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Dear Friend,
As I write this email, single-day coronavirus cases in Florida reached new highs. But as longtime Florida resident and New Republic consulting editor Adam Weinstein wrote this month: “To get a sense of Florida’s priorities amid a viral pandemic, economic ruin, and a campaign for Black lives, just look to the letter I received from state Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronus on Monday evening, asking me if I was a paid Chinese Communist agent. The form letter was addressed to the Florida-based S-corporation I formed in 2009 to handle my freelance writing and editing and which, as a “veteran-owned” business, is registered as a state vendor, even though I’ve never bid on a public contract and never intend to.”
Weinstein went on to explain that “Patronus was the Florida chairman of the notorious conservative, Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council … championing lobbyist-written bills that denuded Florida’s critical ecology and despoiled its environment.” Governor Ron DeSantis and Patronus are partners “in the decades-long conservative project to turn Florida into a no-services fiefdom for frictionless profiteering.”
Like mainstream media, the governor has been spreading Trump’s crazy idea that testing causes Covid-19 cases to increase. If he had a subscription to TNR, he could have read the truth from Adam Weinstein: “Testing is finding more afflicted Floridians because there are more afflicted Floridians.”
Weinstein doesn’t pull any punches: “Ron DeSantis is the latest in a long line of Republicans who made the state a plutocratic dystopia. Now he’s letting its residents die to save the plutocrats. I can’t help but wonder if DeSantis and his partisans’ coronavirus calculus is an essentially eugenicist one: They seem overtly content to let lots of people die, as long as they’re the right people.”
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