Broadway Actress Compares Ron DeSantis to KKK “Grand Wizard” at Tony Awards

Actor Denée Benton compared Ron DeSantis to the leader of the KKK while she presented an award at the Tony’s, a clear jab at the Florida governor’s recent attacks on human rights.

Benton presented an award for theater education to a school in Florida. The actor, known for shows including Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, noted that she is also from Florida.

“I’m certain that the current Grand Wizard—I’m sorry, excuse me, governor of my home state of Florida,” Benton said during her presentation speech. She was cut off by cheers.

“I am sure that he will be changing the name of this following town immediately.”

Benton then presented the award to the South Plantation High School in Plantation, Florida.

While Benton did not elaborate on her remark, it was a clear comment on the recent policies that DeSantis has passed or pushed in Florida. He defunded diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, helped gut the A.P. African American Studies course, and backed measures to ban books in public schools. In May, the NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida, calling the state “openly hostile towards African Americans and other communities of color.”

DeSantis’s attacks on civil rights also include a “Don’t Say Gay” law, banning classroom discussion of gender or sexuality in all grades, and a six-week abortion ban. He has enacted multiple laws targeting LGBTQ people, particularly drag queens and transgender children. A recently signed law banning gender-affirming care for minors has been partially blocked by a judge.

DeSantis has also gone to war with two major Florida institutions: the liberally minded New College and Disney. DeSantis installed a board packed with allies at the New College, who then ousted the school’s president. Students across the state have repeatedly protested DeSantis’s actions.

He tried a similar move with Disney, also installing an ally-packed governing board. But Disney fought back, and DeSantis is now locked into the weirdest legal battle ever.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Friday that he was resigning as a British lawmaker, after learning he would be sanctioned for misleading Parliament.

Johnson stepped down as prime minister in July, following the bombshell revelations that he and members of his Cabinet had violated U.K. Covid-19 protocols multiple times with wild parties at his office at 10 Downing Street. Johnson admitted in March that he misled Parliament about the so-called “Partygate,” but he denied doing so intentionally. Now he is resigning from his role as Conservative member of Parliament, effective immediately.

Here’s a look back at some of the worst things Johnson has said and done as a public servant.

1. No plan for Brexit

Johnson was one of the key campaigners for Brexit, which he ultimately oversaw during his premiership. But he never expected it to actually happen, according to a biography of him published in May.

“What the hell is happening?” Johnson kept saying after the vote results came in. “Oh shit, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it.”

The U.K. did finally leave the European Union under Johnson’s leadership. But Brexit, and the deal Johnson negotiated, were a total flop, sticking the U.K. with the lowest economic growth rate of all G7 nations. The International Monetary Fund expects it to be the only leading global economy to shrink this year.

2. Burqas look like “letter boxes”

Johnson compared women wearing burqas to “letter boxes” in a 2018 column for The Telegraph. In his opinion, it was “absolutely ridiculous” that people “choose to go around looking like letter boxes.”

He felt that people should be “fully entitled” to ask a woman to remove her burqa so that they can “talk to her properly.”

3. Bashar Al Assad should “keep going”

In a 2016 column for The Telegraph, Johnson said that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad should be allowed to keep doing his thing because he saved Palmyra from ISIS.

“Hooray, I say. Bravo—and keep going,” Johnson wrote. “Yes, I know. Assad is a monster, a dictator. He barrel-bombs his own people. His jails are full of tortured opponents. He and his father ruled for generations by the application of terror and violence—and yet there are at least two reasons why any sane person should feel a sense of satisfaction at what Assad’s troops have accomplished.” (The two reasons were ISIS and archaeology.)

4. The Holocaust was an attempt to recreate the “golden age” of Europe

Also in 2016, Johnson said the Roman Empire had been a “golden age” that saw Europe unified under a single government. The continent’s past 2,000 years were filled with attempts to recreate that political system.

“Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” Johnson told The Telegraph. “The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.”

5. Black people have “watermelon smiles”

In 2002, Johnson wrote in The Telegraph about a visit then–Prime Minister Tony Blair made to Africa. “What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England,” Johnson said.

