Ron DeSantis’s accidental neo-Nazi rebrand

Rumors began to swirl that the Ron DeSantis team was planning a major reboot last week following plummeting polls and financial woes. But the first ad to emerge from his circles since appears to suggest that the presidential hopeful is a neo-Nazi. Cockburn never would have guessed this was the campaign-saving pivot his team had planned. 

On Sunday morning a staffer for the DeSantis campaign retweeted an ad from the Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter account.

It features a “doomer,” a crudely drawn young man who suffers from depression and a crippling cigarette addiction, watching reports of Trump’s vaccine rollout and undelivered border wall promises. A cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” plays as the doomer, meant to be the everyman, grows more and more anguished with Trump’s failures. Just when he is about to break into tears, our triumphant hero appears — Ronald Dion DeSantis. The doomer’s face lights up as beautiful blonde women bounce around Florida beaches and rockets launch. Alligators feast on chunks of flesh and drag shows have finally been vanquished. DeSantis has saved the country.

But wait: the ad isn’t over  — DeSantis hasn’t become the nation’s fascist dictator yet. To do that, DeSantis stands in front of the Florida flag while soldiers march behind him. His face slowly fades into a spinning Sonnenrad, an old northern European symbol that was ubiquitous in Nazi Germany. 

The thought of plain-Jane DeSantis as a neo-Nazi would add much needed pizzazz to his otherwise boring campaign — but Cockburn can guarantee that DeSantis had nothing to do with the ad: the internet meme is a dead giveaway. The governor is too busy fighting “woke” companies to know what a doomer is.

Yet the heavy injection of internet culture does mean the new ad is suspiciously similar to a controversial anti-LGBT ad reportedly produced by a DeSantis campaign staffer last month. The ad attacked Trump for his support of trans beauty pageant contestants and painted DeSantis as the strongman halting the LGBT agenda. In typical Gen Z humor, it compared DeSantis to characters that have been adopted by the far right including Patrick Bateman and Jordan Belfort. 

At first, the campaign tried to distance themselves from the anti-trans ad. It was originally credited to “Proud Elephant,” a conservative media group, and retweeted by the campaign’s rapid response Twitter account. But according to the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, the video was produced internally by a staffer, then passed off to a third-party account to make it appear as if it were generated independently. Cockburn can’t help but wonder if this latest ad is also house-made. If so, perhaps the DeSantis campaign has a few more names to add to their “major reboot” clean-up session…