Republished with permission from Common Dreams, by Abby Zimet

Evidently inspired by her raging bigot of a husband’s WTF ad with oiled beefcakes and serial killers, Casey DeSantis, aka “America’s Karen,” released her own overwrought plug—cue Nazi marching music!—declaring she and other zealot moms will “protect the innocence of our children” from history, empathy, masks, books, rainbows, immigrants, black people and sweet Jesus male seahorses giving birth by electing her loathsome partner in crime to “do for America what he did for us in Florida.” Thanks, no thanks.

Unfondly dubbed Sunshine State Lady Macbeth, Casey DeSantis is widely viewed as the thorny “power behind the throne,” a former TV reporter more comfortable in the spotlight than her awkward husband who nonetheless shares “his hubris, and his paranoia, and his vaulting ambition,” and then some. For critics of a certain age, she can evoke Natasha Fatale, the scheming, genetically engineered spy for fictional Pottsylvania in the 1960s cartoon show Rocky and Bullwinkle; taller and smarter than her fellow spy Boris, she sometimes trash-talked the country’s Fearless Leader behind his oblivious back. LOL. In a book, DeSantis has described meeting his future wife on a Florida golf course in 2006 as “my life’s most fortuitous moment.”

After marrying in 2009 at—irony alert—Disney World’s wedding pavilion, she quickly became his most important political adviser, part of “this singular entity, ‘the DeSanti,'” “the tip of the spear,” “the air in which he moves.” “She is every bit as involved in Ron’s rise as Ron is himself,” said a former staffer, who like others in a scathing profile in Politico stayed anonymous due to the DeSanti “collective capacity for spite.” “He constitutionally doesn’t trust people (and) she doesn’t either,” he said. “She’s more paranoid than he is. He’s a vindictive motherfucker. She’s twice that.”

Still, she stands by her short, mediocre, malevolent man. Asked about him on his gubernatorial reelection campaign trail in Iowa, she burbled about a “man of integrity,” a “good dad,” a “good person (who) will “put this country back (where) we are talking about our rights coming from our creator (to) protect our rights that are ours” (if you’re white/straight): “As long as I have breath in my body, I (will) fight for Ron DeSantis.”

After a fawning New York Times piece inanely posited she aspires to a “Camelot-Meets-Mar-a-Lago” wardrobe, in 86-degree heat she instead earned the moniker “Wal-Mart Melania” by defiantly wearing an alligator-adorned, saying-the-ugly-part-out-loud black leather jacket boasting of her state, “Where Woke Goes to Die,” along with lots of people—COVID, Pulse shooting, lynch mobs. Around the same time, she launched “Mamas For DeSantis,” stressing moms like her could work “to protect the innocence of our children (and) the rights of parents” to do terrible things in their name. There’s merch—baby onesies with “Future Freedom Voter,” “Joe Biden makes me cry,” t-shirts with “Stop the Invasion—Build the Wall”; soon after Ron’s weird-ass, homophobic, homoerotic, gladiators-and-body-builders video “for the small-penis crowd” came her own, hold-my-beer monstrosity of an ad.

“We will not allow you to exploit the innocence of our children to advance your agenda,” she tweeted, failing to acknowledge the times her husband Benito already did that. “When you come after our kids, we fight back. We are no longer silent. We are united. We are Mamas for Desantis.” The video—rapid cuts, ominous drums, tragic piano, histrionic speechifying without context—show all the horrors of the last few years: Children crying because they had to wear a mask to save their lives, Fauci advising indoor and outdoor venues be closed (ditto), drag queens, gay marches, trans athletes, more drums! “We’ve been forced into silence, into compliance,” seethes the narrator. “Enough is enough. Because there’s nothing we won’t do to protect our children. They’re not yours.” Unnamed but vituperative “we, you, our, your:” Divisive much?

But then there’s glorious Florida: Schools open, parents’ rights defended, no critical race theory or “child mutilation,” communities protected, at least white, straight, rich, cis, bigoted ones with guns and no drag shows or icky sex-time with slavery books, and never mind the teachers, workers, professionals, Latinos, queers and other non-fascists fleeing in droves. “Winning the fight in Florida is just the beginning,” says Casey of this merciless dystopia and the hateful creep who created it. What the ever-loving fuck. Just not.