“It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies,” he wrote. He also described African people as having “watermelon smiles.”

6. Colonialism in Africa should never have ended

Johnson was editor of the conservative magazine The Spectator from 1999 to 2005. In 2002, he wrote an article arguing that Africa would be in better shape if British colonialism had never ended.

“The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience,” he wrote in the piece. “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”

In the same article, Johnson downplayed Britain’s role in the slave trade and suggested that Ugandans would never have been able to grow a variety of crops. He also managed to blame Vietnam for low coffee prices.

Idaho and Mississippi have zero openly LGBTQ elected officials, despite major advances in queer representation in U.S. politics, a new report found.

The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, an organization that works to get LGBTQ people into public office, found that the number of openly queer elected officials increased by 13.6 percent from June 2022 to May 2023.

In its annual Out for America report, the group also found that the number of queer people of color elected jumped by 23.2 percent in the past year. But while this progress is heartening, LGBTQ elected officials still only make up less than a quarter of a percent of all U.S. officials.

That discrepancy is particularly noticeable in Idaho and Mississippi, which have no LGBTQ elected officials. Those two states, along with Louisiana and West Virginia, also have zero LGBTQ state legislators.

The situation in Idaho and Mississippi should come as no surprise, though. Both states have been aggressive in pushing legislation to curb LGBTQ rights since the start of the year. Mississippi lawmakers introduced at least 31 anti-LGBTQ bills at the start of the session alone.

Both states have banned gender-affirming care for transgender minors, with Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signing the measure in February and Idaho Governor Brad Little following suit in April.

The Idaho House also passed two bills in February targeting drag performances. One bill banned drag in public, and the other prohibited state agencies from sponsoring nongovernmental organizations and events such as Pride celebrations. Both those measures stalled in the state Senate.

Donald Trump, whose trademark 2016 motif was demanding Hillary Clinton be locked up for deleting emails, apparently admires that the emails were deleted, and wishes his legal team was up to snuff to do that kind of thing.

The former president has been impeached twice, criminally indicted, and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. And now, as he faces 37 criminal counts for mishandling classified government documents, absurd details of his behavior reveal both how tough a case this will be for him to crack and how almost too hypocritical he is.

“He said, he said that it—that it was him. That he was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments,” Trump said to his lawyers, an unnamed lawyer (widely assumed to be Evan Corcoran) told the special counsel. “And he was great. And he, so she didn’t get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted them.”

Trump shared the story on May 23, in the immediate aftermath of being issued a subpoena for the trove of classified documents he had taken from the White House. He apparently reiterated the story more than once, perhaps insinuating to the lawyers that they ought to be prepared to participate in some covering up themselves.

The difference between what Trump says in public versus what he says in private echoes the broader contradiction of him, for years, repeatedly calling for the lengthy imprisonment of those who mishandle classified information. Meanwhile, he had conceded he could not declassify things after leaving office (while sharing classified documents with people without security clearances).

The absurdity is embodied just as well by him sharing the classified documents with someone from his super PAC and hiding the documents in his shower, a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, and a bathroom with a signature Trump-style chandelier.

Donald Trump allegedly kept hundreds of classified documents, including on how best to attack the United States, from seven different government agencies, the indictment against him reveals.

Trump is now the first former president ever to be federally charged. Of the 37 total charges against him, which were unsealed Friday, 31 are for willful retention of national defense information. He is accused of keeping an array of classified national security material after leaving the White House, despite being unauthorized to do so.

The documents had come from the CIA, the Defense Department, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Energy, and the State Department and its Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

And a look at what was in the classified documents is quite damning.

The materials Trump kept included information on “potential vulnerabilities” to military attack for the United States and its allies, as well as details on the U.S. nuclear program. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods,” the indictment said.

The documents also contained plans for possible retaliatory attacks on foreign nations. One such document detailed a plan to attack Iran. Prosecutors obtained recordings of Trump admitting he had the document and that he knew he couldn’t declassify it because he was no longer president. That document has not yet been recovered.