Politics

Ron DeSantis says conservatism is in its ‘racket stage,’ riddled with paid influencers

Published

3 weeks ago

November 14, 2025

Gov. Ron DeSantis returned to his undergraduate Alma Mater Friday night, and turned his attention to whether conservatism is a “racket” or not.

He rooted his argument, which borrows unattributed phrasing from an antiwar speech from General Smedley Butler nearly a century ago, in the premise that there are conservative precepts that endure despite rhetorical and situational shifts that threaten the ideological framework.

“There’s a saying, you know, all great causes begin as a movement, transform into a business and degenerate into a racket. And I think whatever is on the right now, you know, we are very much in a racket stage. I mean, you have people that can monetize, outrage online. Some of these people that are always out there, they’re getting paid for certain positions. There’s a whole cottage industry,” he said at The Buckley Institute’s Fifteenth Annual Conference.

DeSantis benefited from his own online influencers, including Twitter tough guys, podcast interviewers who spent hours with him but never asked a remotely critical question, and two conservative websites in Florida that took aggressive positions on his behalf as alleged counterweights to the liberal media as he ran for re-election then for President.

But by the time he got to the end of his bid for the GOP nomination in 2024, he began to take a more critical look at the phenomenon from which he benefited.

“It used to be, ‘Oh, Republicans, you know, don’t like the liberal media, the NBC, CNN, all that stuff or whatever, but that the conservative media were like the good guys, right? They’re fighting for us,’ Well, let me tell you, it’s all a racket. OK? It’s all a racket,” DeSantis said in Iowa in January of that year. “They’re trying to get clicks, they’re trying to do all this stuff. There’s as much fake news on the right as there is on the corporate press now.”

The outlets don’t “want to lose viewers,” DeSantis said, and “almost every entity out there is plagued with this in one sense or another.”

At that time, the Governor fumed at Fox News offering no “pushback” against Donald Trump’s claims in a town hall, calling the conservative press a “Praetorian Guard” for him.

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Politics

Paul Renner doubles down on Cory Mills critique, urges more Republicans to join him

Published

52 minutes ago

December 6, 2025

May Greene

Mills was a day-one Byron Donalds backer in the gubernatorial race.

A former House Speaker and current candidate for Governor is leading the charge for Republicans as scandal swirls around a Congressman.

Saying the “evidence is mounting” against Rep. Cory Mills, Paul Renner says other candidates for Governor should “stand up and be counted” and join him in the call for Mills to leave Congress.

Renner made the call earlier this week.

But on Friday, the Palm Coast Republican doubled down.

He spotlighted fresh reporting from Roger Sollenberger alleging that Mills’ company “appears to have illegally exported weapons while he serves in Congress, including to Ukraine,” that Mills failed to disclose conflicts of interest, “tried to fistfight other Republican members of Congress, and lied about his party stature to bully other GOP candidates out of primaries that an alleged romantic interest was running in,” and lied about his conversion to Islam.

The House Ethics Committee is already probing Mills, a New Smyrna Beach Republican, over allegations of profiting from federal defense contracts while in Congress. More recently, the Committee expanded its work to review allegations that he assaulted one ex-girlfriend and threatened to share intimate photos of another.

Other candidates have been more reticent in addressing the issue, including Rep. Byron Donalds.

“When any other members have been involved and stuff like this, my advice is the same,” said Donalds, a Naples Republican. “They need to actually spend a lot more time in the district and take stock of what’s going on at home, and make that decision with their voters.”

The response came less than a year after Mills, a New Smyrna Beach Republican, spoke at the launch of Donalds’ gubernatorial campaign.

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Staff writer Jacob Ogles contributed reporting.

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Politics

Eileen Higgins brings out starpower as special election campaign nears close

Published

1 hour ago

December 6, 2025

May Greene

Prominent Democrats will be on hand at a number of stops.

Former Miami-Dade Commissioner Eileen Higgins is enlisting more big names as support at early vote stops ahead of Tuesday’s special election for Mayor, including a Senate candidate, a former Senate candidate, and a current candidate for Governor.

During her canvass kickoff at 10 a.m at Elizabeth Virrick Park, Higgins will appear with U.S. Senate Candidate Hector Mujica.

Early vote stops follow, with Higgins solo at the 11 a.m. show-up at Miami City Hall and the 11:30 at the Shenandoah Library.

From there, big names from Orlando will be with the candidate.

Orange County Mayor and candidate for Florida Governor Jerry Demings and former Congresswoman Val Demings will appear with Higgins at the Liberty Square Family & Friends Picnic (2 p.m.), Charles Hadley Park (3 p.m.), and the Carrie P. Meek Senior and Cultural Center (3:30 p.m.)

Higgins, who served on the County Commission from 2018 to 2025, is competing in a runoff for the city’s mayoralty against former City Manager Emilio González. The pair topped 11 other candidates in Miami’s Nov. 4 General Election, with Higgins, a Democrat, taking 36% of the vote and González, a Republican, capturing 19.5%.

To win outright, a candidate had to receive more than half the vote. Miami’s elections are technically nonpartisan, though party politics frequently still play into races.

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Politics

Hope Florida fallout drives another Rick Scott rebuke of Ron DeSantis

Published

2 hours ago

December 6, 2025

May Greene

The cold war between Florida’s Governor and his predecessor is nearly seven years old and tensions show no signs of thawing.

On Friday, Sen. Rick Scott weighed in on Florida Politics’ reporting on the Agency for Health Care Administration’s apparent repayment of $10 million of Medicaid money from a settlement last year, which allegedly had been diverted to the Hope Florida Foundation, summarily filtered through non-profits through political committees, and spent on political purposes.

“I appreciate the efforts by the Florida legislature to hold Hope Florida accountable. Millions in tax dollars for poor kids have no business funding political ads. If any money was misspent, then it should be paid back by the entities responsible, not the taxpayers,” Scott posted to X.

While AHCA Deputy Chief of Staff Mallory McManus says that is an “incorrect” interpretation, she did not respond to a follow-up question asking for further detail this week.

The $10 million under scrutiny was part of a $67 million settlement from state Medicaid contractor Centene, which DeSantis said was “a cherry on top” in the settlement, arguing it wasn’t truly from Medicaid money.

But in terms of the Scott-DeSantis contretemps, it’s the latest example of tensions that seemed to start even before DeSantis was sworn in when Scott left the inauguration of his successor, and which continue in the race to succeed DeSantis, with Scott enthusiastic about current front runner Byron Donalds.

Earlier this year, Scott criticized DeSantis’ call to repeal so-called vaccine mandates for school kids, saying parents could already opt out according to state law.

While running for re-election to the Senate in 2024, Scott critiqued the Heartbeat Protection Act, a law signed by DeSantis that banned abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy with some exceptions, saying the 15 week ban was “where the state’s at.”

In 2023 after Scott endorsed Donald Trump for President while DeSantis was still a candidate, DeSantis said it was an attempt to “short circuit” the voters.

That same year amid DeSantis’ conflict over parental rights legislation with The Walt Disney Co., Scott said it was important for Governors to “work with” major companies in their states.

The critiques went both ways.

When running for office, DeSantis distanced himself from Scott amid controversy about the Senator’s blind trust for his assets as Governor.

“I basically made decisions to serve in uniform, as a prosecutor, and in Congress to my financial detriment,” DeSantis said in October 2018. “I’m not entering (office) with a big trust fund or anything like that, so I’m not going to be entering office with those issues.”

In 2020, when the state’s creaky unemployment website couldn’t handle the surge of applicants for reemployment assistance as the pandemic shut down businesses, DeSantis likened it to a “jalopy in the Daytona 500” and Scott urged him to “quit blaming others” for the website his administration inherited.

The chill between the former and current Governors didn’t abate in time for 2022’s hurricane season, when Scott said DeSantis didn’t talk to him after the fearsome Hurricane Ian ravaged the state.

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