Earlier this week, presidential hopeful Nikki Haley decided to alienate basically everyone in the country by suggesting all social media accounts be forced to display their users’ real, legal names. It went about as well as expected for the former South Carolina governor legally named Nimarata Nikki Randhawa Haley; observers of all political stripes found the bipartisan bonhomie to savage the proposal, which she walked back in a matter of hours.
Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are currently fighting over who gets to be the Republican presidential nominee if Donald Trump starts choking to death on a luau pig and no industrial hydraulic presses are available to give him the Heimlich. And so they’ve found themselves in a little squabble over Haley’s proposal, because attacking fellow hopefuls Asa Hutchinson or Doug Burgum would be a bit like standing on the side of the interstate screaming talking points at roadkill.
RELATED STORY: Nikki Haley wants to doxx every person on social media—or does she?
DeSantis, who’s presumably running for president to prevent anyone from discovering the existence of gay people, used this opportunity to put some distance between him and Haley—who’s gradually been gaining in the polls—to point out that several Founding Fathers used pseudonyms to publish some of their most important works.
He also claimed that “Haley’s proposal to ban anonymous speech online—similar to what China recently did—is dangerous and unconstitutional.”
Yes, it is a dangerous idea. And very likely unconstitutional, even in a country that picks its Supreme Court justices with all the care of a Boone’s Farm-besotted teenager pulling stuffed puffins from an arcade claw machine. But, as some are pointing out, DeSantis is hardly the ideal spokesperson on this issue.
DeSantis hasn’t always been such an ardent defender of anonymous speech. During his tenure as Florida governor, he has railed repeatedly against the use of unidentified sources in news stories, going as far as to host a live-streamed roundtable discussion earlier this year to push for legal changes that would have clamped down on journalists’ use of such voices and make it easier to sue reporters for defamation.
The bill also would have made using anonymous sources more difficult by creating the legal assumption that “a statement by an anonymous source is presumptively false for purposes of a defamation action.”
That bill, HB 991, and its companion measure in the state Senate, SB 1220, ultimately died in committee. DeSantis later said that he has no issue with reporters citing anonymous sources in cases of “real serious malfeasance in government,” when using someone’s name could put their livelihood at risk, but said that journalists often use “anonymous sources to smear” individuals.
Hoo-boy. Well, that sounds way worse than doxxing Catturd, doesn’t it? But at this point, DeSantis is doing anything he possibly can to stand out among the crowd, beyond wearing lifts in his boots or asking Mike Pence to carry him on his shoulders with an overcoat draped over them both in a vain attempt to create an 8-foot-tall uber-Christian super candidate.
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But while DeSantis’ desperate flailing—and glaring hypocrisy—may have escaped his supporters’ notice, his detractors have been far more clear-eyed.
“He has been the most anti-free speech governor in the history of Florida and among the most anti-free speech governors the United States has ever seen,” Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic operative told the Orlando Sentinel. “To me, what’s really interesting is they’re willing to risk the hypocrisy badge because they’re so desperate and scared about Haley.”
Haley tried to walk back her original proposal shortly after she made it, claiming that she was really just talking about “anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech.” And she immediately picked up on the hypocrisy inherent in DeSantis’ criticism. “[DeSantis] wants China and Iran to be able to do anything anonymously on social media, but doesn’t want Americans to be able to speak to the press anonymously,” her campaign told the Miami Herald. “The more DeSantis loses, the more he lies.”
DeSantis’ campaign hit back, claiming that his position on the free speech rights of anonymous newspaper sources was different from Haley’s take on anonymous social media users. Of course, he neglected to mention that it was far worse.
“Defamation is not a constitutionally protected right, and the media certainly needs more accountability when they utilize unfair advantage and disproportionate resources to attack and cancel people they disagree with,” DeSantis campaign press secretary Bryan Griffin told The Herald. “This is plainly different from Nikki Haley’s proposal to restrict the First Amendment right of everyday citizens to speak anonymously.”
DeSantis is all for secrecy when it benefits him. As activist and DNC member Thomas Kennedy told the Sentinel, “DeSantis’ whole approach has been to stifle ideas and people he doesn’t like. … It’s only free speech when it’s ideas that he likes.”
Indeed, the only transparency DeSantis really likes is his supporters’ prevailing skin tone. In fact, The Washington Post is currently challenging a Florida law—which was mysteriously passed just before DeSantis announced his candidacy—that keeps his travel records hidden from the public eye.
GOP legislators said that the law — which applied not just to future travels but also to trips DeSantis had already taken — was needed to protect the safety of the governor and his family. But Democrats said the move was made to help out with the governor’s political ambitions by shielding his travel from public scrutiny.
[…]
In late October, lawyers for the Post filed a 25-page motion asking that [Florida Circuit Judge Angela] Dempsey order the law-enforcement agency to hand over additional records, asserting that the travel records exemption was overly broad and unconstitutional. Florida voters in 1992 passed a “Sunshine amendment” that guarantees the public’s access to government records and open meetings.
“The exemption sweeps from public view every record relating in any way to the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars each year, including the most basic information needed to inform the public about what those services are for, when they were provided, who received them and why,” states the motion filed by the Post’s lawyers. “The Florida Constitution prohibits such a gaping disconnect between the narrow justification for an exemption and its sweeping coverage.”
Right on, Ron! Way to hide basic shit from your constituents. And anyone else who might somehow be persuaded to vote for you. But maybe that “sunshine” amendment is so old, it’s hardly worth discussing. Though, to be fair, you might want to think about changing Florida’s nickname from “the Sunshine State” to, say, “the Gun Shrine State.” That’s long overdue anyway.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
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