It is with regret that I have to tell you again about Ron DeSantis. The attack comes over an innocent announcement by Florida that it will award $80 billion to improve its infrastructure.
To get things going, here’s what that looked like, and you can probably imagine what came next.
Governor DeSantis will award more than $80 Million for South Florida infrastructure projects. https://t.co/7s6iwmokFq
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) January 28, 2022
Numerous journalists descended on DeSantis’s office to complain about the Florida governor being a hypocrite after he explained how the money was distributed. But as we’ll get to momentarily, there’s a very big problem with their framing.
The Federal Government (aka the Federal Government) is responsible for this money. #BidenAdministration . https://t.co/NtKDSP6S1f
— Diana Gonzalez (@DianaGHealth) January 28, 2022
DeSantis was against the bill on infrastructure as was @marcorubioAnd @SenRickScott. https://t.co/IXxtLWBzfK
— Melissa Ross (@MelissainJax) January 28, 2022
Yes, he does. This is a scam. https://t.co/lDBPgrlhdl
— Nikki Fried (@NikkiFried) January 28, 2022
Here are some things you need to know. To start, I’m not sure DeSantis ever “opposed” the infrastructure bill. Instead, DeSantis criticized the bill as too heavy on pork for blue states while giving a good amount of money to Florida. I can’t find any evidence he was outright against the bill. Maybe he was, but he never explicitly stated it. It would appear that, if someone is going to say he opposed it they need to provide a quote.
But that’s marginal compared to the biggest screw-up in this latest attack.
Evidently, DeSantis did not give any money to the bill for infrastructure. That makes perfect sense — given that bill was only passed two months ago. When money is allocated to states via Congress, it doesn’t usually get disbursed as quickly from the federal government.
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. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the bill, and there was no link to the Biden government. Like the normal flow of events, funding for hurricane relief isn’t given at once. Instead it is distributed over several years in order to finance various projects. A state board (in this case, ‘Rebuild Florida’) oversees the distribution and progress. That’s what happened here.
Almost 24 hours later and “journalist” @MelissainJax hasn’t deleted or corrected this dishonest Tweet. These awards were funded by Hurricane Irma recovery money that was appropriated by the Trump Administration. It has nothing to do with Biden’s so-called infrastructure bill https://t.co/02UKBJJgnW
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 (@ChristinaPushaw) January 29, 2022
There’s a reason this kind of thing continually happens, and that it almost exclusively happens in one direction. Many journalists are passionate partisans who pretend not to be Republicans. They will grab onto any story that could be used against them. Journalists use Twitter to get misinformation, check facts and do their job.
Why? Why? They can be stubborn and refuse to take responsibility on Twitter.
Look, I don’t claim to be perfect. After writing thousands of articles here at RedState, I’ve made my share of mistakes. When a mistake is made we fix it. There’s also a reason you’ll see me provide a link to any quantifiable fact I claim in a story. Because we are a news website that is right-leaning, they will always try to kill 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.
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