsense that discredits their work and vindicates the DeSantis operation's overall posture of treating most of the 'news' media as hostile adversaries.  

First, did you hear about one of the largest school districts in Florida banning huge numbers of books, thanks to the governor's fascism?  A video 'exposing' it went viral. Here's a 'senior editor' at HuffPo sharing it, as did hordes of activists and journos.  As of today, this video (originally exploding on TikTok) had racked up close to two million views on Twitter alone:

The only problem is that it was totally false, as confirmed by the district in one of the state's bluest counties:

But did you hear about the poem getting banned in Florida? The famous poet has been spouting off about this anti-art outrage in DeSantis' dystopia, with a great many journos piling on:

Once again, that's not what happened, and the poem wasn't banned at all, facts that didn't prevent an avalanche of headlines asserting blatant falsehoods:

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Then you have California's governor, who's not especially interested in fixing his own state's brokenness and population exodus, making nonsense up:

Someone should ask Newsom, incidentally, what he thinks of the various Neo-segregation pushes that are all the rage on the Left these days.  Meanwhile, there's the reaction to the NAACP's recent political stunt, joining other left-wing identity groups to issue a "travel advisory" about Florida (as if it's the State Department warning Americans not to vacation in Yemen).  Aside from all the glorious hypocrisy, like the NAACP's chairman living in Florida, the condescension of telling the thousands of black individuals and families who've actively moved to Florida under DeSantis that they don't know what's good for them is staggering.  And rooted in a factually-deficient premise, to boot:

The NAACP's "travel advisory" does not cite any figures, which show that black Floridians enjoy lower unemployment, higher median incomes, and lower rates of both hate crimes and police killings than their counterparts in other states...Left-wing activist groups have warned minorities against traveling to the Sunshine State in response to DeSantis’s educational reforms. The NAACP’s travel advisory comes after the League of United Latin American Citizens and the gay rights group Equality Florida issued similar warnings, the New York Times reported. These warnings paint a much grimmer picture than the reality of life in Florida. Black unemployment in the state stood at 3.8 percent by the end of 2022, far lower than the national average of 6.1 percent, or California’s of 7.5 percent. Florida is second in the country for the most minority-owned businesses, which may explain why median black family income is higher there than the national average or blue states such as Illinois.

Those economic facts may also explain why Florida has one of the largest black populations in the country—and why it has grown from 1.9 million to 3.2 million in the last 30 years. That's much different from the troubling picture the NAACP paints in its advisory, which claims "Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals." The NAACP warns black travelers to "be aware of the open hostility towards African Americans and people of color" in Florida. But blacks have enjoyed a higher degree of safety there than elsewhere. Florida law enforcement recorded 127 hate crimes in 2020, compared with 1,537 in California and 466 in New York. Three years into DeSantis’s first term as governor, the state saw a significantly lower amount of hate crimes than California. The reported hate crime rate in Florida was 0.6 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI, and 3.1 per 100,000 people in California. There is also evidence that blacks are far less likely to be killed by police in Florida than California or Washington, D.C.

But the NAACP and other groups' ridiculous advisories aren't about facts or reality. They're about politics.  If they were about reality, they'd note that Florida's crime rate has plunged to a 50 year low, and that the state was just ranked number one in the nation in education.  Instead, we've been treated to hilariously demented pronouncements like this:

Needless to say, you don't bring your own family to vacation in an incipient "terrorist state."  That's a deeply insane thing to do and say, but no one bats an eye on that panel.  Wild, deranged stuff.  If it were right-wingers airing that sort of inflammatory garbage, you'd have a lot of these same people wringing their hands about a climate of hate that could put the leaders of the targeted state in danger.  And in that same spirit, I'll leave you with this: