DeSantis calls Gov Hochul ‘ridiculous’ for telling Conservatives, get out of New York, move to Florida

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday slammed New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Joe Biden over their divisive, polarizing, arguably anti-American rhetoric.

Speaking at an unrelated press conference, he zeroed in on the two while discussing his concern that the now beefed-up IRS is going to start targeting the administration’s enemies like it did during the Obama era.

Gov. Ron DeSantis holds press conference

DeSantis speaks in Live Oak

Posted by WCJB TV20 News on Tuesday, August 30, 2022

“They say it’s only going to be [IRS enforcement] for billionaires. Well, there was an amendment that was offered in the Senate when this bill was being debated that said you cannot use any of these IRS agents to go after anyone earning less than $400,000. The Democrats voted that amendment down. So it can go for anybody. And here’s the thing: Who are they going to go after?” he said.

“They’re going to go after the people who don’t have the wherewithal to withstand these audits. People who have lawyers and accountants, they know how to do this. But they’re going to go after some sole proprietor, they’re going to go after some handyman, they’re going to go after somebody driving an Uber, somebody owning a family restaurant. That’s who they’re going to go after, because you can turn the screws on those folks, and you can really get a pound of flesh.”

It’s at this point that Hochul and Biden came up as  topics.

And oh, by the way, they go after people they don’t like. That’s unfortunately where we are in this country. I mean, you have the governor of New York saying all Republicans need to get on a bus and leave the state and come to Florida. Who would say something so ridiculous, to say if you don’t agree with me, then you don’t even have a right to be here?”  he said.

The governor added, “And now you have Biden, he’s going to say that the majority of the country that opposes his policies are somehow semi-fascist.”

“That’s what they’re trying to do. So they’re using the power of the state to weaponize that against people they don’t like. And so who do they not like? They don’t like people who are small business people, are individual entrepreneurs, whatever. That’s where that’s going to go. And that’s going to have a devastating effect,” he continued.

His criticism of Hochul referenced what she’d said during a recent campaign event: “We are here to say that the era of Trump, and Zeldin and Molinaro, just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, okay? Get out of town. Because you do not represent our values. You are not New Yorkers.”

Lee Zeldin is a Republican congressman running to unseat Hochul. Marcus Molinaro meanwhile is a local Republican running for a House seat.

His criticism of Biden meanwhile referenced the president’s increasingly hostile rhetoric toward roughly 50 percent of the population.

In addition to calling Republicans semi-fascists, he’s reportedly also intent on portraying them as a threat to democracy.

“President Joe Biden plans to deliver a prime-time speech Thursday in Philadelphia assailing Republicans for what he regards as their threats to US rights and freedoms, seeking to buoy his own party’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections,” Bloomberg reported on Monday.

“The president will warn that the country’s core values, including democracy itself, are at stake, [a] White House official said, previewing the speech on condition of anonymity. He’ll stress that it’s his party fighting to preserve American rights, freedoms and democracy, the official said.”

Writing for National Review on Tuesday, Jim Geraghty pondered the long-term implications of this increasingly divisive rhetoric.

“Do Democratic officials who think and speak like this want to start a civil war? Not necessarily, but they are starting to casually declare that people who think differently from them don’t belong in ‘their’ states. Those who can’t anticipate the kind of trouble this can stir up have a remarkable lack of foresight. We’re already living with the challenging consequences of ‘The Big Sort,'” he wrote.

“What happens when people start thinking that Republican voters in blue states or Democratic voters in red states deserve to be ostracized and driven out? What happens when Americans start thinking they’re entitled to live in a community or state of political homogeneity?”

Democrats don’t seem to care. They keep demonizing and othering Republicans, all while proclaiming that Republicans are the hateful ones, the bigoted ones, the ignorant ones that are a threat to democracy.

It seems like a perfect case of cognitive dissonance. Except that this high-level cognitive dissonance has the power to shatter the cohesion and well-being of an entire nation …

Vivek Saxena

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