(John Ransom, Headline USA) Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis hit back at New York City’s Democrat Mayor Eric Adams, who has spent “donated” resources and money on advertising attacking Florida for its anti-grooming bill and urging residents to move north.
The law prevents teachers and educators from talking about sexuality in classrooms for third grade and below. Adams has criticized the law as a violation of freedom of speech.
But in a sadly ironic turn, a New York City staffer was fired on Tuesday hours after calling on Adams at a public free-speech forum to “unmask our toddlers,” Fox News reported.
DeSantis responded on Tuesday by calling Adams’s policy of forcing masks onto children “fundamentally wrong” at a press conference.
“They’re saying ‘you can say whatever you want,’ but they will force a mask on your face and muzzle you in public,” DeSantis said.
“They just fired somebody who was criticizing the mayor for masking toddlers in New York,” he continued. “So if you speak up for the kids, they fire you from your job.”
The ads Adams is running in Florida break a longtime unspoken tradition that politicians don’t go looking for trouble outside where their voters vote.
But DeSantis looks to be the heir apparent in the GOP if for some reason former President Donald Trump doesn’t take the presidential nomination, and Democrats have wasted no time in attacking him.
DeSantis likewise has gone on the offensive, criticizing California for its pandemic restrictions on live sporting events and its inability to manage the logjam at the ports, which has contributed to a nationwide supply-chain crisis.
DeSantis has benefited as New Yorkers have abandoned the Big Apple for the Sunshine State—a trend that accelerated during COVID lockdowns initiated by prior Mayor Bill de Blasio and disgraced ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats.
“More than 33,500 New Yorkers have moved to Florida between September 2020 and March 2021, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles,” reported said the Brooklyn Eagle.
But even before the pandemic, DeSantis had openly courted New York City tech and financial industries to flee the city’s oppressive taxation.
In September, Florida’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, said New Yorkers were fleeing the state—and the city—because it had become a “tax hell,” even making a pitch to the New York Stock Exchange to leave Wall Street, said the Eagle.
