DeSantis' Bizarre Anti-Gay Ad

As Ron DeSantis gets more desperate to gain traction against Donald Trump, one increasingly has to wonder who is advising his campaign.  Last week team DeSantis ran an anti-gay ad seemingly targeting Donald Trump as too friendly to LGBT citizens that was so bizarre that it was slammed even among right wing talking heads and then taken down.  The ad had one positive impact in my view: gay Republicans - something to me akin to a Jewish Nazi in 1930's Germany - finally have awaked to the reality that DeSantis is their mortal enemy as noted in a piece at LGBT Nation: 

Gay Republicans are abandoning Florida Gov. and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R) in droves after his rapid response team shared a bizarre video bragging about his reign of terror against the LGBTQ+ community.

And despite DeSantis’s years-long crusade against LGBTQ+ people, this video, for whatever reason, seems to be the last straw for gay conservatives who had formerly viewed the Florida governor as a palatable alternative to Trump.

“Not only did DeSantis show that he is as anti-LGBTQ+ as the mainstream media has alleged, he made a mockery of any GOP candidate that shows an interest in LGBTQ+ rights, setting the whole party back decades,” wrote Yvonne Dean-Bailey, former Republican state legislator in New Hampshire, in an op-ed for the Daily Beast. 

Why these gay Republicans are shocked is baffling since the planks of the last GOP national platform contained stridently anti-LGBT provisions.  A piece in Politico looks further into the truly bizarre nature of the ad and its strange themes that have prompted negative reactions save perhaps among the most hysterically gay elements of the hideous elements of the MAGA base.   Here are article highlights:  

 Over Fourth of July weekend, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign drew fire from across the political spectrum after it shared a bizarre, 1-minute-and-13-second video hyping the Florida governor’s hardline opposition to LGBTQ rights. The video, which was created by an anonymous account and shared on Twitter by the DeSantis campaign’s “rapid response” team, has been skewered by critics on both the left and the right for its homophobia and transphobia. But commentators also fixated on another element: It’s just plain weird, a video that is largely unintelligible to someone who hasn’t spent too many hours on the darker corners of the internet.

The clip, which was tweeted by DeSantis’ team with the message “To wrap up ‘Pride Month,’” opens by attacking former President Donald Trump for his past support of LGBTQ people, setting pictures of Trump shaking hands with Caitlyn Jenner and holding a pride flag against upbeat techno music. But 23 seconds in, the video takes a turn. The upbeat techno music is replaced by an ominous base tone. Clips of DeSantis fade in and out, intercut with a series of seemingly random images: DeSantis with red lightning bolts emerging from his eye sockets; a black-and-white photo of a chiseled bodybuilder; pictures of Hollywood anti-heroes.

To the average voter, this rapid-fire mishmash of images might seem like a political fever dream. But the video fits squarely within an emergent strain of an online conservative subset that focuses on LGBTQ issues and masculinity. This discourse, which emerged from an obscure corner of the internet sometimes called the “manosphere,” relies on a heavily self-referential set of memes to convey its message, a message that is almost always drenched in irony . . . Yet beneath the irony lies a coherent — if deeply intolerant — argument: The embrace of LGBTQ people is part of a broader plot in society to destroy traditional masculinity.

For the most part, this irony-laden variety of homophobia remains a relatively fringe position on the online right. But its prominence in DeSantis’ latest campaign video suggests that it could be seeping into the conservative mainstream, and that might pay dividends among a group of Republican voters. . . . “They are trying to demonstrate that DeSantis doesn’t just talk the talk, but he walks the walk — that Trump is all full of lip service, but that DeSantis is the one who makes good on quasi-Trumpian promises.”

“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last weekend when asked about DeSantis’ video — apparently referring to several shots of slick-looking male bodybuilders flexing their bulging muscles. But in certain corners of the online right where the popularity of bodybuilding is on the rise, it’s not strange at all. For one possible explanation of this trend, look no further than Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed documentary The End of Men, which advanced the argument that the destruction of men’s bodies through poor nutrition and poor exercise habits is part of a broader globalist plot to take over the world.

As many commentators online have pointed out, there a poignant irony to the fact that a video targeting LGBTQ people included an image of Achilles, given that many scholars have interpreted Achilles’ friendship with Patroclus as a type of homosexual relationship. But the valorization of Achilles fits neatly within a broader far-right obsession with ancient Rome and Greece, which some conservatives hold up as the cradle of “Western civilization.” Ever heard of “Bronze Age Mindset”? We bet the creators of this video have.

DeSantis is dangerous and needs to be sent into the political wilderness.