Update and scripts

Hi, everyone! Everything is going well. Four videos in July, another four in August. Expect to see the same schedule going forward. I'm also planning to do another YouTube Short in September, and there will be a new behind-the-scenes vlog for some of my high-roller patrons soon. Lots to do!

For now, some scripts from earlier this year.

RON DESANTIS

This is Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. Maybe you have heard of him because of his abysmal policies during the pandemic, misrepresenting data, sowing mistrust and actively telling children not to protect themselves. Maybe you have heard of him because of his endorsement of the “Don't Say Gay” bill that targeted the LGBTQ community and furthered the dehumanization of an entire population. Maybe you have heard of him because while he was a lawyer in the military, he oversaw and approved human torture in Guantanamo. Maybe you have heard of him because he is probably running for president in 2024 as the “Trumpism Without Trump” candidate. Or maybe, just maybe, you have never heard of him or have only heard his name but nothing else about him.

Now that DeSantis is gearing up to become President of the United States, it might be helpful to better familiarize ourselves with this man. His life, his political positions, and his aspirations for the future. [I. Before Politics]

Ron DeSantis was born on September 14, 1978 in Jacksonville, Florida. If we were to believe that each generation is “better” than the last or more progressive than the last, this birthday might come as a surprise. If DeSantis had been born one year and three and a half months later, he might be characterized as a millennial. Yet, people are not only products of their time but of their environment. Most men are their father's son.

DeSantis may have been born in Jacksonville, but he grew up in Dunedin, Florida – an overwhelmingly white, middle class suburban town. Dunedin is infamous for its “homeowners association” style governing, fining its  residents for violating the aesthetics of the town. In one case, one resident was fined tens of thousands of dollars for uncut grass. The entrance to the town marked with an arch that says “Defending Freedom” – a socially conservative dogwhistle. Nothing like the freedom of living in an almost exclusively white, conservative town in which residents have the fear of God put into them if they forget to mow their lawn. This is where DeSantis grew up, and it might explain a thing or two about the man. The instillation of draconian conformity was present throughout his entire life.

After graduating college, DeSantis became a teacher at Darlington School, an exclusive prep school for well-to-do teenagers. While there, he earned a strange reputation. Mr. DeSantis was known to excuse the behavior of slaveowners and misrepresent the cause of the American Civil War. He was also reportedly antagonistic toward Black students. According to a report in The New York Times, several Black students have come forward, some anonymously, and one willing to go on record with her name. “Danielle Pompey remembers Mr. DeSantis, a Florida native and recent Yale grad, being an outsider like her, a New Yorker with a thick accent to match. But Ms. Pompey, who is Black and was on an academic scholarship, said she felt that Mr. DeSantis treated her worse because of her race. 'Mr. Ron, Mr. DeSantis, was mean to me and hostile toward me,' said Ms. Pompey, who graduated in 2003. 'Not aggressively, but passively, because I was Black.'

She recalled Mr. DeSantis teaching Civil War history in a way that sounded to her like an attempt to justify slavery. 'Like in history class, he was trying to play devil's advocate that the South had good reason to fight that war, to kill other people, over owning people – Black people.'

DeSantis' views on slavery and the Civil War were so well-known to the student body that a group of students made a satirical video about it for the yearbook.

In addition to this, DeSantis had the peculiar habit of showing up to party with his teenage students – a frequent occurrence that understandably concerned some of the students. One student once found a memo on a teacher's desk warning the faculty that it is dangerously inappropriate to fraternize with students. This memo was assumed to be about Ron DeSantis. There is photographic evidence of this. DeSantis only lasted one year at Darlington School for undisclosed reasons. DeSantis' employment at Darlington is curiously absent from the career section of his biographical website.

After his very brief stint as a teacher, DeSantis went to law school and eventually joined the United States Navy – not as a trained soldier on the front lines but as a legal adviser. DeSantis was brought in to sign off on torturing people at Guantanamo Bay.

Mansoor Adayfi was wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo for fourteen years. He was beaten, tortured and dehumanized – and he was never charged as an enemy combatant. Those who have interviewed Adayfi and investigated his claims have said, quote:

“DeSantis oversaw torture in Guantánamo, greenlighting everything from beatings to forced feedings of hunger-striking detainees.… DeSantis was brought in specifically to break a hunger strike. He was not replacing some other lawyer whose job it was to ensure the human rights of detainees. That would, I think, imply that they knew DeSantis was going to be loyal and do the job they expected him to do by going to Guantanamo Bay.

