The media obviously has it in for Ron DeSantis, and the Washington Post has outdone itself with a McCarthyite attack on his talks at events sponsored by David Horowitz.
The piece is headlined “GOP Candidate for Fla. Governor Spoke at Racially Charged Events.” It doesn’t establish that these events were racially charged or that DeSantis himself said anything racially charged, but let’s not quibble with a good narrative.
What it relies on is DeSantis’s association with controversial figures — such as Milo Yiannopoulos — via his attendance at the same conferences. But this doesn’t mean that DeSantis shares any views or anything else with the disgraced provocateur. The piece is tendentious throughout. This is how the Post describes our colleague Douglas Murray, who also has attended and, as our readers know, is unfailingly intelligent and interesting: “a critic of multiculturalism who has written that ‘Europe is committing suicide’ by welcoming large numbers of refugees and immigrants.” The piece also spends time trying to associate DeSantis with Horowitz’s Twitter feed, which DeSantis, of course, has nothing to do with.
As for DeSantis himself, the Post has nothing: “DeSantis’s four appearances at the annual events — only one of which, the 2017 speech, has been previously reported — are coming to light at a time when his positions on matters of race are under scrutiny. In three of the four speeches reviewed by The Washington Post, DeSantis delivered sharp-edged conservative criticism of Democratic policies without explicitly touching on race.” Oh.
But this is all about creating another supposed racial controversy so it can be written that DeSantis has a history of racial controversies. Sure enough, the Post ran a piece about its own piece, headlined “Another Headline Prompts Questions about Ron DeSantis’s Views on Race.”
This is cheap advocacy dressed up as journalism.