Daily Beast executive editor Katie Baker took to her supposedly serious journalistic outfit Sunday with a Mean Girls hit piece on Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis that bordered on infantile in its imbecilic language and proof that, if the person at the top feels this way, it’s a farce for the liberal media to view them as a sober purveyor of real journalism.
Baker’s piece consisted of throwing a conniption over Mrs. DeSantis’s decision to wear “a ghastly black leather jacket” — with an alligator and the phrase “Where Woke Goes to Die” on the back — to Senator Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) Roast and Ride on Saturday as something you’d find in “the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.”
Baker argued it was snugly tied into her husband Ron’s 2024 presidential campaign: “Crude. Grasping. Saying the ugly part out loud.”
She added that DeSantis was “even more explicit [than Trump] about who he intends to target” (i.e. minorities, in the fictitious world of liberals) with Florida being where not only “woke go[es] to [die],” but “a lot of other people die as well.”
Not having to fear fact-checkers, Baker provided no evidence other than the liberal media’s talking point (echoed by the Trump campaign) that “Florida under DeSantis has had one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation”.
Fact-checking continued to fly out the window as Baker stood up for teaching preschoolers about sex and changing their genders on a whim. Take notice of her fact-free claims about Governor DeSantis wanting to ban discussion of Jim Crow and lynching in schools:
And as the governor whips up anti-LGBT sentiment and bans books on race, Casey’s jacket and its message of death also bring to mind the horrific Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, not to mention the state’s shameful history of Jim Crow-era lynch mobs and the Rosewood massacre. But of course, DeSantis and his cronies want to prevent kids from learning about any of that by censoring their library books and AP curricula.
Baker’s personal vendetta continued to be filled with lies when she took issue with the idea that a DeSantis First Couple would harken back to the Kennedys:
Jackie and JFK symbolized the opposite of vulgar pettiness—they embodied youth, energy, a commitment to moral progress in the struggle for Civil Rights, a country fresh with idealism. Not an America that was obsessed with banning books about male seahorses and rainbows, or nuking the latest Disney movie.
Taking Baker at her word, then drug addiction, infidelity, and allegations of rape are her ideal vision of America’s leading family seeing as how that’s what the Kennedys were actually like.
Baker kept up that beef to the point one could wonder if she’s jealous with language fit for MSNBC’s Deadline: White House (aka Rich, White, Liberal, Wine Mom Story Hour) where the sense is your Republican friends and family members need to be treated like domestic terrorists (click “expand”):
We’ve got a Sunshine State Lady Macbeth, in her green cape and white gloves, with her middling husband and her thirst for the crown—and we’ve got a guy who wants to be sitting in a corner, mumbling about the Federalist Papers and gobbling pudding off his fingers.
Trump would never eat pudding with anything other than a gold spoon—while pressing the button for his 20th Diet Coke of the day and trying to bomb Iran on a whim. Put another way, Trump is the danger of raw, chaotic id. DeSantis, meanwhile, is the little jerk who's going to make all of us pay for how he had no friends in third grade, or whatever his particular villain origin story is.
The moral of all this? She needs to go outside and touch some grass instead of whine about how Republican women use fashion “to stick it to political enemies” and “a bored, nihilistic shrug” (click “expand”):
I’m sure many MAGA-types love a jacket that so blatantly sticks it to the libs. Still, we’re told that the average GOP voter doesn’t like feeling that elites are talking down to them (like someone nerding out about the Federalist Papers?), even though one suspects that they actually want to be the rich guy eating off the golden spoon. Will Red State primary voters see more of themselves in strivers like Ron and Casey—or in their old, brash, filthy-rich ‘God Emperor’ and his supermodel spouse?
Of course, neither Melania Trump nor Casey DeSantis could ever embody the class and effortless elegance of Michelle Obama or Dr. Jill Biden. Those First Ladies have used fashion not as a punitive tool to stick it to political enemies—nor as a bored, nihilistic shrug—but as something generous and welcoming...In those moments, we remembered that fashion is not only a way to look and feel great, but a way to be inspired to help other people feel great about themselves, too. We remembered that fashion is a joyous extension of who you are and a symbol of what you want the world to know about you and about what you stand for.
Baker’s puerile bile (dressed up as a supposedly edgy takedown) ended with her lament claiming Mrs. DeSantis’s jacket proved “she is cheering on a spouse who gets his kicks off targeting his fellow Americans,” “down with his message of division and dehumanization,” and “ready for far more power.”
All the while, Baker seethes, the DeSantis are “seething with hate.”
