Ron DeSantis Insists Voter Intimidation Tactics Are No Big Deal

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis doubled down Monday on his decision to dispatch state police to investigate thousands of verified signatures that helped to put a state constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion on the ballot in November.

Following a roundtable discussion with condominium owners in Miami Lakes, Florida, DeSantis was asked to respond to reports that state residents felt “intimidated” after police officers were instructed to show up at their homes to verify signatures collected supporting an amendment that would overturn Florida’s current six-week abortion ban.

Last week, DeSantis requested that election supervisors across several counties submit 36,000 signatures for state review after the Department of State claimed that it had “uncovered evidence of illegal conduct with fraudulent petitions.” One supervisor with 16 years of experience told the Tampa Bay Times that the state’s enormous, last-minute request was entirely unprecedented.

DeSantis has publicly opposed the amendment, and last week, Florida’s Agency for Health Care published an official website opposing the amendment. Still, DeSantis insisted that the state’s investigation was simply due diligence, and not part of a state campaign to undermine the publicly supported amendment with police force.

“Are you concerned at all about that?” one reporter asked DeSantis on Monday. “That this investigation could lead to supporters of that amendment feeling intimidated by law enforcement?”

“Anyone who submitted a petition, accurately, that’s a valid voter [who] is totally within their rights to do it. They’re not investigating that, what they are investigating is fraudulent petitions,” DeSantis replied.

DeSantis claimed that the group behind the petition, Floridians Protecting Freedom, had submitted petitions on behalf of the deceased. “Uh, I don’t know how you do that, I mean, I thought that was a Chicago thing!” DeSantis exclaimed. It was unclear whether DeSantis was referring to this petition or a previous petition, but this specific claim appears entirely unsubstantiated.

The governor said that the state was investigating cases “where the petition and the name does not match the signature that’s on file.”

“I do think that they’ve identified examples that are not valid. And, they absolutely need to be—anyone that is trying to commit fraud in this process absolutely should be held accountable, and what I’ve found is if people know that there’s accountability then it really deters others from wanting to do it,” DeSantis said, giving a nod to his own game of chilling speech.

DeSantis went on to spread claims of widespread voter fraud, which he admitted could be entirely innocent mistakes, and baselessly complained that Democrats were fighting for noncitizens to vote in local elections.

“You look at what’s happening in Ohio, where they brought in all these illegal immigrants from Haiti, and they have like tens of thousands now in this one little town in Ohio. It’s just overwhelming all these services,” DeSantis said, repeating false talking points from Donald Trump’s social media earlier that day. “So you’ve had a massive open border, and deliberately bringing people in and dropping them in certain communities, which, you just can’t handle that type of influx.”

“It’ll be interesting to see how Kamala [Harris] answers this in the debate tomorrow night, because I just think it’s indefensible having been the border czar,” DeSantis said, complaining about immigrants from the Middle East and China coming over the southern U.S. border. DeSantis also alleged that “training camps for terrorists” were training people to “infiltrate the country” and said that noncitizen voting was tantamount to “foreign interference.”

“If people signed petitions, and it looks, for whatever reason, if someone uh uh, is questioning that. If you signed it, you signed it. And you have a right to sign ’em,” DeSantis said, sounding overwhelmed after diverting into right-wing anti-immigrant talking points for several minutes straight.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has been accused of trying to thwart the petition. “These are petitions that were already approved, that were done properly,” said Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Monday, according to the Independent. “This police intimidation tactic is clearly intended to chill the democratic process.”

In a recent gaffe-filled, nonsensical speech, 78-year-old Donald Trump seemed to imply that 80-year-olds are incapable of signing important documents.

Speaking in the battleground state of Wisconsin on Saturday, Trump suddenly poked fun at the elderly, during a rant about Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis.

“Great patriots have been indicted by Fani and her boyfriend, and it’s a disgrace. You had people that are in their eighties, ‘Uh would you sign here?’” said Trump, with no real explanation of how the two thoughts connected.

It’s unclear which 80-year-olds he is ridiculing: whether that be his great “innocent” patriots or some cabal of elderly people in cahoots with Willis. What is clear, however, is that Trump’s offhand comment only throws himself under the bus. In case Trump has forgotten, he will turn 80 in 2026. And he is running to serve a four-year term as president, during which he would presumably be signing documents” quite often.

Immediately following the comment about old people, Trump rattled off American historical figures who he said “did the same kind of things” as himself, such as Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Notably, Hamilton wouldn’t have tried to steal an election because he never ran for president.

Elsewhere in the speech, Trump called his friend Elon Musk “Leon” and warned his crowd that if “Comrade Kamala Harris gets four more years, you will be living a full-blown banana republic ruled by an anarchy and a tyranny.”

