I was having my usual siesta on Wednesday afternoon when I was jolted awake by the sound of a truck straining to get up the hill. Discover that I tuned my computer into Elon Musk’s Twitter, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis struggled to get the official announcement of his candidacy for president out.

The sound turned out to be Musk trying to get the thing to work in real time, amid feedback, weird musical interludes, and long silences. Scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. Pacific Time, it finally kicked off on Twitter Spaces, an audio-only application on the platform, about 18 minutes late. I listened, so you don’t have it. Don’t mention it.

While struggling to fix repeated glitches in Twitter Spaces, Musk and the moderator, a Musk acolyte named David Sacks, continued to argue that the technical glitch was in fact a triumph brought on by the general public. (Sacks claimed more than 300,000 users logged in.) “We’re melting down the servers, which is a good sign,” Sacks said early on.

You cannot have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that affect our civilization.

This reminded many listeners of the claim by SpaceX, another of Musk’s ventures, that the April 20 launch of a prototype rocket, which ended with the vehicle exploding in flight four minutes after launch, was a success. Never mind that the launch destroyed the launch pad, flooded a neighboring community with debris and prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to

NASA, the company’s customer,

to set up a major investigation.

Once it got underway, the Twitter event unfolded like a love fest between DeSantis and Musk. The overall theme was what my mom always described as “I like me, who do you like?”

Musk and DeSantis praised each other for their commitment to free speech, and Sacks enlisted several right-wing sophists to add their voices. Among them was Jay Bhattacharya, one of the drafters of the Great Barrington Declaration, who, as I reported this week, advocated allowing the COVID virus to rampage through the population in search of the elusive goal of ‘herd immunity’ at the cost (so far) of more than 1.13 million American lives.

Another was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), whose national-scale fame released a Christmas tweet in 2021 showing himself, his wife, and their five children brandishing assault weapons. “Santa, please bring ammunition,” the tweet read. (As of December 2021, there have been 39 mass shootings in the US, claiming 36 lives and injuring 160.)

DeSantis said Florida was safer than blue-state cities, where “your kids are more likely to get shot than to get a first-class education.” As a reminder, one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history occurred in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, killing 17 people and injuring 17. In April, DeSantis signed a law allowing Floridians to carry guns without a permit.

It would be wrong to say there were no light-hearted moments during the Twitter event. Unfortunately for DeSantis, the best joke came from President Biden: While Musk struggled to get the event launched, Biden posted a tweet that read, “This link works,” referring to a fundraising site for the Biden-Harris campaign.

If you were looking for policy regulations of the freshly minted candidate, you heard nothing new. Put it this way, if you were at a party where you had to drink a shot of whiskey every time DeSantis uttered the word “wake,” you became desensitized within ten or twenty minutes. If the drinking game included a shot when DeSantis took a shot at “the old media,” you might have had your stomach pumped.

Aside from that, it was a festival of cynical lies and gross hypocrisy uttered by DeSantis.

For example, he spoke out in favor of freedom of expression and open debate. “People need to be exposed to different viewpoints,” he said. “You can’t have a free society unless we have the freedom to debate the most important issues that affect our civilization.”

This is the man who fought a fierce battle with Walt Disney Co. because Disney had spoken out against its “Don’t Say Gay” law, which stifled the teaching of gender issues in schools.

Column: A look into the dystopian abyss of President DeSantis’ America

When Sacks prepped him with a question about the battle with Disney, DeSantis responded, “We believe it’s wrong to disturb gender ideology in elementary school; Disney was clearly in favor of injecting gender ideology into elementary school.” He added that Disney’s “corporate culture had really been exposed as an attempt to inject sex issues into youth programming.” You don’t have to be a fan of it

walt

disney

co

to see that as silly nonsense.

DeSantis also dismissed accusations that Florida is a hotbed of book bans as “a hoax”. All his administration has done, he said, has been “to allow parents to review the curriculum, to know what books are being used in school.” That’s one way to look at it.

The right way is to see that he has empowered a small cadre of reactionary activists to force books they dislike from the shelves of Florida schools. As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, the majority of complaints about textbooks nationwide come from just 11 complainants. Florida ranks second among states in the number of textbook challenges, after Texas.

By the way, one of the Republican mushrooms DeSantis has appointed to the board created to oversee Disney’s development district (as part of his retaliation against the company) is Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the right-wing censorship-happy organization Moms for Liberty.

When Bhattacharya came online, DeSantis took the opportunity to brag about his success against the COVID pandemic. The truth is that Florida’s record is one of abject, deadly failure. Florida’s COVID death rate of 411 per 100,000 residents is the 10th worst in the country. DeSantis has appointed Bhattacharya to a state panel examining federal COVID policies.

DeSantis claimed to have based his COVID policy on his determination to “look at the data… There was a concerted effort to quell dissent”. This can only be interpreted as a kind of

a

joke. DeSantis installed a COVID cracker, Joseph Ladapo, as Florida’s surgeon general.

Ladapo has promoted useless anti-COVID drugs such as ivermectin and advised against the COVID vaccines. “Looking at the data”? As the Tampa Bay Times has reported, based on official state documents, Ladapo deliberately deleted data from an official state report on the vaccines that contradicted its claim that the vaccines were unsafe for young men; studies even show that the vaccines are much safer for them than infection with the virus.

The event concluded with a hymn from Musk and DeSantis

to for

cryptocurrency, which amounts to tricking innocent small investors into burning their nest eggs in a scam.

“We should do it again,” DeSantis said as the feed closed. “We’ll make sure we come back and do it again. This is a great platform.”

We will see. DeSantis’ next appearance on Twitter could be just as buggy, or worse. The only thing we can be sure of is that whatever happens, Elon Musk will consider it a great success.