Played good cop at first, so that detainees would confide in him the things that they felt were the most egregious. DeSantis then reported that to the prison officials who then intensified, magnified, multiplied all of the things that were the hardest on the detainees, so basically used his position to amplify the torture, the illegal torture. Not only that, but he was present for beatings, present for force feedings and other forms of torture. As Mansoor describes, not only was he present and observing them, but seemed to take great pleasure in them happening.”

Following his time greenlighting torture, DeSantis was sent to Iraq. Don't be fooled by campaign photos, though. He was an officer, a pencil-pusher, and he never saw combat. He was part of the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps or JAG. You know, that television show that ran for ten seasons and over two hundred episodes but you never knew anyone who actually watched it? That thing.

JAG officers placed within special operations units are not there to keep the units working within the confines of the law. Instead, JAG officers within these units exist to keep people out of trouble once they commit crimes – to cover up the crimes. War crimes, illegal rendition, sexual assault, all the common crimes expected in the United States military.

Why was this so important for DeSantis to do? Because it set up his next career in politics. Again, from the same source, “DeSantis just wanted to talk about his military experience enough to be able to check the box, to say, I’m a veteran too. It’s like politicians who were former officers in the military, that’s a stepping stone for political careers. And so to be able to get your cool guy photo in Iraq holding the gun, the one that Pete Buttigieg shares, it’s like you get that photo, you get to say in a debate, I’m a veteran, and then that’s pretty much it. No one really cares to look into it that much.”

Once DeSantis' time in the military was concluded and his myth-making about his glorious “service” was written, he set his sights on something loftier.

[II. Politics] DeSantis did not have to wait long for his opportunity, and that opportunity was gerrymandering. Political parties are always trying to change the congressional districts to better favor a majority in the House of Representatives. The Republican Party knows that they are outnumbered in the United States. There are a lot more Democrats than Republicans. The reason the House of Representatives often has a Republican majority, such as right now, is because their party redistricts in such a way that even if a majority of people in a state or in the nation altogether vote Democrat, the districts are portioned out in such a way to give Republicans a majority of seats in the House. It's like putting a thumb on the scale. Democrats do this sometimes as well, but Republicans tend to do this a little more because they have to in order to ever have a House majority.

One such redistricting saw Florida's seventh district split to accommodate the party. Long-serving Republican John Mica ran in the new seventh district that did not have as his voting base, and DeSantis ran in what was essentially a completely new sixth district tailor-made for a Republican. Does this sound boring? Yes, it does, and that's how political parties get away with this because redistricting is so not sexy that the voting population never has that on their list of grievances and important issues come Election Day.

Anyway, all DeSantis needed to do was win one Republican primary, and he would be set for life. Because of the deep-red district, he would always win in November against a Democrat, and incumbents are difficult to oust during a primary – but there was no incumbent because of the redistricting. DeSantis won his one election, and that meant that he would either have this job for life or a bigger job if he wanted one. That's how Congressmen make their careers. The bar to being a Congressman is extremely low. You don't have to be a real person to a Congressman anymore.

In 2012, DeSantis slid into the House of Representatives on the back of his military career that nobody would look into, and we have been stuck with him ever since. His time in Congress and time in the military had one commonality: persecuting Muslims. According to Umar A. Faarooq, “[DeSantis] co-sponsored a number of bills that targeted Muslim communities inside and outside the country.

... he co-sponsored unsuccessful legislation that sought to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, a move that Muslim Americans see as an attempt to vilify the faith community, cripple civil society, and a designation that would feed into the Islamophobia industry. …

The then-congressman was also the lead author of a bill introduced in 2015 that sought to ban the entry of immigrants from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen - all Muslim-majority countries. The bill, titled the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Prevention Act of 2015, never passed out of committee. However, several years later, former President Donald Trump introduced his own Muslim ban, which included all of the countries named in DeSantis' bill, but added two more in its first iteration: Iran and Sudan.”

While in Congress,  DeSantis even went after charities that helped people in Muslim-majority countries, citing ties to terrorism that were debunked completely.

In addition to this, DeSantis has links to a number of Islamophobic figures and groups, including ACT for America, which is designated an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. DeSantis makes no secret of this. He makes campaign stops for them, he gives speeches to them – he is their guy.

In 2015, he announced his candidacy for the United States Senate in 2016 because Marco Rubio was running for President and had not filed for Senate re-election yet, but once Rubio flamed out in the primaries and filed for the Senate again, DeSantis got cold feet and backed out. Imagine being afraid of Marco Rubio. Jesus Christ.