Now that Joe Biden is out of the race, Trump’s rapidly increasing cognitive decline is more and more on display. With each speech he gives us a new unintelligible moment, or several.

Senator Ted Cruz has joined the “Haitian immigrants are eating house cats” conspiracy theory, sharing a meme on X on Monday that he presumably thinks is funny.

But as the internet was quick to remind him, Cruz probably shouldn’t be getting involved in spreading any conspiracy theories involving pets. When he made his infamous trip to Cancún during Texas’s devastating 2021 snowstorm, he left behind his family’s pet dog, ironically named Snowflake, to be looked after by a security guard. The storm left millions of Texans without electricity, and Cruz’s house (without its normal occupants) was among them.

Several users on X were quick to remind Cruz about that embarrassing incident.

And others pointed out the bigotry behind the false rumor.

Ironically, Cruz is the son of an immigrant who successfully sought political asylum in the United States, making his post hypocritical in addition to xenophobic.

Cruz should probably be more worried about his upcoming election, as his lead over his Democratic challenger, Representative Colin Allred, is shrinking. He could also focus more on his Senate duties, instead of engaging in shouting matches or pushing a self-serving airport security bill that is another reminder of his Cancún trip. But it seems that he’s more interested in making racist jokes, engaging in political theater, and fawning over the man who famously insulted his wife and father, Donald Trump.

A secret network of influencers were paid big bucks to spread sexual rumors about Kamala Harris, according to a new Semafor investigation.

The investigation delves into a weird political network of posters, led by an unknown individual, who made it their mission to smear Kamala Harris about her sex life. One person made as much as $20,000 for being a part of the scheme.

While the group first organized around generic Republican talking points to support Donald Trump, after an emergency “War Room—Kamala Messaging” meeting following President Joe Biden’s choice to step aside, the network shifted gears to talk about Harris’s sexual activities. They compared Harris to Haliey Welch, the “Hawk Tuah girl” who went viral after discussing oral sex.

In August, Trump elevated similar attacks on Harris, reposting a meme on Truth Social featuring photos of Harris and Hillary Clinton alongside the comment: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently …” Other conservative posters also emphasized Harris’s previous relationships with California politician Willie Brown and television host Montel Williams.

Meanwhile, the right-wing influencer group moved in secret. In Zoom meetings, they kept their cameras off and operated under aliases. But Semafor was able to ID one participant: former New York Representative George Santos. After the plan to sexually smear Harris materialized, the disgraced former congressman said he rejected the messaging and left the call, according to a participant who spoke to Semafor.

On July 24, less than 48 hours after the influencer call, Santos posted on X, criticizing “conservative influencers talking about Kamala’s sex life and race” rather than legitimate issues. “Please God make it stop.… I don’t pay my bills or fill up my car with this nonsense!”

Kimberly Guilfoyle just had her Jeb Bush moment.

The waning conservative star lost her spark while speaking at a Republican fundraiser in Florida on Saturday, where even like-minded conservatives couldn’t find it in themselves to clap for the 2020 Trump campaign adviser.

“I’m here to tell you, don’t lose hope. On a personal note, I can tell you that I am as hopeful as ever,” Guilfoyle said at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida. “Because Americans from all walks of life have had enough of the Democrats’ decline. And we are ready, we are willing, and we are able to spark a new era of American exceptionalism.”

But that tagline didn’t elicit any reaction from the muted crowd.

“You can clap for that,” Guilfoyle added, tossing her head to the side.

About 700 Republicans were in attendance, reported The Palm Beach Post.

Even direct attacks against Democratic leadership, including Vice President Kamala Harris, fell flat with the right-wing loyalists during Guilfoyle’s roughly 15-minute speech.

“I have known her for 25 years. And let me tell you something: Do whatever it takes to keep her out of the White House,” Guilfoyle said to relative silence.

The lackluster reception to Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée could be credited to Guilfoyle’s low-tier spot in the evening’s speaker lineup, which otherwise included MAGA heavy hitters such as Senator Rick Scott, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, and Florida Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Byron Donalds. Still, the crowd managed to perk right up when Guilfoyle walked off the stage, giving a standing ovation to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as he emerged from behind the curtain to celebrate the “free state of Florida.”

The MAGA right, including Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, are spreading a racist rumor that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are capturing, cooking, and eating people’s pet cats and ducks.

Right-wingers seemed to have conflated a report from Canton, Ohio, of a woman who was arrested for allegedly killing and eating a cat, with complaints from residents in Springfield, more than 170 miles away from Canton. The woman is a U.S. citizen, and there is no indication she is a Haitian immigrant.

Meanwhile, police in Springfield say they have received no reports of pets being stolen and eaten, according to the Springfield News-Sun. The newspaper says that the rumor began from a local Facebook group, where a poster claimed that her neighbor’s daughter’s friend lost her pet cat and found it hanging from a tree branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home to be carved and eaten.

