The race card has been overplayed.
Via Daily Wire:
Was Ron DeSantis’ “monkey it up” comment a racist “dog whistle” against his Florida gubernatorial challenger Andrew Gillum? Gillum and the Left seem to think so, but Andrew Klavan believes this is all a strategy the Left employs against their political opponents, one he thinks will backfire big time in Florida.
“My rule is this: if you are running for office, if you are asking the American people for power, you cannot hide behind the color of your skin. You got to play the game on the same field as everybody else,” Klavan said. “If Ron DeSantis would say that to a white man, and he would, then he can say it to a black man. This thing about “dog whistles” — crap. If you can’t hear it, it’s not there.”
I have to say, the way that some of the press reported this was absolutely disgusting. The Hill, CNN, they had headlines that said “DeSantis says it’s ‘monkeying things up’ to vote for a black candidate.” He was talking about socialism. He was praising Andrew Gillum, he was saying what a talented guy he was, but it’s really clear he was saying his philosophy was no good, but Gillum pounced on this like crazy.
The whole point is to make you watch your tongue so you can’t think straight, the whole point is to make you watch, if you slip, if you say something that can be spun, you have to always be thinking so you can’t really think as clearly as you want to if you’re a candidate. Gillum just absolutely makes hay out of this on Fox:
Andrew Gillum: “It’s clear that Mr. DeSantis is taking a page directly from the campaign manual of Donald Trump, but I think he’s got another one coming to him if he thinks that in today’s day and age Florida voters are going to respond to that level of derision and division. They’re sick of it… In the handbook of Donald Trump they no longer do whistle calls, they’re now using full bullhorns…We’ve got to make sure that we stay focused, I think, on the issues that confront everyday people. I’m not going to get down in the gutter with this DeSantis and Trump, there’s enough of that going on, I’m gonna try and stay high and try to talk about what the North Star and the future is for the state of Florida…I think that’s what people want…”
First of all, I’m glad he’s gonna stay high, because if this election is gonna go this way I’m gonna stay high too! That was expert Democrat politics because he says: “look how divisive he is being” because he said “monkey” and it’s Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump’s a racist therefore DeSantis is a racist. It’s just all BS because the guy was talking about socialism, and that’s what Andrew Gillum doesn’t want to talk about.
He doesn’t want to talk about the fact that Tallahassee has been lagging behind other cities in the Florida economy while he was mayor, he doesn’t want to talk about what socialism means, what it means is that your work, your time, your life belongs to the state, and your money can be spent the way the state says, not the way you say. He doesn’t want to talk about that, he wants to talk about “monkey.” Let’s just look one more time again at him using this phrase to see if it really is a dog whistle…
HT: Rufus