In 2018, DeSantis ran for governor of Florida. He won by attaching his politics to then in-vogue Trumpism. By this point, Florida had become very red and no longer much of a swing state. His victory in the general was preordained by demographics.

So, what are DeSantis' politics anyway? What did he try to accomplish, first as a Congressman and now the Governor of Florida? DeSantis is a far-right, Catholic crypto-fascist – light on the crypto part now that he hasn't received enough pushback. Let's go through his views and his scandals one by one to get a better sense of the man. DeSantis ticks all the garden variety conservative boxes, but since he is mired in the more recent push towards Trumpism or American fascism, he's like, all of those boxes but filled in all the way and not just checked. Does that make sense? Let's take a look.

[Abortion]

DeSantis is an anti-choice politician, citing his Catholic faith as all the justification he needs for violating the autonomy of human beings. In 2020, Governor DeSantis signed a law that took away the right to privacy of pregnant teenagers, forcing parental consent. In Florida, a pregnant high school student can be forced to give birth if their parents demand it.

Florida has yet to ban abortion altogether, but it is slowly chipping away at reproductive rights, gearing up for an outright ban. In early 2022, less than a year after the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, DeSantis signed a bill into law that limited abortions to the first 15 weeks. This has nothing to do with the right-wing talking point of “fetal viability” and everything to do with limiting abortions and inching closer to an outright ban on the practice in the state of Florida.

In late 2022, DeSantis appointed a judge who once denied a girl an abortion because she had a “C” average in her high school grades. I am not exaggerating. Her GPA was the judge's evidence that the girl was not mature enough to have an abortion but apparently mature enough to raise a child.

[Corruption]

DeSantis has a habit. It's not a peculiar habit because of how common it is among politicians, but it's a habit that he engages in more often than the average politician. Donors to DeSantis' campaigns generally find themselves with fat government contracts in return. According to the Tampa Bay Times, “While it's common for governors to stack commissions, boards and task forces with their supporters, DeSantis has done so at a significantly higher rate than his predecessor, according to analysis of campaign contributions and political appointments.

Since assuming office in 2019, DeSantis has accepted roughly $3.3 million in campaign donations from about 250 people he selected for leadership roles – a 75% increase in the number of donors appointed by Gov. Rick Scott's first term in office, and over 10 times the amount of money. …

'There's nothing Ron DeSantis won't do to line his coffers – including selling state appointments for contributions to his campaign,' Drew Godinich, a spokesperson for American Bridge wrote in an email.”

This table, provided by The Intercept, shows much a campaign donor paid former Governor Rick Scott and current Governor Ron DeSantis, and what they got out of it. A construction aggregates firm received $30 million in new contracts. A railroad company received $32.7 million. In 2021, a donor received $50 million for pandemic emergency services. A massive construction corporation received, and this is not a typo, $696.9 million.

Government officials claim that competitive bidding would make backroom deals difficult, but other sources claim that government agencies in Florida have been streamlined and pushed to move faster in recent years – for unknown reasons – and because of this, such a deal could go unnoticed and fall through the cracks. A perfect opportunity for corruption.

[COVID]

Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, the narrative coming out of the Republican Party has been that of opposition to safety measures, especially masks in public and vaccinations. This was popularized by the President, but other prominent Republicans ran with it once their base was excited by this new, dangerous talking point. Ron DeSantis has been particularly vocal in his opposition to public health, even going so far as to tell children not to wear their masks. DeSantis has been called a “longtime skeptic of the science deployed to stall the spread of the virus at the start of the pandemic.

In fact, DeSantis has profited from his public skepticism of COVID-19 safety measures. His campaign sells beer koozies and t-shirts that read “Don't Fauci My Florida” – and one beer koozie has a quote from DeSantis reading “How the hell am I supposed to drink a beer with a mask on?” This is a real product sold by the DeSantis campaign.

DeSantis and other COVID skeptics are actually killing their own party. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Republican Party's COVID denial has resulted in an increased death rate among Republican voters. “Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat- leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021. We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states.”

[Education]

DeSantis wants to shape education to be as socially conservative as possible. Remember when he was a teacher lovingly excusing slavery? It's more of that. He pushed to ban “critical race theory” in Florida public schools even though it was not taught in Florida public schools. However, by banning it, DeSantis has created a fearful atmosphere for teachers and students about bringing up the subject of racism altogether. In 2021, he pushed for the Stop Wrongs for Our Kids and Employees Act or the WOKE Act – ha ha, extremely obnoxiously. It would have allowed parents to sue teachers if they taught them something their parents objected to – like the consequences of racism, for example. The WOKE Act was struck down by a Florida judge for violating the First Amendment and for being absolutely bonkers, probably.