The post cited, with no evidence, that “rangers” and police said that “they have been doing it” at a local park with ducks and geese, according to the newspaper. But these reports do not appear to have reached the right, who are not only spreading the rumor, but using it to promote anti-immigrant policies and make racist attacks.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Republican members, former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, Representative Mike Collins, Elon Musk, commentator Charlie Kirk, conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, influencer Ian Miles Cheong, and many others have all picked up and spread the rumor, in some cases with bizarre A.I.-generated images of Donald Trump holding cats and ducks.

Vance reshared a video from a Senate hearing earlier this year where he claimed “Haitian illegal immigrants” were draining public resources in Springfield, repeating the baseless story that pets were being eaten. Other right-wing influencers have also shared reports of Springfield residents complaining about Haitian immigrants killing and eating ducks.

In reality, while Haitian immigrants have settled in the town since the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, local officials have been debunking rumors and misinformation about them for a long time, saying that any increases in crime are in line with national trends. Like in other elections, the GOP is using immigration fearmongering in the hopes that it will scare up votes and give credibility to Trump’s planned mass deportations.

Donald Trump is already laying the groundwork for his claims of election fraud by elevating outlandish right-wing claims about Pennsylvania.

“An interview by Tucker Carlson of an election expert indicates that 20% of the Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent. Here we go again!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday.

“Where is the U.S. Attorney General and FBI to INVESTIGATE? Where is the Pennsylvania Republican Party? We will WIN Pennsylvania by a lot, unless the Dems are allowed to CHEAT. THE RNC MUST ACTIVATE, NOW!!!”

In his post, Trump was seemingly referring to an April interview Carlson had done with Justin Haskins, the “Director of Socialism Research” at the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank linked to the Koch brothers and perhaps best known for cooking up virulent climate change denialism.

Earlier this year, the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports, the right-leaning polling group that regularly churns out the most favorable numbers for Trump, reported that one-fifth of those who cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 had committed some form of voter fraud, according to a survey of 1,085 “likely U.S. voters.”

Months later, Trump continues to boost this outlandish claim—but this time with a twist, aiming his ire at Pennsylvania, the most populous swing state and a crucial battleground for his presidential campaign. A CBS News poll released Sunday found that the former president was neck and neck with Kamala Harris among registered voters in Pennsylvania.

By claiming that the ballots “are” fraudulent, Trump is already setting to work fomenting claims of voter fraud in an election that has yet to take place.

Rasmussen’s poll results seemed less than credible, according to The Washington Post. While the survey found that “17% of mail-in voters admit that in 2020 they voted in a state where they are ‘no longer a permanent resident,’” about six in 10 Americans have never moved out of the state where they were born. That would mean that nearly half of the other voters had supposedly committed fraud.

The results also indicated that Republicans supposedly committed these federal crimes at an equal rate to Democrats, so the results don’t even serve Trump’s claims of a stolen election.

At the time this report was first released, Trump totally lost it. “THIS IS THE BIGGEST STORY OF THE YEAR,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “AND REPUBLICANS MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.”

He urged his party to “MAKE A MOVE NOW. GET TOUGH, GET SMART. OUR COUNTRY IS BEING STOLEN!”

Representative Lauren Boebert struggled to back up her extreme allegations about a Venezuelan gang’s alleged takeover of an apartment building in her home state of Colorado.

Last week, right-wing media and former President Donald Trump elevated claims that Tren de Aguas, a Venezuelan gang, had taken over The Edge, a residential building in Aurora, Colorado. After following up on the rumors, the Aurora Police Department determined that a gang had not taken over the complex.

At a press conference, Edge residents hit back at the right-wing claims and said that they were living in uninhabitable conditions as a result of neglect from CBZ Management, which was also responsible for another Aurora building where there was a mass eviction last month, according to Denver7.

Boebert held a community roundtable last week with Texas Representative Chip Roy to discuss the presence of gangs in Aurora, Colorado. While Boebert does not represent any of the residents of Aurora, the far-right anti-immigrant Republican took a special interest in the suddenly high-profile issue.

During the roundtable, Boebert discussed a recent report from Denver law firm Perkins Coie, which alleged that Tren de Aguas had a “stranglehold” on another apartment complex operated by CBZ Management, called Whispering Pines, five miles away from The Edge. According to CBS, the report was first sent to top Aurora administrators in early August.

The report, which had been made on behalf of a lender, alleged that gang members at Whispering Pines had committed several crimes including “flagrant trespass violations, assaults and battery, human trafficking and sexual abuse of minors, unlawful firearms possession, extortion, and other criminal activities, often targeting vulnerable Venezuelan and other immigrant populations.”

