I regret to inform you that Ron DeSantis is being attacked again. This time over of an innocuous announcement that Florida is awarding $80 billion in infrastructure funds to better the state.
To get things going, here’s what that looked like, and you can probably imagine what came next.
After DeSantis plugged the distribution of the funds, multiple journalists descended, snarking that this proved the Florida governor was a hypocrite. But as we’ll get to momentarily, there’s a very big problem with their framing.
There are a few things to deal with here. To start, I’m not sure DeSantis ever “opposed” the infrastructure bill. Rather, he criticized it as containing too much pork for blue states, while not providing a fair amount to Florida. I can’t find any evidence he was outright against the bill. Perhaps he was and never made that clear? But it would seem that if people are going to claim he opposed it, they should provide a quote showing that.
But that’s marginal compared to the biggest screw-up in this latest attack.
Apparently, none of the money DeSantis awarded had anything to do with the infrastructure bill. That makes perfect sense — given that bill was only passed two months ago. Money does not typically get distributed that quickly from the federal government, when an allocation to the states is made via Congress.
So, where’d the money actually come from? It came from Donald Trump’s administration as part of a long-term recovery fund following Hurricane Irma. Not only did the infrastructure bill have nothing to do with it, but there is no connection to the Biden administration at all. As is the usual flow of things, hurricane relief funding is not given all at once but is given out over a period of years to fund various projects. A state board (in this case, ‘Rebuild Florida’) oversees the distribution and progress. That’s what happened here.
There’s a reason this kind of thing continually happens, and that it almost exclusively happens in one direction. Most in the journalism profession are rabid partisans pretending not to be, and the tendency is to latch onto anything that can be spun against a Republican. Instead of checking facts, getting more information, and, you know, doing their jobs, journalists rush to Twitter as a kind of misinformation safe-space.
Why? Because if they publish something wrong at their outlet, they might be forced to correct it. On Twitter, though, they can stubbornly snark and refuse to admit fault without paying any consequences.
Look, I don’t claim to be perfect. After writing thousands of articles here at RedState, I’ve made my share of mistakes. But when a mistake is made, we correct them. There’s also a reason you’ll see me provide a link to any quantifiable fact I claim in a story. We do our best to cover our bases because as a right-leaning news site, the powers that be are always looking to smite us.
That’s a different world compared to the one inhabited by mainstream “journalists.” They can lie, obfuscate, and mislead at will because they are on the “right” side of the political aisle. We’ll continue to be here to correct them, though.