DeSantis signed a bill into law recently that stated that universities could lose their funding if they taught things that the state did not want them to teach, but the “wrong things” were not clarified. So, the law essentially functions as a catch-all in which the state can force universities to end courses and affect curriculum.

DeSantis also supported the “Don't Say Gay” law that forbade teachers from mentioning “gender identity” and “sexuality” to young students. Of course, the law is so broad that its actual purpose is preventing teachers from revealing that they are gay or transgender. supporters of the law clearly would have no problem with a cisgender teacher mentioning her own gender and using her own pronouns, but the supporters of the law would have a problem with a transgender teacher doing the same. supporters of the law clearly would have no problem with a straight teacher wearing a wedding ring and answering question or not she is married, but supporters of the law would have a problem with a gay teacher doing the same.

The law not using the word “gay” in its language does not change the fact that the law exists to be used selectively. supporters of the law are not asking straight married people to take off their wedding rings and pictures of their spouses on their desks. supporters of the law are not asking cisgender teachers to stop using any and all pronouns relating to themselves. If a straight, white, Christian man mentioned his wife while teaching a lesson, and that exposed his heterosexuality, he would not be in danger of being fired for it. If he were fired for it, supporters of the law would be outraged – because that's not what it's there for. That's not why they want it. They want it in place to be used selectively and to discourage gay and transgender people from becoming teachers.

[Immigration]

As a Congressman, DeSantis opposed DACA and DAPA – pretty boilerplate for a conservative of the time – but went harder with his rhetoric as a Governor. In 2019, he signed as anti-sanctuary city bill into law, which is strange because there were no sanctuary cities in Florida at the time. DeSantis just wanted to signal his general cruelty to his base. More recently, DeSantis has been chartering flights to get rid of immigrants seeking asylum. The asylum seekers are told lies about where they are going and what they will be doing there, and then they are hurried away before anyone notices. This is also done by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, so you know it's a really compassionate policy.

[CONCLUSION]

In 2016, a lot of people were caught off-guard by the results. In 2024, we should probably brace ourselves for the very real possibility of Ron DeSantis becoming President of the United States. Polling this far from Election Day is usually not accurate, but it's telling that DeSantis is already beating Biden in the polls before either of them announce their candidacy and only two months after the previous president announced his candidacy.

So, what can we do about it? I don't know. Poison? What do you want from me, I'm a YouTuber.

HOGWARTS

Did you know there is a TERF game coming out? There is, a TERF game with magic boys and girls, based on books by JK Rowling. You may have heard of Harry Potter. It's that thing that let Daniel Radcliffe have a career where he could play a farting corpse, literally one of my favorite movies.

Anyway, the TERF game is out this week, and none of the focus is on the gameplay or the frame rates or whatever else gamers care about. The focus is on the fact that it's a TERF game, and there is really no way around that. From my vantage point, there appears to be three camps.

The first camp despises JK Rowling's politics and is steadfastly refusing to buy the game or play the game because doing so would put money in the pockets of an already-wealthy billionaire transphobe.

Even if the boycott does not change much of the income acquired by the game, the backlash itself is meaningful because it lets transphobes know that dangerous rhetoric will not go unchallenged, and that those who speak it will face public condemnation at every turn. Allowing the game to prosper without backlash essentially cedes ground to transphobia, regardless of the sales figures. Rhetoric against transgender people has reached a fever pitch, passing the threshold of eliminationistrhetoric that has already had disastrous results. Whenever a high-profile transphobe is able to raise their profile and damage the trans community without consequences or pushback, it invites more transphobia, more eliminationist rhetoric. The campaign against this game is not about gaming – it is about drawing a line in the sand and refusing to let JK Rowling go unchallenged.

People in the first camp do not believe that this boycott will completely tank sales of this high-profile AAA video game, but they recognize that doing some damage is better than doing no damage, and that the public backlash itself has meaning and creates consequences for Rowling and her ilk.

The second camp adores JK Rowling's transphobia and will purchase the game without a second thought because they, too, are worthless toilet monsters. I can't reach those people, at least not in this video.