Boebert, Roy, and several other Republican lawmakers then sent a letter Friday to several U.S. officials, including Colorado Governor Jared Polis, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and FBI Director Christopher Wray, insisting that they had “confirmed” the report’s many claims.

However, as Kyle Clark of Next9 News pointed out, claims of sexual abuse of minors were seemingly new and unconnected to any recent arrests in the area. Clark explained that the report relied on a “third-hand anonymous claim” to make that allegation.

When asked how she had possibly confirmed the sexual abuse of minors by gang members in Aurora, Boebert couldn’t provide a coherent answer.

“This is a nonpartisan uh, law firm that has come out with this. This is information that is, is vetted. It is nonpartisan. And it is our most evident form of allegations that have been presented with ‘Tren de Aragua’ here in Aurora, Colorado,” Boebert said.

Boebert then claimed that being asked about this at all was tantamount to a media cover-up.

Trump campaign advisers aren’t distancing themselves from Tenet Media, the conservative media operation accused of taking millions of dollars from Russia to spread foreign propaganda. Instead, they’ve decided to defend it.

Trump campaign senior adviser Alina Habba attempted Sunday to brush off the Justice Department indictment, linking the scandal back to the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” in 2016.

“It’s so obvious,” Habba told Fox News Sunday morning. “The story is now that there’s a criminal investigation about a $10 million investigation into two individuals who had no idea they were being backed by a company that eventually, allegedly, had ties to Russia.”

“So in 2016 what happened? There was the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. The media peddled a story that we now know was funded by members of the DNC, their lawyers, Hillary Clinton was involved in all of this—we know that because she had to pay a fine for doing so,” Habba continued, referring to the DNC and the Clinton campaign’s failure to report the costs of the Trump-Russia dossier research to the Federal Election Commission in 2016.

Habba then went on to elevate the Durham report, an objective bust that failed to find any evidence that the FBI engaged in misconduct while investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, while damning the Mueller report—which left the possibility of Trump-Russia obstruction on the table—as a waste of “so much taxpayer dollars.”

“A $10 million payment to some podcasters who had no idea from some ties allegedly to Russia is now going to make a spin on Russia backing Trump,” Habba added.

The DOJ indictment accused Tenet and its founders of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

Other entities, even ones on the right, are not so quick to remain aligned with the allegedly compromised media personalities. The fallout from the alleged propaganda scheme lost Tenet’s co-founder Lauren Chen her broadcasting gig with another far-right media group, Blaze Media. Blaze wiped episodes of her podcast from Spotify and deleted her contributor page from its website shortly after the indictment was announced, with Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon telling Semafor that the conservative anchor had been “terminated.”

YouTube also wiped Tenet Media’s content from its platform “after careful review” following the indictment, telling NBC News that its decision to erase the channel and its affiliates was part of “ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”

The Russian funds paid for videos by popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. Pool described himself as a “victim” in the Tenet scandal.

“I have been contacted by the FBI as a potential victim of a crime,” Pool posted on X on Thursday. “The FBI believes I have information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation and have requested a voluntary interview. I will be offering my assistance in this matter.”

In a new interview, Donald Trump claims Mark Zuckerberg promised him there’s no way he’ll vote for a Democrat this November.

In a New York magazine interview published on Monday, Trump said that after the assassination attempt against him, Zuckerberg gave him a call to say that he wouldn’t vote against him.

“‘I’ve never supported a Republican before, but there’s no way I can vote for a Democrat in this election,’” Trump recalled the Meta CEO saying. “He’s a guy that, his parents, everybody was always Democrat. He said, ‘I will never vote for the people running against you after watching what you did.’”

Zuckerberg did tell Bloomberg in July, “Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” But Trump’s new story follows a long-standing feud between the two men. Just last month, Trump re-upped his threat to send Zuckerberg to prison for life if he “does anything illegal” or “cheats” in the 2024 election.

And Trump’s latest claim about Zuckerberg hasn’t been confirmed by anyone but Trump himself. In response to the news, a spokesperson at Meta said, “As Mark has said publicly, he’s not endorsing anybody in this race and has not communicated to anybody how he intends to vote.”

In the same New York magazine interview, Trump also claimed he got kind words from another tech magnate that fateful week: He claims Jeff Bezos gave him a ring as well.

“You know, I got so many nice calls from people I really don’t know. Jeff Bezos called. He said, ‘It is the most incredible thing I’ve ever watched.’ And he appreciated what I did, in the sense of getting up and letting people know,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Despite the fact that you own The Washington Post, I appreciate it.’” Amazon did not respond to New York magazine’s request for comment.

Obviously, Trump could be making all of this up—or it could be the case that more and more tech CEOs really are turning rightward.