WASHINGTON — GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis confronted Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom with a map of public sightings of “human feces” in San Francisco during a debate between the pols Thursday.
DeSantis invoked the map of human waste as he argued that California had let itself go under Newsom, who was mayor of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011.
“This is a map of San Francisco. There’s a lot of plots on that. You may be asking, what is that plotting? Well, this is an app where they plot the human feces that are found on the streets of San Francisco,” DeSantis said, holding up the geographic depiction of the city smeared in shades of brown.
“And you see how almost the whole thing is covered. Because that is what has happened in one of the previous greatest cities this country’s ever had. Human feces is [sic] now a fact of life, except when a communist dictator comes to town,” DeSantis said, referring to claims San Francisco tried to sweep its homeless and drug problems under the rug during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last month attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Then they cleaned up the streets,” DeSantis said.
There are multiple online mapping projects that seek to chart the public poops, including by Open the Books as well as an effort by a member of Rio Hondo College on the platform ArcGIS.
DeSantis, 45, and Newsom, 56, were the lone debaters in the Fox News showdown hosted by Sean Hannity as they seek to establish themselves as their party’s next generation of leaders. Polling shows Republican former President Donald Trump, 77, and Democratic President Biden, 81, are likely to win their parties’ presidential nominations early next year.
DeSantis averages 13.6% support in the GOP primary in the latest polls — second to Trump at 62% — and Newsom is widely seen as running a stealth campaign for the Democratic nod should Biden become unable to continue or decide to retire.
The Florida governor also brought a print-out to the debate of animated sexual situations from the book “Gender Queer” to counter Newsom’s contention that DeSantis’ administration was banning books in schools — arguing some content was simply age-inappropriate.
“Gavin Newsom, [at] one point, he tried to say that California was the Freedom State. I just kind of laughed, like, you’re locking people down [during the coronavirus], you’re doing all this,” began DeSantis, who in 2021 pardoned people arrested for violating his own COVID-19 restrictions, such as a prohibition on going to the beach.
“And then I thought about it — you know, California does have freedoms that some people, that other states don’t,” DeSantis continued.
“You have the freedom to defecate in public in California, you have the freedom to pitch a tent on Sunset Boulevard. You have the freedom to create a homeless encampment under a freeway and even light it on fire. You have the freedom to have an open air drug market and use drugs. You have the freedom if you’re an legal alien to get all these taxpayer benefits.
“They’re not the freedoms our Founding Fathers envision, but they have contributed to the destruction of the quality of life in California,” DeSantis said. “And the results speak for themselves. People are leaving the state because [state pols] have failed in addressing the homeless population.”
Newsom responded by ridiculing DeSantis’ “rant on freedom.”
“I mean, here’s a guy who is criminalizing teachers criminalizing doctors, criminalizing librarians and criminalizing women that seek their reproductive care,” Newsom said, referring to Florida restrictions on abortion and on school discussion of sexual orientation and gender expression.
“You’re making it harder to vote, you’re banning books. I mean, spare me this notion of freedom,” Newsom said of his foe.