There is a third camp. A camp full of Harry Potter die-hards who might superficially disagree with Rowling but prefer their billion-dollar wizard boy franchise over trans allyship. They have twisted themselves in knots to rationalize this choice. If you are in this camp, this video is for you. Welcome! I'm not planning on making an exhaustive essay on why JK Rowling and transphobia are bad, as the definitive videos on the subject have already been created by transgender content creators like Jessie Gender and Natalie Wynn. Links to their videos will be appearing on screen right now, and these links are also in the description. I simply want to create a short, practical guide for people in the third camp.

Here is my advice, if you are a big gamer and a big Harry Potter fan. You can just buy another game. Do you know how many video games there are? Me either, because there are so many that it would be challenging to count them all and literally impossible to play more than a small fraction of them to completion in your lifetime. Isn't that cool? Just play another game.

Harry Potter fans might find that unreasonable because they want something with magic and schools and all the other trappings of the Wizarding World. But that's the thing. There are so many games that there simply must be an enormous amount of them that will scratch that particular itch.

I love Doom. I love playing Doom. There is always more Doom because enthusiasts have never stopped making Doom levels. The sound that the shotgun makes is extremely satisfying and always will be. If it turned out that buying Doom on Steam helped the makings of a transphobic, eliminationist campaign or even just signaled that I am not a trans ally, I would stop playing Doom. That would be OK, because there are other games similar to Doom that I could play instead that would satisfy that desire, like Cultic, which is really good.

I love Mega Man. I love shooting, jumping, and shoot-jumping. That's basically all you do. If it turned out that buying the new Mega Man would embolden transphobes and made them even more eager to arm themselves and endanger people's lives, I would not buy the new Mega Man. I would play Explodemon instead. It has the same DNA. I hear Shovel Knight is also good, should I play Shovel Knight?

Like I said, if you're just straight-up a transphobe, these arguments won't matter to you. I'm speaking to the hardcore Harry Potter fans, those who went to midnight releases, those who need that sweet, sweet magic release but are on the fence about buying the game because maybe they feel a little weird about it.

Do you want to play a game in which you are a student at a magic school? Ikenfell has you covered. It's a turn-based roleplaying game that takes place primarily in a school for magical students. You play Maritte, an ordinary girl with a magic sister who has gone missing. What's most appealing about this game compared to the other gameis that it features a lot of LGBTQ characters, including non-binary characters, same-gender relationships, and unlike the other game's last minute panic addition of one transgender character with a suspicious name, Ikenfell was built from the ground up with these sensibilities in mind.

Now, you might be thinking “I don't care about magic schools, I just wanted to play a new action RPG, and I like Harry Potter well enough.” OK, but you know how many action RPG's there are? There is no shortage of these games, here's Darksiders, for God's sakes. Here's Dark Souls, and here is my trying and failing to do well at Dark Souls. There are countless games that have the same vibe and probably almost the exact same controls but without all that Rowling sauce covering it.

I can already hear your complaint, it's “But I wanna play a game as a Harry Potter character!” Alright, listen. You read books, right? Presumably, that's how you came upon Harry Potter? I am confident you can use your imagination. Here, look. I just made Hagrid in Pillars of Eternity. I'm that big guy who says that famous line, “Harry, my boy, you're the man now, dog.” or something? Oh, and the game has magic. So many games have magic!

If you want to play a game that reminds you of your childhood, then play a game from your childhood. There were no Harry Potter games during your childhood unless you are currently still a child. I love Pac Man, I play it to this day, and even having never played the new Harry Potter game, I am 99% sure that Pac Man is better. Or maybe you can get Harry Potter out of your mind altogether by playing an altogether different game that has nothing to do with the Wizarding World.

I'm sorry, but if you sympathize with transgender people, and transgender people are asking you to do one small thing, one tiny thing, which is not buying one game out of hundreds of thousands of games, you should consider doing that. Be a good ally. There are countless games that will give you the same dopamine rush. You will probably find something you enjoy more than this one game. You can't possibly say, with a straight face, that the new Harry Potter video game is going to be head and shoulders over the hundreds of thousands of other games you can play right now. Statistically speaking, you will almost definitely find something you enjoy more. It's just a numbers game. Hundreds of thousands of games, and you think this will be the absolute best one? This is worth all the bad that comes with it?

It's no great sacrifice to choose not to play this game, no moral conundrum, because it will not negatively affect your life in any meaningful way to not play this game, but the continued success and elevation of JK Rowling will negatively affect trans people. The choice is clear.

Come on. Just play Pac Man, it's great.