Ron DeSantis Is Getting Angrier, and He’s Taking It Out on Florida

By Diane Roberts

Everything Ron DeSantis touches dies.

Or becomes diseased or deformed.

The governor’s not much different from the Palm Beach Pumpkin, his patron-turned-rival-turned-lord-and-master, whose regime Never Trumper Rick Wilson correctly noted was a hellscape of “blazing, white-hot embrace of actual, honest-to-God stupidity,” a condition “as contagious as smallpox and as fatal as Ebola.”




DeSantis was always a rage-hampered homunculus, but now that he’s been humiliated on the national stage and his presidential aspirations squashed like a palmetto bug, he’s only gotten angrier.

And he’s taking it out on Florida.

He imposed the vicious six-week abortion ban: Clearly, he doesn’t care how many women’s lives are ruined or health impaired by his forced-birth fetish.

He vetoed funding for museums, music programs, and arts organizations — part of his War on Culture — denying Floridians enriching experiences, encounters with beauty, and, in many cases, jobs.

He’s destroyed New College of Florida, once a home for the smart, arty kids who didn’t want the usual football, frats, and four-for-one shooters experience of going to university.

This formerly well-regarded institution is now in thrall to an over-paid, unqualified president and a gang of anti-education goons masquerading as “trustees.”

It’s been hard to avoid seeing pictures of New College library books thrown out on the sidewalk, but did you know DeSantis’ pudding-sticky fingerprints are also all over the mess at the University of Florida?




Until last month, UF was run by Ben Sasse, another over-paid, under-qualified president, a former U.S. senator from Nebraska who hadn’t the least clue about this state.

Sasse would never have been hired had he not been DeSantis’ pick. Right before Sasse was secretly anointed by UF’s toxic trustees, the governor described him as “a good candidate” and a “deep thinker on education policy.”

DeSantis said, “good candidate,” but meant “servile lackey.”

Mori makes his move

For his part, Sasse confused deep thinking with deep pockets: The guy spent like a drunken sailor, more than three times as much as his predecessor.

He hired multiple “vice presidents” and press flacks at lavish salaries, mostly his D.C. cronies, and threw millions at the management consultants McKinsey, his former employer.

Millions for what, exactly?

Another secret.

Thanks to top reporting from the Independent Florida Alligator, we know Sasse was forced out by Mori Hosseini, chairman of the UF trustees, a thuggish developer and big DeSantis donor who sees the university as his personal fiefdom.

Yes, Sasse’s wife has serious health problems. But this is about power. Hosseini didn’t like Sasse going around him to forge relationships with Tallahassee power brokers, even if Sasse was once DeSantis’ fair-haired boy.

If it’s Sasse versus Hosseini, Hosseini wins. No way the governor is going to mess with the guy who flies him and the missus around on private jets and installed a $28,000 “golf simulator” in the mansion.

Now DeSantis is demanding an investigation into UF’s fiscal funny business while claiming he was not “involved necessarily” in hiring Sasse.

He wants us to believe this higher-ed train wreck isn’t his fault.

That big cyber attack on the state health department, the one that sent people’s social security numbers and patient information out onto the dark web?




Not his fault, either.

Florida’s insurance crisis?

Not his problem.

If a big storm blows your town off the map, stop whining. The space might become a nice golf course.

The governor likes golf.

Golf courses, ‘lodges’

Nevertheless, he wants to make sure you know he definitely, positively had nothing whatsoever to do with the “Great Outdoors Initiative,” a boneheaded attempt to trash nine of our most beloved state parks.

The plan was to build large hotels, pickleball courts, and golf courses on state-owned critical habitat and conservation lands from Biscayne Bay to Grayton Beach.

The scale of this proposed desecration was breathtaking: 350-room “lodges” at Topsail Hill Preserve, a deliriously beautiful and rare coastal ecosystem in Santa Rosa, and on Anastasia Island, home of the endangered (and extremely cute) Anastasia Island Beach Mouse, as well as three golf courses in Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Hobe Sound.

Golf courses are environmental poison, requiring huge amounts of water, fertilizer (which helps generate all that smelly blue-green algae choking our lakes and rivers), and pesticides.




There are 1,250 golf courses in Florida, more than any other state.

Who was stupid enough to think this is a good idea?

That would be Ron DeSantis and the lickspittles at his DEP — Department of Environmental Prostitution.

When Floridians heard about this atrocity, the ca-ca hit the fan. People demonstrated at Oleta River State Park, Dickinson, Honeymoon Island, Anastasia Island, and others, telling the state to back the hell off and keep their venal paws off the parks.

Tuck tail

A number of DeSantis’ fellow Republicans, including state Cabinet members and U.S. senators rarely notable for their interest in the environment, saw which way the wind was blowing, and, loath to kiss their political careers goodbye, climbed on some very high horses to demand DEP dump this crap plan.

Even the notoriously clueless Rick Scott expressed shock and dismay, which is a bit rich, given that while he was governor Scott thought the state should build roads and other infrastructure on lovely Honeymoon Island State Park so RVs could swarm the place.

Suffice it to say Floridians were unimpressed and, terrified of all those citizens lobbing verbal grenades, he retreated.

DeSantis has likewise retreated.

During a news conference with the deranged sheriff of Polk County (a guy who claims “millions” of immigrants are invading Florida to kill your children), DeSantis declared the “Great Outdoors Initiative” was no more, not happening, at least not right now.

Probably.

Anyway, you can’t point the finger at him. He had nothing to do with it — even though he met with one of the developers a mere five months ago.




The dubious outfit behind the proposed Jonathan Dickinson golf courses calls itself “Folds of Honor” and somehow links golf, God, and the flag.

Obviously not pleased with the bad publicity, they’ve now withdrawn from the project, leaving DeSantis blaming absolutely everyone except himself.

“I didn’t approve it,” he said, and he never even saw DEP’s plan, which he called “half-baked,” and hilariously insisted some sinister person had leaked it to “a very left-wing group to try to create a narrative that somehow, you know, the state park is going to become a big parking lot or something like that” to grab media attention.

Nihilists, despoilers

That very left-wing group would be his own Department of Environmental Prostitution, which put it up on its website.

DeSantis flacks Jeremy Redfern and Bryan Griffin (two embarrassing and indefensible drains on the public purse) amplified and defended it.

When Floridians from all parts of the state and every political persuasion rose up and objected to their moronic “Great Outdoors,” DEP huffed, “There is A LOT of confusion out there about the 2024-25 Great Outdoors Initiative & our efforts to increase public access, recreation & lodging throughout @FLStateParks. We love #TheRealFlorida as much as you do … .”

Actually, no: We are not confused. DEP does not love our parks. Nor does Ron DeSantis. They can cite Teddy Roosevelt till they’re blue in the face, but that does not mean they’re conservationists.

They’re despoilers.

It’s no secret who’s behind all this: Ron DeSantis. He is, as Republican state Sen. Joe Gruters says, “responsible for everything his agencies do, and he’s a very hands-on governor.”

“Great Outdoors” would never have made it out of the room if he hadn’t said at least a provisional yes.

Now he wants to take credit for sending the plan, as he says, “back to the drawing board.”

Don’t, for God’s sake, give it to him.

“Great Outdoors” is dead for now. But in Florida, bad ideas never really go away. They just go dormant until the nihilists who run this state think nobody is watching.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.