Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we dive into the latest outbreak of DeSantis Derangement Syndrome, look at a puff piece on Pete Buttigieg, and cover more media misses.

Pundits Panic as DeSantis 2024 Campaign Nears Launch

The prospect of a “President DeSantis” has brought about another outbreak of DeSantis Derangement Syndrome — and the symptoms are as bad as ever.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is expected to join the 2024 presidential race this week and liberals and the mainstream media are in a tizzy.

Politico dropped a hit piece on Casey DeSantis, Florida’s first lady, that includes a comparison to the power-hungry Shakespeare character Lady Macbeth, who urged her husband to kill the king so she could become queen.

“For some time now she’s been seen mostly and by many as an absolute superstar of a political spouse,” writes Politico senior staff writer Michael Kruse. “For nearly as long, too, though, others who have worked with her or around her have nodded more quietly to the downsides of the starring part that she plays. The DeSantis inner circle is too small and remains so, they say, not only because he constitutionally doesn’t trust people but because she doesn’t either. Especially forthright are the people who are granted anonymity on account of their fear of retribution given their power — not just his but hers.”

The story goes on to note Trump ally Roger Stone said last year, “Have you ever noticed . . . how much Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?”

Kruse notes that Stone’s comment, which was used to promote the piece on social media, was “hyperbolic” but suggests it means she is an “agent” of her “husband’s undoing.”

“The more complicated but also more instructive reality is that she is neither the fawning caricature she’s made out to be in conservative and even at times mainstream media nor a Shakespearean villain,” Kruse wrote. “She might well be a bit of both, say even some DeSantis proponents, and somewhere in this tension sits the central dynamic of the pending DeSantis campaign. She can ameliorate some of the effects of his idiosyncrasies. She can also accentuate, even exacerbate, his hubris, and his paranoia, and his vaulting ambition — because those are all traits that they share.”

But during last year’s midterms, Politico Magazine senior editor Katelyn Fossett roundly dismissed the use of the “Lady Macbeth” analogy when it came to the wives of Democratic lawmakers, including Jill Biden and Gisele Fetterman. The result of such attacks “is a reinforcement of traditional gender roles that make any ambitious woman suspect,” Fossett wrote.

Kruse’article quotes DeSantis donor and supporter Dan Eberhart as saying Casey DeSantis is her husband’s “biggest asset and his biggest liability.” It includes comment from several Republican-turned-Democratic-allies including David Jolly, Rick Wilson, and Mac Stipanovich.

New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz dismissed Politico’s reporting and shared her own profile of Casey DeSantis:

Other outlets have trained their fire directly on Ron DeSantis himself. According to Florida Sun Sentinel columnist Steve Bousquet, “DeSantis does what he wants, and we’re all hostages to his political ambitions.”

“Aren’t you excited that Ron DeSantis could be our next president? I didn’t think so,” Bousquet asks and answers.

“What should be cause for jubilation, or at least civic pride, feels like anything but. That’s because his autocratic reign continues to tear this state apart,” he opines. “He won re-election by 19 percentage points, but it’s not the Florida it used to be. Elected leaders have made intolerance fashionable.”

And in Slate you can read about the “battle against fascism in Florida.”

“The situation in Florida clearly represents a threat to American democracy,” writes Maria J. Stephan, co-leader of the Horizons Project, a group that works to “strengthen relationships and collaboration within the ecosystem of social change to spur a larger movement in the United States that addresses systemic injustice, advances societal healing, and reimagines our democracy.”

“Florida has become the epicenter of a struggle between authoritarianism and those committed to freedom and justice for all,” Stephan says. “Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, actively campaigned for election deniers, embraced divide-and-rule politics, and enacted extreme policies that gut fundamental freedoms enshrined in Florida’s and the US Constitution.”

“These policies, grounded in racial resentment, misogyny, homophobia, and the punishment of opponents using state power, come straight from the global authoritarian playbook and are already spreading from Florida to other state legislatures across the country. Attacks on fundamental rights and freedoms are only likely to accelerate should DeSantis’ clear 2024 presidential ambitions be realized,” she adds.

DeSantis has been fielding attacks from both the left and the right. Trump-aligned GOP consultant Alex Brusewitz deleted a series of tweets knocking DeSantis for not doing enough to limit abortion in Florida after Trump suggested Florida’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy is “too harsh.”

Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried decried a new Florida state law that would make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to enter the state by saying the law will cause 800,000 migrants to leave the Sunshine State. In that case, she doesn’t know “who is going to be doing the picking of the fields during the harvest and who is building all these new homes for everybody who is moving to our state.”

The law in question, Senate Bill 1718, goes into effect on July 1 and will impose harsher penalties for transporting illegal immigrants into Florida, invalidate driver’s licenses for individuals who can’t prove their legal status, and require hospitals that receive Medicaid to confirm patients’ immigration status. It also sets aside $12 million to “send migrants out of Florida.”

“They’re all going to be gone,” Fried said of illegal immigrants in Florida during an appearance on MSNBC. “And he’s going to have crippled our economy because he’s got such a distaste and distrust for people that don’t look like him and pray like him.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid said, “But if the migrant workers all leave your state and construction projects are going without workers and having to shut down, and the agricultural industry can’t find workers, you can’t build a big enough white ethno state to find enough people to replace them. So is the Christian white ethno state going to somehow supply these workers?”

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) also said DeSantis is “going to devastate our economy, tourism, construction, agriculture” with the new law.

“I mean you’re going to have vegetables rotting in the field, you’re going to have construction sites that will lie dormant, or certainly will struggle to get workers to help make sure that they can make progress,” she said.

And the DeSantis hate train kept rolling at MSNBC, with anchor Chris Hayes shouting that gender transition procedures for minors in Florida are none of his “goddamn business!” after the governor signed Senate Bill 254, which bans anyone under the age of 18 from undergoing procedures or taking hormones for gender dysphoria.

“Ron DeSantis’s dystopian, authoritarian vision is most apparent in the legislation he just signed yesterday. It bans all gender-affirming care for all minors in Florida, everyone 18 or younger.”

Hayes said the law “empowers state courts to change custody agreements if a child is receiving or is at risk of receiving gender-affirming care – meaning taking a kid away from a parent.”

“Telling parents how they can or cannot raise their own children is among the most authoritarian things that government can do,” Hayes said. “And now that is exactly what Ron DeSantis and the Republican Party in Florida, and generally the conservative movement that endorses this, are doing purely for ideological and punitive purposes.”

He said there are parents and families who have decided, along with their doctors, that “gender affirming care is the best care for their kids.” Addressing DeSantis and other Republicans he said, “You may not like it! But you know what? It’s none of your, excuse me, goddamn business!”

When DeSantis signed the bill into law, he said it would “permanently outlaw the mutilation of minors. It will outlaw the surgical procedures and experimental puberty blockers for minors.”

“It will also require any adults receiving these surgeries to be informed about the irreversible nature and about the dangers of the procedures,” the governor added. “It will give the courts temporary jurisdiction to intervene and halt procedures for out-of-state children.”

Headline Fail of the Week

A riveting story by Wired invites readers inside the “cathedral mind” of Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The fawning piece by contributor Virginia Heffernan says infrastructure “occupies just a sliver of his voluminous mind.” Buttigieg, Wired will have you know, “loves God, beer and his electric Mustang.”

“As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers,” Heffernan wrote.

While the article spends significant time underscoring Buttigieg’s massive brain power and his love of hamburgers, it does in fact finally get around to answering pressing questions such as, “Are there more ways the challenges of transportation speak to your spiritual side?”

Media Misses

• The New York Times last week reported that the Durham report “produced no startling revelations” and “is being viewed by some conservatives as lending credence to their conspiracy theories about the U.S. agency.” This despite the report having confirmed that the DOJ and FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence.” The report also confirmed that the FBI did not give due consideration to the possibility that the Steele Dossier, which was used to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page, was Russian disinformation.

• Despite the aforementioned facts, Representative Daniel Goldman (D., N.Y.) said the Steele Dossier “was irrelevant to the origination of the Russia investigation and irrelevant to the Mueller Report. Yet Durham spent the majority of his ‘report’ on it. Having failed as a prosecutor, Durham morphed into a bad politician in a prosecutor’s clothes.”

• The Los Angeles Department of Transportation held a press conference to announce major news last week: It had installed La Sombrita, an 18-inch wide metal fixture that attaches to existing bus-stop poles to provide shade during the day and light at night for people taking the city’s buses in areas where there is not enough space for a full bus shelter. The project was part of the department’s “Gender Equity Action Plan.”

But despite officials having spent $200,000, it provides little shade or light and has been widely mocked online.